The Other Side of Nowhere

Chapter 6

Braden pulled down a lever on the control-room wall. It was about a quarter-inch thick and as long as his hand. It was one of hundreds of similar levers arranged in rows in a four-foot- square section of the wall. They were the levers that controlled the fire-fighting fog apparatus in the corridors and compartments of the ship. This one turned on the fog just outside the control-room door.

A dense, thick, opaque, drowningly thick fog spouted from openings in the ceiling. Water, thinned by wetting agents, poured out of tiny nozzles. The pressure was so great that the moisture broke into droplets of microscopic size. They did not fall. They floated. They spread. They turned the air into something palpable, heavy, that was somewhere between a gas and a liquid. No fire could burn in it. No man could breathe it. It looked like heavy smoke. It felt clammy.

Braden fumbled at the pivoted metal dogs which had held the control-door shut against all impacts. Steam came through the melted openings in the door. He flung the door wide, and the heavy white stuff in the corridor flowed in like an infinitely viscous liquid.

"Come on!" snapped Braden. "Hold your breath!"

He thrust his blaster into a pocket to protect it against the fog and plunged out into the white opacity. He stumbled over something which made noises like escaping steam. It was a blaster, shorted and ruined, its batteries melting down as they discharged.

He ran, holding his breath like a man dying. He felt rather than heard, that there were blundering figures fleeing ahead of him. The skipper followed him, guiding himself with his hand against the wall. Braden knew that his face was wet. His hair became saturated and water flowed down his neck. He felt as if he were wading rather than running, and he began to worry intensely that his blaster, even in his pocket, might become soaked and useless, or worse. He tripped on another blaster busily destroying itself on the floor. He almost fell. He needed to breathe. He was desperate for air. He'd strangle...

The white mist grew brighter. His head came out of the white stuff and he gasped in breathable air. The corridor here was filled from wall to wall with the fire-fighting fog which flowed very slowly away and ahead of him. He saw stirred-up trails of the vapor, like the swirling of mist above chilly water on a warm day. The stuff looked like milk. The crewmen were far ahead, still in flight, stirring up the stuff as they fled.

Braden snatched out his blaster and fired, just before the curve of the corridor wall hid them.

There was a scream and a great turning of vapor into steam. Then nothing.

The skipper blundered into view, seeming to rise out of a thick white nothingness that streamed down about his head and shoulders with infinite deliberation. He gasped and filled his lungs as he waded toward Braden.

"I think," said Braden, "that somebody got hurt. Whether any were killed is something else. Are you all right?"

The skipper mumbled, his face ghastly. Water-soaked and stunned by the disaster, he could derive no courage from this setback to the mutineers. He had been outguessed and outthought. He was in a state of shock.

"They'll still have weapons," said Braden. "They got those you stored by the bomb, you tell me. But they also got the ones that were in the hiding place we found empty. You had blasters enough to kill them with, but now they've got them to use on us! But they're off balance for the moment."

The skipper made a hopeless gesture.

"Mr. Braden," he said thinly, "I can't hope to kill them now as I wanted to. But... I will kill them somehow! You..."

He stopped. His forehead wrinkled pathetically.

"You haven't my reasons," he said helplessly, "but you have done very well, Mr. Braden. I would like to.... spare you what is going to happen in this ship. You are... you are concerned about the passengers. I would like for your sake to have them escape. But..."

Braden's muscles tensed suddenly.

"I've two pocket blasters," he snapped. "But... there are the space-boats! You told me to take to a boat!"

The skipper's eyes were despairing. It took seconds for him to understand. Then his despair turned to blazing hope.

"Come, Mr. Braden! You do very well indeed!"

He instantly reassumed the role of leadership. It was inevitable. A man does not command spaceships for half a lifetime without acquiring the habit of taking charge of every situation he finds himself in. Now the skipper waded forward, his confidence abruptly returned. He came to a panel in the side wall. The fog was only knee-deep. The panel must give access to one of those almost-unused passages between the inner skin and the hold-plates of the Rim Star. They had no part in the operation of the ship while in space. They were used only for inspection and for access to places that needed painting or repair.

The panel in the wall swung out. Beyond it there was a narrow catwalk that had metal handrails. It reached out across emptiness. Lights burned feebly at relatively great intervals in a web of angular struts and braces designed to maintain the rigidity of the ship. The lights burned on unseen for years on end.

Braden closed the rarely used panel. The skipper led the way, head erect, all his self- confidence returned.

There were, of course, three space-boats - three lifeboats - in their proper blisters in the Rim Star's skin. Any one of them could carry all the normal ship's company; but there were three, because anything that could require abandoning the ship would almost certainly require the destruction of a good part of it first. Hence the boat-blisters at widely separated parts of the hull.

Other forethought was involved in the matter of the space-boats. They could not, of course, be fueled and provisioned for journeys of indefinite length. A fully loaded space-boat had a maximum range of just about five light-years. In some parts of the galaxy this practically assured its ability to reach a colonized world - in the denser star-clusters especially. But there were sectors in which the best hope was to find a merely habitable world. So there was emergency equipment for a castaway landing - seeds, tools, instructions for agriculture, and even data on recognizing smeltable ores. And in case of hostile animal life - it had long since been evident that there was no other race like man in the galaxy - in case of dangerous beasts, there were weapons. Castaways would have material, arms, and information for survival.

It was the weapons that instantly restored the skipper's spirits. He strode along the narrow catwalk, their handrails barely allowing his bulk to pass. He rumbled premonitorily:

"Mr. Braden, I think..."

The ship's gravity went off. Both he and Braden became weightless. Braden grabbed at a handrail when he found himself floating. The lights went out, and though they were faint and widely separated, their loss was horrifying. A mooing, hooting, dismal noise filled the air. It was the maximum-emergency signal that would be set off from the control-room in case of imminent disaster. All through the ship, compartment doors swung shut, scaling the ship into scores of airtight compartments. The doors were actually collision doors. Gravity came on again. There was the crazy, intolerable sensation of coming out of overdrive, and in a few seconds the equally intolerable sensation of going back into it. The collision doors opened, the lights came on, and gravity went off. The doors immediately closed once more. The mooing noise stopped. Gravity went on and instantly off, the lights flickered insanely, and again the ship came out of overdrive.

The lunatic sequence of events continued, but presently the tempo seemed to slow. Braden clung to one handrail of the catwalk. The skipper clung to both rails. The phenomena came at greater intervals - but not consistently - and at long last seconds intervened between them. Then half minutes. Then they stopped.

"Shorts in the control-room," said Braden. "The fog rolled in and wetted the contacts. Seems to be over now, though."

The skipper rumbled. The ship was back in overdrive, the dim lights shone steadily, and the men's feet rested solidly on the metal plates of the catwalk.

"No doubt," growled the skipper. "I've an idea, though, that those devils believed for a moment that we'd gone into the Other Side of Nowhere. Eh? Too bad it wasn't true! But they'll realize it was shorts, as you said. Too bad!"

He went on along the catwalk. Braden followed. His brain nibbled at the skipper's remark about the Other Side of Nowhere. This tall tale had become folklore; nobody knew how it started. But all over the galaxy there were absurd tales of ships blundering into an impossibly wrong sort of space where before was behind and below was above and ships reacted insanely to their controls. One heard it in great detail about certain definite ships, but those ships always denied it. They said they'd heard the same story about other definite ships. But they denied it, too. No man ever claimed to have been on a ship when it happened, but the story persisted like other fabulous tales that can never be run to ground. Authorities on folklore said it was a fragment based on a science-fiction story centuries before - a story called "The Other Side of Nowhere", by a forgotten writer named Leinster. But it was discussed in all forecastles, and a great many crewmen believed it obstinately.

The Rim Star was again driving through emptiness at multiples of the speed of light, and conditions in her interior returned to normal. The incident had been frightening, but harmless. It was not likely to cause the crewmen to reform. The time had passed for that.

The catwalk ended at a second metal panel in the wall of the other corridor between the two ends of the ship. The skipper unlocked the panel from inside and stepped confidently through. It would have been incautious, had the Rim Star not been so huge.

There was no alarm. A taller door, marked as being that of a lifeboat-blister, was almost opposite. The skipper opened it boldly. Braden followed him through it. Another door inside made the entrance into an airlock. They went through that door also. A feeble light glowed here. They were in the blister.

They looked at the space-boat. Its size was proportionate to that of the Rim Star - 60 feet long and 15 feet in diameter; it looked like an even clumsier miniature of the parent ship. At that, it was larger than the ships that first traveled between the planets in the first solar system, and even the first interstellar trips were made in ships that were only a little larger. Perhaps a tenth of its volume was available for human use. The rest held stored food and other supplies, and the disproportionately large drive that was necessary. It was strictly for emergencies. The inspection seal on its port seemed to be intact.

The skipper touched the seal. It gave. He stared at it and then went inside the boat. Braden waited. As of now, the mutineers were better armed than the skipper and himself in the ratio of a riot squad to two peaceful citizens.

There was stillness. The silence of space is absolute. The silence of a huge ship, traveling light-years in hours, is no less absolute. It seemed to Braden that he could hear the beating of his own heart and even the blood rustling in his ears. Once he thought he heard the tiniest of all possible sounds - metal striking on metal somewhere. But it was infinitely faint, and it was very far away, and it was not repeated.

The skipper came out of the space-boat. His hands were empty. His features had lost all their life again. He said in a thin, breathless voice:

"I'm beaten again. The weapons are gone. And... the boat's drive is wrecked. When I saw the weapons gone, I looked. The boat can be launched, but the drive's smashed. It can't be driven anywhere. The passengers can't have even that much chance for their lives."

The dim light of the lifeboat-blister showed that he was raging. And somehow it seemed to Braden that the crewmen's pains to prevent the passengers' escape by lifeboat was a maddening form of mockery, of derision, just as the removal of the weapons was. The skipper was not only outwitted but he was being laughed at! And to be laughed at, in addition to murder and worse that was to be anticipated - it was intolerable!

Braden grimly handed the skipper a pocket blaster. His action was almost derision in itself, considering everything. But the skipper took it.

"Not much, Mr. Braden," he said fiercely. "It's not much! But it's enough to go into business with! The business of killing pirates! Come along with me and we'll wipe them out! Kill them! Move in on them in force! A pity for them to die easily, but..."

Braden interrupted.

"You're forgetting the passengers!" he said sharply.

The skipper was like a man faced with something he couldn't endure. He couldn't admit that he was beaten. He had to pretend what he knew was not true. A man can die in proof of his own incapacity.

"Mr, Braden, I've this!" the skipper said. He tapped the pocket blaster Braden had just given him. "Thanks to you, I've got this! And when I'm finished with those devils, your passengers will be as safe as if they were in their mothers' arms!"

He did not believe it, but he had to pretend that he did, or he was lost. It was better to be killed, believing it, than to admit defeat.

"The odds are bad," snapped Braden. "They're impossible! Only two of us..."

"One, Mr. Braden!" said the skipper fiercely. "I know this ship, Mr. Braden, as I know the chin I shave each morning. I'll take care of the crew alone!"

It was absurd. It was utter folly. And the skipper knew it. But he would let himself be killed rather than admit to himself that he'd been caught in his own trap and that only death remained to him.

"Somebody," said Braden grimly, "has to think of the ship and the passengers. I ask for authority to look after the ship while you go hunting mutineers - if you must."

The skipper rumbled. Braden told him, curtly, what he meant to do about the remotely possible safety of the passengers. He did not so much ask for authority as declare flatly that he was taking it. There comes a point when subordination is pure folly.

"Very well. Mr. Braden," growled the skipper. "Take the watch until relieved. I'll get along better with the ship off my mind. I give you full responsibility for the passengers. Use your best judgment for the ship and for them while I attend to the crew!"

He thrust past Braden and went out into the corridor. There was no sound. Braden followed him a moment later. He'd vanished.

Braden, frowning, opened the door to the catwalk by which they'd come here. He fastened it behind him. To all intents and purposes he vanished, too. He did not expect ever to see the skipper alive again.

One instant after closing the corridor-plate, he had left the catwalk. He was in the maze of struts and girders which, with very occasional catwalks, filled the space between the ship's holds and her outer skin. He saw a gigantic steel precipice which was a cargo hold. There were other holds the size of monster warehouses. Each could contain a large part of what a new colony of thousands of people would need to become self-supporting. Between them there were myriads of braces - weblike labyrinths of steel struts and strength-members.

Together they made the ship firmer and less flexible than a similar mass of solid steel.

Braden began to climb downward through the bewildering masses of metal. There was silence, and only the dimmest twilight in the web-like space. There were only feeble yellow lights. Those nearby were blanked out by girders as he moved on, and those farther away twinkled. He scowled as he descended. This behavior was contrary to all his instincts. If he followed his impulses, he'd join the skipper in a furious attack on the mutineers. A little while ago, that would have been the rational thing to do. But no more. Yet he yearned hungrily for freedom to do battle, whether with fists or blasters, instead of thinking coldly of what was wise and practical and sensible.

He tried to hurry. The crewmen didn't know what had happened to one of their number, and they couldn't have any clear idea of what had become of the skipper, but they couldn't fail to know what Braden must do. He would have to join the passengers and try to do something for their safety. The steward would surely realize that. Unless the crew had panicked - a temporary state, at best - he'd be leading them now to clean out the passenger space before Braden could obtain what added strength the male passengers might give him. It would not be much.

Braden saw the complete impossibility of defending the passenger section. The mutineers had lost at least two heavy-duty weapons in the fire-fighting fog, but they had more. There would be no weapons in any of the spaceboats now, and the skipper had had powerful blast- rifles in the control-room cache. The crewmen would be extravagantly equipped for murder. They could melt through walls if necessary, to kill the passengers. And they should be on the way sternward now.

He was driven to desperate haste. Once he slipped and his hand jerked loose from what he was holding on to, and he fell. But the struts and girders were like tree limbs in their distribution. He fell no more than a dozen feet before he caught himself, though he felt as if his arms would be pulled from their sockets. Then he went on again.

He growled. He wished bitterly that the Rim Star were like those old-fashioned ships now relegated to minor runs between solar systems. Those ships' drives were considered engines and engineer-officers cobbled them, and swore that they were superior to the new-fangled automatics. Men felt greater loyalty to those ships and believed them better than any others in space. They would fight for them. Mutiny would be unthinkable.

But the Rim Star was a machine. Her drive-units were failure-proof. They were sealed in an armored compartment after inspection by specialists aground. The astrogation system was no less non-human. The Rim Star was a complex, soulless device which was wholly indifferent to the human beings aboard her. She drove on blindly.

Braden heard an ominous sound. A blaster - a hand weapon - made a snarling noise. It was nearby - higher, and closer to the bow, but certainly within a few hundred feet. It could be the skipper. He might have attacked the mutineers with a hand-blaster in an utterly hopeless attempt to kill them before they could kill him. A tumultuous uproar of heavy weapons answered. But it kept up too long to be simply a suicidal attack for the purpose of getting killed. There were blasts at odd intervals for several minutes. It could be that the skipper had sniped at them from a cracked-open corridor-plate and then retreated to the dimness in which Braden moved now. There were other blasts from heavy rifles, as if the mutineers were trigger- happy and expected further sniping.

Then there was heavy firing, and somehow it sounded final, as if the men who fired were certain that they had killed their enemy - the skipper. If so, everything was up to Braden.

Braden almost flung himself downward. The crewmen, though, would be marching down ramps and steps which successively circled the whole ship. They could move faster forward, but probably not downward as swiftly as Braden could.

He came to a catwalk which should be the right one. Breathing hard from his exertions, he made his way to the corridor-plate. As he opened it and stepped out, a pellet of blindingly white light flashed past him. He heard a blaster snarl.

"Stop!" he snapped.

He was within ten yards of the doorway to the passengers' quarters. Duckworth had been on guard. He saw Braden appear and fired. He missed. It was wise to miss with only a stage weapon. Braden went past him, angered.

"That shot tears it!" he snapped again, as he went in. "But shoot first if anybody comes!"

He was in the passengers' saloon. Diane had snatched up a hand-blaster. She gave a little gasp of relief at the sight of him. Fortescue had grabbed a stage rifle when he heard Duckworth shoot. Hardy faced the door grimly, a hand-blaster halfway drawn. Derr Carmody seemed to be half-fainting, her hand to her lips and her eyes filled with terror.

"Come along!" said Braden sharply. "Everybody up! The crew's on the way here. The skipper's killed one of them, but they're heavily armed and they're coming to kill you. Everybody up!"

He gave them no time to ask questions as he hurried them out. There were two spiral corridors from end to end of the ship. The mutineers would come along the corridor to the right, so he shepherded his charges to the left. There had to be two passageways, for safety's sake alone.

They passed the place where a stairway went down to the exit port. The exit was at the bottom of one of the giant fins on which the Rim Star stood upright in port. Braden had an idea and seized on it.

"Go on ahead," he commanded. "Right with you!"

He raced down the stairs. The personnel port, of course, was an air lock. Braden hauled open the inner door, jammed it against being closed, and held his pocket weapon within inches of the door that remained between himself and interstellar space. He held down the trigger, and swore at the smallness of the effect it made. Heavy-duty weapons had burned through the control-room door as if it were butter.

But presently - it seemed an agonizing length of time - a small place glowed red... cherry red... incandescent. And then the ship's air-pressure blew out the semi-liquid metal and screamed out through the small opening into the space beyond. It was not a large hole, of course - actually less than an inch in diameter. But air rushed out and Braden raced up the stairs again. He reflected dourly that this was the kind of trick the steward might think of. Smart. And safe. He didn't like it, but it was necessary.

He reached the top of the stairs and there was the mournful, mooing, dismal sound of the maximum-emergency signal. A monitor-panel somewhere had reported a drop of air-pressure here. Collision doors closed all over the ship, dividing it into innumerable airtight compartments.

"Quick!" snapped Braden. "Run!"

He drove them on. Derr Carmody stumbled on the stairs. He picked her up and ran with her. Already the air was thin. There was a considerable volume of air to escape from this compartment, but there was need for haste.

The corridor ahead was blocked by an automatically closed collision door. But there was an escape section, to be worked by hand. Braden opened it and rushed the others through. He panted out orders. Diane grasped what he meant and ran on ahead. Only Fortescue stayed behind.

"Anything I can do?" he asked uneasily.

"Get them to the next door. Fast!" commanded Braden.

Fortescue ran on ahead, disappearing around the curve of the corridor. Diane called. Braden punctured this door also with his blaster. It was a smaller hole than the one in the outside lock door. Air whistled through, ultimately to stream out free into space.

Braden caught up with the others. Again he opened the escape section and got them through.

"They can't follow us now," he said savagely. "I created an air leak. One compartment's empty of air and another is emptying its air into the first. But now we've got to move faster than ever. We can't go back the way we came, and they can head us off by way of the bow."

There was sweat on his forehead. He'd asked to be given the responsibility for the ship and the passengers, but it involved flight, hiding, trickery, instead of the violent action he preferred. He disapproved of himself as he rushed them onward. One closed-off section after another. Derr Carmody gasped that she had to rest... the stairs... the ramps. She had to rest.

"We haven't time!" Braden raged at her. "Keep going or be left behind!"

He knew he wouldn't do it, but the threat might keep her going. The corridor seemed interminable. Where there were no steps, there was ramp. It was a matter of climbing, climbing, climbing.

He drove them on. Their behavior could have been predicted. Just as a group of men, long isolated, form group-patterns of behavior that tacitly assign different roles to each man, so a group of men and women establish a pattern in a time of emergency. Here Braden was obviously the leader, and Diane was automatically his chief lieutenant. Fortescue was prepared to do loyally whatever he was told. Duckworth might be a third leader in case of need, and Hardy... Braden somehow left Derr Carmody to Hardy. In an emergency Hardy would always be the one man who saw details the others did not notice, and stolidly took care of the weakest. Who, of course, would be Derr Carmody.

"There's a lifeboat-blister ahead," said Braden brittlely. "We're making for that."

There'd be no attempt to escape in a lifeboat, of course. The mutineers had wrecked one space-boat drive. They undoubtedly had wrecked this one, too. The skipper had said, when he found the weapons gone from the boat, he'd looked at the drive and found it smashed. The boat could be launched, but once in space it would automatically become a derelict. Anybody in it would suffer a slow death as the air supply gave out. It was more than probable that this boat also was a booby trap. But the crewmen would have a perfectly operating space-boat for their own escape when they left the Rim Star, taking the treasure in the big ship's cargo hold.

The fleeing passengers came to the lifeboat door. Braden dashed in. Since he had no hope at all, there was no bitterness in finding the inspection seal broken and the arms rack empty. There was not even shock in the verification of his belief that the drive would be useless and not repairable. But he could make use of the boat, nonetheless.

He did. He sent it out to space. The Rim Star echoed with the "Boat-away" signal, which informed anyone left behind that the ship was being abandoned. The useless empty lifeboat left the Rim Star; a derelict which would drift in space until the crack of doom; no human eye would ever see it again. But the mutineers would believe that the passengers and Braden - and perhaps even the skipper - were in it.

Braden waved his companions on. They did not understand what he'd done, but were huddled together, waiting for him to tell them what to do. Derr Carmody was threatening hysterics again because she didn't like the situation she was in.

"If we aren't killed in the next five minutes," said Braden, "we may live on for some days. Go on! Hurry! To the next collision door. Make it fast!"

They hurried. Up more stairs and more ramps. Duckworth panted, but toiled on gamely. A collision door. They went through it. More stairs and ramps. Another collision door. Then Diane turned a white face to Braden. There was the sound of muflled voices ahead.

Braden drove the passengers on with a pantomime of drastic threats. At best it would be horribly close. But they did reach the destination he'd chosen before he'd left the skipper. There was a normal double doorway, with two doors set in it, on the inboard side of the corridor. It was the door used by spaceport technicians aground to go aboard to examine the Lawlor drive-units and the astrogation equipment. It was a large doorway, in case units of either piece of equipment had to be replaced.

Braden opened the doors and rushed his group through. Before the last one had disappeared, however, the sound of voices grew suddenly louder. The men had come through the collision door ahead. They were not fifty feet away. But the corridor was curved. Braden was inside and had the doors almost closed at the last conceivable instant before he'd have been seen.

He drew back and held his inadequate pistol drawn and leveled. If they opened the door he'd try to shoot them all, belly-high, before they could level their vastly more powerful weapons and kill him.

Sweat stood out on his face. For if he killed every crewman but was killed himself, Diane would die. Without a trained man in the control-room, the passengers could never get the ship to ground even though she was wholly in their hands. The Rim Star could go blindly to her destination and come indifferently out of overdrive there. But her passengers would not know how to call the unfinished new colony. They might be only a light-hour from Handel's Planet when the ship's taped instructions came to an end. But the ship could drift on aimlessly, in orbit or not, for the rest of time, and the passengers could do nothing to save themselves.

The mutineers went on past where Braden waited. When the sound of voices dwindled and then were cut off at the next collision door, Braden closed the wide doors completely and fastened them. He was shaky. But no crewman thinks that the door to the ship's drive is ever meant to be opened, for the drive is never touched in space. Never.

But Braden led the way to the drive-compartment, that sacrosanct cell of thick metal which holds the drive and astrogation units. He knew how to get into it, for on another ship, aground and years back, he'd watched the technicians check her automatic equipment. He couldn't

have done the checking himself, but he knew how to get in to where it was done.

Hardy was the last of the passengers to enter the compartinent, and Braden closed the door behind him. The lights, useless except at inspection time, showed the clumsy-looking, lumpy, ungainly object that moved the Rim Star. A composite of many sections bolted together, it was about twelve feet high and twenty feet on a side. Beyond it was the astrogation complex, the main part of which was a cabinet four feet by six. The innumerable wires and cables leading to it merged to form a six-inch cable which entered it. As it left it, the wires separated and led in orderly confusion to an enormous instrument bank intended solely for testing. There were vision screens and dials and switches, the whole apparatus more complex than that of the control-room itself. And all this apparatus was simply to make sure that the astrogation units contained not even so much as one defective microscopic transistor. If a unit showed any signs of trouble, a duplicate unit immediately began to function. This test apparatus would locate the unit replaced by the substitute, in case the substitute itself ceased to function.

Braden looked discouragedly at the complicated wiring. He'd have to use it, for there was nothing else to do. But he was miscast as a technician; he preferred a simpler and more natural role.

"Nobody thinks of coming here," he said evenly. "I've left the crew to find which lifeboat left the Rim Star, and they'll think we were in it. So long as we don't show ourselves, and they don't hunt for the skipper here, we should be able to work in peace."

Duckworth stared at him, shocked and bewildered. "Work?" he asked blankly. "What can we work at?"

"We can work," said Braden matter-of-factly, "at taking back the ship."

The Rim Star stayed in overdrive. There were stars by the myriad where the huge ship could be said to be, but their light did not penetrate the overdrive field. Nor did any light go out. The Rim Star was wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space. She had no measurable effect on anything as she speeded from one place to another, for she went too fast. If starlight had glittered on her traveling at the speed she'd attained - trillions and quadrillions of miles per second - she would still have been invisible. No one light-wave was fast enough to strike her and be reflected. In a perfectly rational sense she could be said not to exist in normal space, because to be real an object must have an effect. It must do something that can be detected. The ship did not stay in any one particular place long enough to affect anything. Perhaps a collision with a dwarf star might invalidate that reasoning, but nothing of the sort had so far been observed. Nor could it occur. Inside her own force-field the Rim Star was a blind, unshapely, insensible mass which was real only to herself and to her contents. There was no day or night. There seemed to be no time.

Frowning, Braden surveyed the job and then began to do what he had planned. He picked out Hardy to help him since, as a cameraman qualified to keep a tape camera in repair, he should have some idea about electronics. But Diane proved to be even more capable.

The three of them began an exhaustive and exhausting study of the bank of testing instruments. They identified the circuits of the vision screens. The test screen in the drive compartment would show, in normal space, exactly what the bow-plate of the control-room revealed. The next screen checked what the port-side control-room screen should show. Others verified stern and starboard plates in the control-room. Here a testing instrument reported on the Lawlor drive relay, and there a dial registered the megamperes - in hundreds - which flowed to produce the overdrive field. Here one could read whether the ship's gravity units were properly adjusted. There...

Tracing circuits was a very tedious business; there was no clear connection with the situation in the ship. Men whose purpose was piracy and murder - plus atrocity if that became practical - controlled the ship. But in the heavy steel cell supposed never to be entered outside a spaceport, Braden and Hardy and Diane traced circuits, identified functions, and informed themselves about the methods used by specialists to certify that the Rim Star was spaceworthy. It seemed wildly irrelevant to the situation they were in.

Derr Carmody whimpered. She was ignored. Duckworth fretted, and Fortescue seemed to view the universe with a wry acknowledgment of his uselessness. But presently the three of them drew together and talked wistfully about the production of tape dramas. They were not qualified to think in detail about anything else. Soon they were planning epics and spectaculars and heart-interest narratives to be shown upon the screens of all the worlds if they could ever be able to produce them. Always, it was understood, the star part was tailored for Derr Carmody. Eventually she was battling jealously if a good scene or an effective line were assigned to another imaginary character in these imaginary productions.

But all this was after Braden made his first trip out of the drive-compartment. Conditions, already uncomfortable, became hair-raising because nothing happened.

The skipper, for example. He knew where Braden proposed to hide the passengers. He should have come there at least to consult about joint action when action became possible. But he did not come.

There was the question of food and water. Braden went out, on the second day, to obtain them and to see if he could find any sign of the skipper's survival.

When he went out, the ship was utterly silent. She drove on, but the mutineers could have been dead and the skipper with them, for all the signs of life there were. The temptation to make a search was extreme, but Braden resisted it. He took food from one of the space-boats. As he was carrying it back to enter the drive-cell, he heard a faint, faraway, irrational thump. Then he heard another. He swung ape-like along the intricate patterns of the strength-members and put his ear against the wall of No. 1 hold... Nothing... He clambered down to No. 2 hold. There was movement inside.

He listened, his ear against the hold-plates. The mutineers were shifting cargo. They would be hunting among packing-cases and crates for a certain unmarked box which held some millions of credits in interstellar currency. It had been stowed among crates of preserved food and hardware and bottled beverages for a labor-force canteen. It was simpler and safer to ship a really valuable item this way than under special guard. The mutineers were completely confident that the ship was in their possession. They were hunting for the money. When they found it, they would be rich. Meanwhile they were working leisurely. Confidence as great as this should mean that the skipper was dead. But, of course, they might believe that he'd gone with Braden and the passengers on the hopeless lifeboat trip that Braden had faked for their benefit.

Braden went back to the drive-compartment, back to the uncongenial task of unraveling the circuits leading through the test apparatus to the astrogation equipment and the drive. The mutineers obviously had a destination in mind where they could unload their loot - by space- boat, no doubt - and then abandon the Rim Star to her eternal career as a derelict. This destination must be somewhere along the Rim Star's legitimate course. Quite likely, a new trip- tape would be put into the astrogator control after the Rim Star broke out of overdrive at Handel's Planet itself. It would be convenient.

Braden felt a certain contempt for the crewmen, because they would take away only a fraction of the value they destroyed. If they were lucky, they might load into a lifeboat half of a tenth of a thousandth of the value of what they'd send drifting endlessly in emptiness. They believed they'd killed the ship's officers and passengers for such a reward. They were enraged because one of their number had been killed and others singed by blaster bolts. They would have exacted special vengeance for those things, if they could.

The details of the circuits gradually became clear. Braden and Diane and Hardy knew what wires carried the signal for overdrive and breakout; for compartment doors to close or open; for the image of bow and stem and side vision screens; for all the things the ship's equipment could be commanded to do.

But they lost track of time. Finally, they believed, they had the information needed for the action Braden intended, quite alone, to take. He said with satisfaction:

"Now we plan the business! We've got to work the thing out in detail and then rehearse it until we have it perfect..."

At that exact instant a voice boomed out of a speaker unit in the drive-room ceiling.

"Attention! Breakout coming! Prepare to come out of overdrive in five seconds. Five... four... three... two... one..."

The universe seemed to reel and their bodies and particularly their stomachs seemed to be trying to turn inside out. There was an instant of intolerable dizziness and the feeling of a precipitous fall...

"Turn on the test screens," snapped Braden. "Put everything on test to make sure! We should have been ready! Hurry!"

Diane threw one switch after another. The vision screens of the drive-room lighted, showing exactly what the screens in the control-room showed. A voice - a different voice - came out of the speaker. It was not from inside the ship.

"Checkpoint Carol," said the voice. It was metallic and loud. "Report. Report." There was a pause. "Checkpoint Carol. Report. Report."

The voice was strong. This was another Space Patrol checkpoint at another crossroads of space. The checkpoint robot here could not be more than a light-minute away - no more than ten or eleven million miles. It seemed - almost - that a human being was calling to the Rim Star, and that if the Rim Star appealed for help, it would be given. But the voice was that of a robot - a clumsy, unmanned complex of machinery within a hedgehog-like agglomeration of receiving antennas. It would record what the Rim Star broadcast to it, but it would not reply; it could not respond. It continued to repeat senselessly, "Checkpoint Carol, Report..."

There was a banded sun in the right-hand vision screen; it filled a respectable part of the firmament. There were millions upon millions of stars in view. There was a planet to port. There were hummings, and whirrings, and no less than two wabbling whines which were ship's logs being broadcast for the Patrol checkpoint robot to pick up and record. Ultimately they would be listened to by somebody in case there was anything notable about them. There never was.

The Rim Star's own high-speed broadcast of her log began. It came through on the test circuit in the drive-room as an unsteady, high-pitched droning noise.

Braden's lips compressed. The ship was out of overdrive in a checkpoint solar system. It would be possible to cut the drive from here, the drive-room. From here, too, he could broadcast an appeal for help - not to the checkpoint robot, of course, but to other ships also out of overdrive and in this same solar system. But it would be utterly futile.

It was conceivable that a ship might pick up such an appeal. It was even remotely - very remotely - possible that such a ship might take a bearing on the call and come to investigate. But it couldn't do a thing to help. In theory, perhaps a Patrol ship could match the speed of the Rim Star in space and conceivably clamp on to the bigger vessel. But it was by no means certain that even a Patrol ship could break into an air lock and fight its way inside, even if it was convinced that such a course was necessary. Nothing like it had ever happened in all the centuries of space travel.

Braden wouldn't have attempted anything of the sort. As long as the Rim Star's mutineers believed the passengers and himself helplessly and hopelessly waiting to die in a disabled space-boat some light-years away, he and the passengers could work on the scheme he'd contrived for retaking the ship. But once the crewmen discovered that they were alive and holding the drive-room, they'd have no chance at all.

The whine of the Rim Star's log broadcast cut off with a savage clicking. Then a voice bellowed from the log speaker and from all the interior-communication speakers simultaneously.

"Call for help!" roared the skipper's voice. "Mutiny! Rim Star calls for help! Skipper, mate, and passengers need help immediately! Mutiny! Mutiny! Mutiny!"

Braden plunged toward the door of the drive-compartment. If the skipper was fighting, he had to have help. But before he'd reached the drive-room door the speakers rasped out the sound of a blaster in action. Instantly thereafter, the log-speaker unit made a raucous crashing sound that would only be made by a cable or a microphone unit that had been struck and fused.

At the same time the stars moved on the test screens that duplicated everything the screens in the control-room showed. Millions of specks of light moved together, some off one screen, others on to another. The Milky Way was in a new position. There was a click.

The Rim Star's observation units had recorded the bearing of the banded sun to starboard. They'd searched for and found the pattern made by other remote and brilliant stars. They had swung the ship's blunt bow to a new bearing, the bearing of the destination the ship was heading for from this spot. The stars steadied.

There came the impersonal booming voice again, but this time interrupted and crashing as if a blaster bolt had melted a cable whose ends still remained precariously in contact.

"Atten-" CRASH! "Prepare..." CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! "... drive in CRASH! CRASH! "four... three..." CRASH! "one..."

Again the universe reeled and seemed to turn inside out. Again there was the feeling of intolerable nausea and unbearable dizziness. The feel of a horrible fall in a contracting spiral.

The ship was silent once more. She was in overdrive again, heading at swiftly multiplying light-speeds for her destination still scores of light-years away.

Braden looked at the white faces turned to him. All had heard the skipper's voice. He'd broadcast, uselessly, that he and Braden and the passengers were alive and on the ship. There was no help to be had from the broadcast. Already the Rim Star was farther from her position of report than the span of any known planetary system. She was momently increasing her speed. She was invisible, untraceable, and in a perfectly accurate sense nonexistent in the space in which - if it had been picked up - the skipper's cry of "Mutiny!" might have caused some concern.

"Why did he do that?" Braden asked fiercely. "Why the hell did he do that?"