The Other Side of Nowhere

Chapter 7

The universe went on about its businesses, which were many and extremely varied. Nobody thought about the Rim Star - or anyhow, only very few. Other and more important matters filled men's minds.

For example, there was a shortage of available capital on Halli IV, so shrewd businessmen on Timbuk bought drafts on Klit, which were paid by drafts on Chagan, which were met out of funds on Tralee, which could be transferred to Halli IV. Thus an economic crisis was solved by shifting written numerals from this column to that on ruled paper pages, a juggling that yielded admirable profits to the shrewd businessmen who arranged it.

There were other important matters. There were gigantic engineering projects involving moving parts of mountains on Lhassa III; economic systems were in process of change in the Nurmi Cluster worlds. There was the discovery of frozen, once-living organisms on Lithian VI, which was proof that in past ages the sun Lithian had been a brilliant star and life had begun even on its outermost planet, where now there were only frozen wastes of nitrogen snow. Expeditions were being organized with feverish haste to study the deep-frozen organisms in situ, to settle again the question of how life began, and why.

Orators made strident speeches, offering themselves for public offices. A sun with three occupied worlds, in Andromeda, began to show signs of instability, which meant that the planets would have to be evacuated. On a world in Cetis there was a collapse of public confidence, and the average price index of sixty standard stocks dropped from a prosperous 698 to a catastrophic 473; supposedly sane businessmen committed suicide in consequence.

And nobody thought of the Rim Star. Anyhow, almost nobody.

Of course the people on Handel's Planet hoped that she would arrive, for things would be easier for them if she did. They'd been brought to Handel's Planet in the mother ships of drone fleets, and they'd been landed by space-boat - at enormous costs in destruction - and the drones with supplies and equipment had followed them down. They'd hacked out a clearing in the planet's jungles, and they had wrestled with various local problems. They were poorly fed, and there was considerable danger. It was to be expected that several standard years must pass, and some hundreds of millions of credits be expended, before they could receive the material for a landing-grid aground and erect it, largely by hand. But then a reasonably comfortable life would begin, and colonists would come and settle down to a heavily mortgaged future.

If the Rim Star arrived and managed to land in one piece, though, the prospects would be brighter for everybody. Equipment that it would take years to land by rocket-driven drones could come down in the Rim Star on one journey. There was some doubt about it, to be sure. Rockets were not gentle propulsion systems. Many drone ships made crash landings, and much equipment was lost. And the Rim Star was to try to land on rockets. There was no other way. Even a space-boat, coming to ground on Lawlor drive, created hurricanes of considerable proportions. A ship like the Rim Star would wreck hundreds of square leagues. So the big ship must balance herself down on jets of rocket-flame that would incinerate only forty or fifty acres. But it would be risky. Hence the few hundreds of people on Handel's Planet were not too optimistic.

If very few people not on the ship thought about the Rim Star, though, those on board did not think about anybody else. Before the Checkpoint Carol incident, the steward and his followers may have dreamed fondly of the riotous debauchery to follow the completed looting of the ship. But they must travel a long way yet to where it would be safe and easy to get to ground with their booty, while the Rim Star floated on, dead and forever a derelict. So they continued without haste to shift the cargo in No. 2 hold. They found some mild pleasure in smashing shipping cases in their search, wasting what was needed by others. Eventually they would find a certain unmarked box that would make them all millionaires. Before the broadcast cry of "Mutiny!" they'd felt perfectly secure. It had been amusing, too, to think about the officers and passengers on the ship being cooped up hopelessly in a lifeboat with no real hope of ever touching ground again.

But then came the control-room incident, revealing the continued existence of at least the skipper. Everything was changed. One enemy aboard any spacecraft can destroy it if he is willing to be destroyed with it. The skipper was an enemy. Definitely! He was aboard. Definitely! He'd concealed himself nearly all the way between Checkpoint Alyx and Checkpoint Carol; apparently he'd gone but actually he was preparing some monstrous disaster for the former crew of the Melpomene. What? He had to be found and killed. Instantly!

Squabbling began among the mutineers. Each man, frantic, proposed a different, desperate procedure. But there was only one kind of action that could do any good - the skipper's murder, at once.

Braden's situation had changed, too. He was authorized to look after the passengers and ship according to his best judgment while the skipper hunted the mutineers. His authority had been delegated to him, not transferred. And there was another point. If he, Braden, were killed during what was now nearly ready to be tried, the passengers could not hope to escape. They couldn't handle the ship. They couldn't even use the communication system they'd need in the remote event that the Rim Star broke out of overdrive where other human beings lived. Even then the ship could become a derelict with her passengers helplessly imprisoned in her. All this hampered Braden's planning. If the skipper was alive, Braden had to delay his own plan and try to find the skipper so the danger to the passengers - and Diane - would be reduced.

Something else happened as Checkpoint Carol dropped behind. Its banded sun was merely a moderately bright star among others when the sound of a blaster went through the fabric of the ship. Braden heard the noise as it was carried by metal. The mutineers heard it the same way. It meant that the skipper was taking action which could only be aimed at them.

The crewmen went desperately to see what he'd done. They hoped to kill him. But they were not easy in their minds. One of them - the chubby man with the insistently innocent face - had been near the control-room when the skipper broadcast. It was his blaster bolt that melted down the communicator wire. But the skipper had fired to better effect. The chubby man moaned from time to time now, but they left him to hunt for the skipper.

The skipper had nearly a hundred hours in which to make up for the frustration of his original scheme. He'd had time to prepare a second unpleasant fate for the crew. They were jittery. But they were desperate.

Their task, at best, was hair-raising. Every collision door in the ship was shut now, so the hull was divided into scores of separate airtight compartments. Two of these were known to be empty of air and sealed off by necessity, as the rest were sealed off for precaution. The armed, fearful, desperately ferocious group of four men - they had been six, and two of the present four were bandaged - had to search each sealed-off space or submit to whatever the skipper could contrive for them.

When they started off, they were not very impressive as a combat group. The steward said abruptly:

"He said Braden and the passengers are still aboard. See what that means?"

His followers stopped to listen. He motioned them on with a scowl.

"It means the women are still aboard," said the steward. "You can think about that."

It had some effect - not much, but some. They came to the first collision door. They went through it with weapons handy. That section of the ship was empty. They went through another door. Emptiness. Still another. Emptiness.

"He's ducked," said the man with the battered face, referring to the skipper. He was pleased. "He won't fight."

"And if he does," said the steward savagely, "it won't do him any good!"

He hoped it was true, but he wasn't sure.

They entered another compartment. Everything was as it should be. They were becoming confident now, although there was no reason for it. But it is characteristic of the professional criminal, as of the gambler, that he always believes that the laws of chance and probability, and even of cause and effect, do not really apply to him. He believes only in runs of good luck for himself. The former crewmen of the Melpomene went through half a dozen compartments without discovering the skipper or any sign of him.

Then a man opened the collision door next ahead. Instantly there came a roar and a scream, together, of air rushing into a vacuum. This was not one of the two compartments known to open on empty space. It was another.

There was a frantic, horrified struggle as the mutineers tried to get the escape door shut again. They succeeded. Then they realized that air could be let out of the compartment they were in. They didn't know how, but it could be done. They fled.

No space crewman feels anything but a pure horror of airlessness. It is the enemy of all life between the stars. And if a man has ever seen another man after two minutes where there is no air, he is never careless again. Not in space!

It took them a long time to get back to the part of the ship they'd been using. They fought to be the first to go through the doors. Finally they made their way back to the corridor, which began at the control-room and went in turn past the skipper's cabin, the mate's, the crew's quarters, and the galley. There it branched to reach the ship's door to the No. 2 hold. The skipper might have planned it that in pure terror of other air leaks they'd gone back to the place where they'd felt safe, before. On their arrival, they realized that there was no safety there, either. But there was nowhere else to go.

The chubby man moaned from his blaster burns when they returned.

"Skipper was here," he told them despairingly. "He laughed!"

The steward was speechless. The chubby man gasped out his story. They'd been gone for a long time in search of the skipper when he appeared. He'd looked in and seen the chubby man on the floor. His eyes went over the mutineer without a change of expression, as if that former member of the Melpomene's crew were an inanimate object. He went somewhere else. Presently he came back and went toward the control-room. The chubby man heard him chuckle.

The steward went to find out what the skipper had done. He came back, his eyes flaming.

"We got to find him," he said thickly. "Got to find him..."

He mouthed horrors, raging as a man can only when frustrated by the object of his rage. The steward had taken the weapons from two of the three lifeboats, and had wrecked their drives. He'd left them so they could be launched and would only afterward be discovered to be the coffins of those who had thought them means of escape. But now the skipper had disabled the lifeboat the steward had kept for the mutineers. It could not even be launched!

The former crew of the Melpomene were now imprisoned on the Rim Star. They might destroy all life aboard but themselves, and they might drive the big ship anywhere they pleased; but they could not land except by landing-grid, and the commonplace formalities of Patrol regulations must infallibly reveal them for what they were.

The steward realized the trap into which he'd led the others. The skipper's broadcast at Checkpoint Carol had not been an attempt to get help. It had been a trick to make the mutineers resolve to find him. He'd fired a blaster through a collision door - emptying another compartment of air - and they'd gone after him there. They'd left their own lifeboat, the last one, for him to wreck. He'd fixed it so it couldn't be launched, let alone driven. It would be a deathtrap for anyone who tried to use it.

The steward cursed harshly as he realized how neatly and precisely his own plans had been countered. His men looked at him numbly. They were in bad enough shape themselves. But he...

In the drive-compartment, Braden's preparations for the recapture of the ship were sufficiently complete. The order of procedure was settled. What he himself was to do, he carefully glossed over. But he began to give Diane painstaking, rule-of-thumb instructions on how to direct the Rim Star to a yellow sun, and how, if necessary, to establish communication with the human occupants of any planet that had land and seas and icecaps.

During his instructions, he grew concerned because he suspected Diane of saying, "Yes, yes, I understand," when actually she was thinking of something else. She denied it, and watched carefully as he drew diagrams in his notebook and wrote out the more difficult things she must remember; but she did seem to be thinking about something else. Eventually he called in Hardy to listen to these instructions too.

Braden was impatient. Up to now, it seemed to him, he had acted in an overprudent, overreflective, less-than-masculine way. What he planned to do would be violent and deadly and he counted upon surprise and experience in combat - if of a less lethal kind - to solve all the problems that still remained. Yet his chances of being killed were not small. But he was convinced that he would somehow manage to stay alive until his part of the job was done. Otherwise, these instructions might have to be depended on to finish the work if he himself couldn't do it.

"Why," asked Diane, "do you insist that somebody else at least know how to try to find a way of getting the ship to where we can get help without your doing it?"

"It's a simple, ordinary, rational precaution," he answered. "In the one chance in a thousand or a million..."

"You ought to find the captain," said Diane. Her eyes were at once frightened and soft, and she looked at Braden strangely. "Only... all he wants is to kill the men who murdered his family."

"I can understand that!" said Braden grimly. "If..."

Then he left them. But within an hour he was back, explaining again to Hardy. Presently Braden beckoned to Diane to listen too. She obeyed, watching him very gravely as he spoke. What she was to do at the appropriate time she had learned well. He was confident of that; he could act in full assurance that she'd do her part. But he was desperately uneasy about the rest.

Fortescue, on guard by the door, said abruptly,

"Something's happened! I hear shouting!"

Braden unconsciously felt for his blaster. Without a word, he went out the door. His exit was completely silent. Fortescue closed the door without the faintest sound. It was essential that the mutineers never think of the drive-compartment as a hiding place.

Braden stood for a moment on the walkway and listened.

A man shrieked. It was not a cry of pain, but of terror almost beyond imagining. It was high, and thin, and shrill, made by a man gripped by the unsurpassed fear and anguish one would expect of someone dangling over the deepest pit of hell, then being lowered into it. The sounds were no more articulate than the squealing of a pig which knows it is going to be butchered. And because it was a human throat that made such inhuman sounds, Braden was ashamed for it.

He swung over the railing and began to swing down through that incredible, vaguely lit blur of struts and joists and girders. The cry came from a definite direction, and Braden made for the source of the sound. There could be only certain causes for the cry - the most likely one being the skipper.

Braden came to a catwalk many levels below. He moved along it to the corridor-plate which should be at the end. The cries died away, and Braden heard lesser sounds like sobbing. He opened the door-plate to the corridor. There was utter and absolute blackness. There should not be such complete absence of light anywhere. The door-plate closed softly behind him, and Braden crouched in the abysmal dark. The man who'd been screaming only wept now, but it was a bubbling and a whimpering and a gasping babble. The man only gathered breath for further cries of terror.

Braden moved toward the sound with all possible caution, making sure that his blaster was handy. He fumbled in his pocket and found a coin which he tossed from him with his left hand. It struck the metal of the corridor wall. The sobbing man was paralysed into a horror-filled stillness. Braden heard the breathing of someone besides the man who'd been sobbing. It was a fat man's breathing. The man waited, as alert and listening as Braden was, but not conscious of the faint wheezing sound he had lived with so long that he'd ceased to hear it.

Braden said quietly:

"Skipper?"

There came a chuckle from the blackness.

"Ah, Mr. Braden! Fancy meeting you here!" The skipper's voice rolled and rumbled. It was sardonic. "And how have you made out with your responsibility, Mr. Braden?"

"Fairly well, sir," said Braden grimly. "I'm ready to take decisive action, sir. But I wanted to make contact with you before starting."

He could tell where the skipper was. Against the side wall, but not standing up. He was sitting, with his back against the wall-plating.

"How badly are you hurt?" Braden asked abruptly.

The skipper growled as if in vexation.

"Now, how the devil... It's nothing serious, Mr. Braden. Nothing to interfere with what I propose to do. Our companion, Mr. Braden - the voice you heard singing - is one Sharkey, who considers himself an accomplished pirate. I fancy, at that, that he's the bravest of the lot. I caught him bound for the passengers' quarters, quite alone, doubtless hoping to find something there that he could steal and hide from his fellows. I took him by the throat from behind. He fought like the rat he is, but when he recovered consciousness he found himself bound and in the dark... I think," rumbled the skipper, with relish, "I think he believes himself in hell."

"He can hear you," said Braden, "and learn better."

The skipper rumbled once more, zestfully.

"Ah, yes! But he screamed most edifyingly when he thought he was in hell. Why shouldn't he be in even better voice, now he knows I will presently take him in hand to... ah... exact some payment for events aboard the Melpomene?"

"How badly are you hurt?" demanded Braden again.

"Trivial," said the skipper. "I'm a heavy man, Mr. Braden. In the struggle with Sharkey, I tripped. His weight and mine came together on my ankle. It snapped - something did, at any rate. So I am immobilized, but I shall devote all my attention to Sharkey until his associates come and rescue him."

The other man in the corridor, Sharkey, began to whimper. It was a revolting sound. No man should ever utter such abject, hopeless, despairing sounds.

"I still hope," said the skipper benignly, "that his friends will come to his rescue. In the dark all cats are gray, and everything that moves can be a target. I believe that in darkness like this I can come to a settlement with most of the crew I have reason to... be stern with. But you've come first. If you will go away, Mr. Braden, I feel sure that Sharkey will try much more urgently to persuade his friends to come and kill me."

"They've only to turn the lights on," said Braden grimly. "Then..."

"Ah!" said the skipper. "But they can't turn on the lights! I've blown the main ship circuits and I've smashed the emergency light systems. If the gentlemen formerly of the Melpomene want to come at me, they must come on my terms.... In the dark." Then the skipper said cheerfully, "I'll have him call them again."

The other man, unseen in the darkness - Sharkey - screamed even when the skipper made only a rustling movement. It was pure terror, perhaps made specific by knowledge both of past events on the Melpomene and of intended happenings on the Rim Star. The mere idea that the skipper was moving toward him was utterly terrifying. He shrieked.

There came a new sound - a hissing, crackling noise. It was entirely familiar. It was the sound made by loudspeaker units in every part of the ship when a general communication announcement was to be made. There were voices behind the crackling sound. They said indefinite things. One voice said, "No good." Then the steward's voice boomed at full volume in all the halls and corridors of the Rim Star.

"Captain, sir," it said. There was a pause. "Captain!"

The skipper rumbled. Sharkey ceased his shrieks to listen. Braden automatically felt for his blaster.

"Captain," said the steward's voice, smooth and unctuous. "You are making things bad all around. I'm going to give you a chance to stay alive. I am talking under a flag of truce. Listen carefully!"

It was black where Braden and the skipper and the tied-up mutineer listened to the steward's voice. All over the ship the voice boomed. It reverberated in the holds. It was intolerably loud in the drive-compartment. It boomed hollowly in every section of the passageway from the abandoned passenger quarters to the ship's controlroom. All through the ship... everywhere... the steward's voice echoed and reechoed and reverberated resonantly between the curving metal walls.

"Listen, captain," said the voice persuasively, "you know you haven't any help. You can't hope for any help. You're alone and you'll stay alone. But I'll make a bargain with you. We're ready to leave the ship. Before we leave, we can let in space. We can make the ship an empty shell. And if we do that, you'll die here, all alone, and you'll stay alone for the next ten million years! But we'll make a deal!"

"Mr. Braden," said the skipper sardonically, "you're about to hear an attempt to bribe me!"

The steward's voice came again, cajoling and somehow plausible.

"Don't you think I should be offered something too, sir?" Braden asked.

The skipper growled. Braden felt along the corridor wall. He found a monitor-box that contained instruments which reported to the control-room the temperature and air-pressure and CO2 content and innumerable other items about conditions in this part of the ship. The steward had used such a monitor-box intercom when Braden was alone in the control-room and the skipper was discovering that his bomb had been disarmed and his blast-rifles made away with.

"We can go away leaving the ship bled of air," said the steward, "or we can leave you here with the ship all tight, and you can get to ground in her and be a hero, and you can have Sharkey..."

The steward's voice went on, with a sort of deferential blandness to propose that the skipper return the part he'd taken from Lifeboat One and let the surviving mutineers go free, taking the money in No. 2 hold. They'd repaired the lifeboat, he said suavely, but they didn't have too much confidence in it. They'd rather have the original part. So to get that part he'd bargain... It was not a reasonable offer, even if the skipper had been alone to face all the mutineers upon the ship. It surely would not have been fulfilled. But the steward offered it in a fashion at once obsequious and flattering and cajoling.

Then Braden said ironically into the intercom:

"Steward, I have to be bribed too! What do you offer me?"

There was silence. Braden's presence on the ship was a distinct shock. But then the steward's voice grew bright and surprised and very admiring indeed. And it still sounded through the general communication speakers all over the ship.

"Mr. Braden!" he said warmly. "You have surprised me! You're a very brilliant man, Mr. Braden! Very brilliant! I see I'll have to make a better bargain! Very well! Mr. Braden, I'll give you a million credits out of No. 2 hold if you'll shoot the captain! A million credits! You can leave the ship with us, leaving no sign behind you, or you can take the Rim Star into port with a good story of how you recaptured her..."

For a moment, Braden forgot that he was surrounded by abysmal darkness, because the steward's voice was so plausible and deferential and respectfully admiring. He could see the steward in his mind, as if in reality. The straw-colored hair, and the singular, apparently flabby skin on his face which wasn't flabby at all when one looked at it closely.

"... Just one moment is all it will take you, Mr. Braden!" the steward was saying brightly. "Just a pull of the trigger and you have a million credits! Think what you can do with a million credits, Mr. Braden! The girls..."

"The devil!" Braden said disgustedly.

"He's mad!" the skipper rumbled. "Trying to get us to kill each other! The man's mad! He's possessed of a devil..."

"I think he is," said Braden coldly. "And I'm going to let that devil out of him with a blaster bolt!"

Silence for half a second. Then the steward spoke again. There was a quivering rage in his voice now, that was literally demoniac.

"Come and try it, Mr. Braden! I'm in the control-room. Come and kill me! Captain, you'll come! You'll come and I'll burn you down and you know it, but you'll come because..."

What followed was literally unbearable, because the steward taunted the skipper. He began to tell the story of taking the Melpomene. He began the story with the officers dead and the passengers captives of the piratical crew. He started to tell in detail what the passengers went through before they were murdered. He mentioned Sharkey. He mentioned the skipper's wife and daughter. The skipper began to move heavily in the darkness and the bound man began to shriek again in terror past description.

Braden moved through the darkness, blaster in hand, headed for the control-room. He had to stop the story of such enormities. It must be stopped! He did not think coldly. He did not think clearly. He thought only of getting to the control-room and killing the chattering, despicably boasting steward, even though three blast-rifles might be waiting to burn him down as he came down the corridor to the control-room door.

He heard indescribable sounds behind him. The skipper could not walk, but he was crawling to get at the man he had to kill, no matter if the skipper's pocket blaster was a toy in comparison to the weapons the other man had.