The Other Side of Nowhere

Chapter 8

Braden went through one of the collision doors. The compartment ahead was utterly black. The loud-speaker behind him ceased to be heard and the loud-speaker ahead took up the intolerable narrative, syllable by syllable. The steward boasted to the skipper. The skipper crawled, to kill him or - much more likely - to be killed. Braden moved faster. To kill. No man could hold himself back while such a story was being told. Or even afterward.

The skipper crawled because he could not walk; and if he came to a section of the corridor that was commanded by blast-rifles in the control-room door, he would crawl down that section in the face of any imaginable fire. Because no man could endure such boasts unless he was in the act of trying to kill the man who made them.

Braden went through another collision door. There was darkness and the same unthinkable boasting. Still another door, and there was light. Just around the curve of the passageway was the control-room, and men waited in its doorway with heavy-duty weapons to turn the air incandescent when the skipper or Braden appeared.

But it was impossible not to go forward...

Braden swore brokenly. The voice boasted...

A new voice, a new noise, broke into the steward's bragging about horror accomplished. The new voice was metallic and loud.

"Nuw... oot... eerth... rouf... sdnoces..." They were unintelligible syllables. "Vyff... ni... ngimuc..."

There came more senseless sounds. Then the universe reeled. There was the sensation of falling, and of overpowering vertigo, and a person seemed to spin dizzily in a contracting spiral. Then stillness... For one second.

Howls came from the control-room. The ship drove on. Braden looked at his blaster and made himself ready for what he knew must come now. He began to feel a tremendous, and peaceful, and terrible satisfaction.

The ship's gravity reversed... Slowly... Deliberately... His weight decreased to nothing, and then increased. What had been up was down; the floor of the corridor was now its ceiling, and what had been its ceiling was now its floor. There were more noises from the control-room.

Braden walked very, very grimly on the ceiling of the corridor toward the control-room. When he came to the doorway, there was a four-foot sill instead of a wall section above it. What had been the threshold was now overhead. The instruments were upside down. The chair by the tape coder hung downward from the ceiling. The control-switches were bottom-side up. The three surviving crewmen still at large lay in a scrambled heap on the ceiling-now-become- the-floor.

Two of the control-room's three occupants clung to each other. Blast-rifles banged about their feet. They grabbed at each other, at the steward, at any solid object they could reach. They howled. The steward shouted at them.

Braden saw what the vision screen showed. There was a sun - a yellow sun - a monstrous, writhing, globular glare as of burning sulfur. It filled a considerable part of the right-hand screen. It was near... Too near. The ship appeared to be drifting slantingly toward its farther edge.

No other cause of terror could keep a space crewman from recognizing this as an emergency that required attention above everything else. The steward scrambled for the controls. They were upside down and therefore reversed, but he swung the ship. The image of the sun ceased to be visible in the right-hand screen. It almost filled the screen dead ahead. The steward wrenched at the controls again, and the sun swung and was visible dead astern. The steward, panting, put on full drive.

The sun grew visibly larger. It seemed to leap in pursuit of the Rim Star. There could be no question about it - driving away from the sun meant approaching it. The steward panted even harder. Again the directional controls. He got the sun abeam. He tried to drive the ship laterally, to get it in orbit.

The sun swam ahead, to intercept the Rim Star.

The steward cried out at it. He flung his hands around wildly, shifting controls at random. The gravity went off and came on again, and the floor was the floor and the ceiling was the ceiling; but the sun still leaped ahead to head off the big ship.

Suddenly a planet came in view. It was small and rocky and very near the sun. The steward aimed the ship at it. It went away. He swung to flee from it. It grew in size. He tried to go past it, and it moved so it was directly ahead...

The steward uttered animal-like cries of fury. His men bid their eyes.

Gravity reversed again, without reason. The ceiling was again the floor. Blast-rifles clattered upon it, and the men in the room were grotesque objects, staring at the vision screens and sobbing bitterly - except the steward. He raged and shouted and flung himself at the ship's controls which now were upside down and now...

Braden could anticipate the consequences of some of those insane attacks upon the ship's guiding and directing controls. There was a hissing sound, and firefighting fog poured out somewhere, and there was the desolate, spinetingling moo of the maximum-emergency alarm. But the screens were mad. The sun was dead astern, and it pursued the Rim Star, growing larger and larger and larger, visibly, until it filled the whole screen, and faculae and solar markings appeared and grew larger until the ship seemed about to be swallowed up in flaming hell-fire.

The steward chattered, his eyes fixed and glassy; he struck this control, and that. There was a sudden violent jolting - something the gravity could not adjust to quite in time. The ship's giant rockets, intended to be used for the first time in history to land the heaviest burden against the gravity of Handel's Planet, now burned furiously to try to hurl the ship away from that hideous ball of flame. But their pencil-thin flames did not spurt out astern. Inconceivably, they appeared at the bow, pushing the Rim Star back so that the swelling solar photosphere could reach out and lick at her.

Braden stepped over what should have been the top of the control-room doorframe. He walked across what should have been the ceiling. The man with the battered features moved blindly about, his eyes blank, his mouth open, making meaningless noises. Braden hit him, with precision. The man with the birthmark on his cheek that looked like a recent bruise pawed at Braden imploringly, babbling incoherencies. Braden hit him too.

There was the steward, his eyes insane, his face purple with fury. He shouted unspeakable things. He suddenly bent down and snatched up a blaster, to destroy with it everything that would not do what he wanted.

Braden hit him with all his strength. He could not hold himself back. He felt toward the steward as one would feel about a demon - such impassioned hatred and revulsion and horror that it was impossible to limit the violence he used against him. Braden felt something give, in his fist, but could not bother about it.

He said aloud, to the four walls and the instrument boards and the reversed floor and ceiling:

"All right, Diane. Put things back to normal. We don't have to stay in the Other Side of Nowhere any longer."

The gravity weakened and went to zero, and from there came on very gently; and for the second or fifth or tenth time since Braden went into the control-room up was up and down was down and left was left and ahead was ahead. But the screens still showed madness.

But then they shifted. The magnification changed; and what had appeared to be the nearby topographic detail of the sun's photosphere smoothed out as the magnification which had made the sun seem so close was cut back and back; the sun dwindled to a more nearly normal sort of object. The stars multiplied too, and the small and rocky planet shrank remarkably. The mere fact of extreme magnification on all the screens had made this solar system look strange, with all motions magnified as the local objects were. But still things did not look normal. The black nebula of the Horse's Head was turned about; it faced in the wrong direction. The striations of the stars in the Milky Way turned backward. The universe still did not look right.

The skipper came crawling along the curved corridor from below. His eyes blazed.

"No!" said Braden grimly, "and I mean no! They're out cold. You can tie them up if you like, but we're too close to port for what you have in mind... Even if I'd permit it!"

The skipper, crawling and grotesque, looked in the doorway. Braden suddenly realized the state he was in. He had become aware of it when he first realized the nature of Diane's danger at the mutineers' hands. It was rage so terrible and fury so vast that his feeling ceased to be either rage or fury. It was an unnatural cold calmness that was utterly implacable.

As the skipper looked in, his features went set and composed.

Braden held out the fist he'd hit the steward with.

"I smashed my hand against his jaw," he said.

The skipper reached out and grasped the doorframe, using it to pull himself erect.

"Ah, yes!" he said with terrifying composure. "But I do not think it would be wise for me to touch any of them. I do not trust myself, Mr. Braden."

He partly hopped and partly hitched himself to the upholstered control-board chair and let himself down into it. He looked at the three unconscious mutineers with distended nostrils and utter ferocity in his eyes.

"You had better call your passengers out of wherever they are, Mr. Braden," he said with the same peculiar composure. "Let them attend to these..." He stopped. "I'll take over the ship. You have done very well, Mr. Braden. I will ask you to make a report, for the log, in a moment or two. But call your passengers now. I... do not like to see these men. The boasting..."

He turned his eyes away. He looked at the screens.

"What is the matter with the stars, Mr. Braden?"

"The leads are changed in the communicator room, sir," said Braden. "They're giving mirror images. Change back in a few moments, sir." He pressed the general communicator button, and his voice came over the loudspeakers all over the ship. "Diane, it's all over. Let Hardy finish getting things back to normal. The rest of you come up to the control-room. Everything's all right. We're stopped within a day or so of normal drive of Handel's Planet. Come up."

He went professionally to make the normal check-over of the meteor scanners to make sure they were functioning. They had not been touched, in the process of contriving an Other Side of Nowhere for the Rim Star to break out into; nevertheless it was wise to check them.

He saw the skipper, sitting heavily in the control-board chair. His hands were shaking. His fingers closed and unclosed and writhed as if filled with a horrible longing to rend and tear. But he said composedly:

"Suppose you make your report for the log, Mr. Braden. Will you throw the switch, please?"

A pair of vision screens went out. Hardy, down in the drive-compartment, had turned them off. They would come back on in a moment, showing the outside galaxy as it really was.

"You know where I hid the passengers, sir," said Braden. He looked at his broken fist. It had begun to be painful. "It was in the drive-compartment. There was any amount of test equipment on the walls. The control-room, here, uses small currents to throw relays in the drive-compartment that actually handle the ship. We traced those currents, sir. We found we could make the ship's gravity reverse for no visible reason in the control room. We could scramble the vision-screen leads, sir, so the camera at the bow made its report to the screen that normally shows the stars astern, the port-side camera reported to the starboard screen, and so on. We could magnify everything, so that a sun or a planet at an enormous distance away would seem unbelievably close. And we scrambled everything so it would appear that the laws of nature had changed, and right was left and up was down and nothing was normal any more."

The skipper nodded. He was breathing heavily and his hands still quivered. He carefully looked away from the crewmen on the floor.

"Go on, Mr. Braden!"

"Then we adjusted the speaker tape so that instead of calling for attention to announce a coming breakout, it ran backwards and counted up - but backwards, so the words weren't like anything anybody ever heard before. The intonations were reversed too, sir, so it sounded like nothing human... But you heard it!"

"Yes, Mr. Braden, I heard it." His features were as if chiseled out of stone. "And to make a formal statement of the purpose of this mystification, Mr. Braden?"

"When the mutineers broke out of overdrive, sir," Braden said formally, "they'd hear that unearthly announcement first, and then they'd find themselves where everything functioned as if they were in the Other Side of Nowhere. You've heard that fable, sir. The steward talked about it to me once, at considerable length. At the time, he was making conversation until he had a chance to murder me, but I could tell that he more than halfway believed in it. He may have believed in it entirely."

"Ah," said the skipper impassively. "And the idea was to prepare all this, and at the moment of breakout, when they were confused and frightened and appalled, you'd attack them. Alone. You hoped they'd be agitated enough to let you - only one man and with only a hand-blaster for a weapon - recapture the ship against four or five men armed with blast-rifles."

"Yes, sir," said Braden. "I think I could have done it."

"This is a report for the ship's log, Mr. Braden!" said the skipper reprovingly. "You did, though the crewmen who were still active were reduced to three by that time. You did very well. In fact, in capturing these desperate characters unharmed - or let us say nearly unharmed - your action was praiseworthy in the extreme."

Braden looked sharply at the skipper. His face was impassive to an improbable degree, but his tone was definitely ironic.

There were sounds. Duckworth and Diane and Fortescue appeared, Duckworth still worried and cautious, Diane infinitely relieved. The skipper nodded to them.

"How do you do?" he asked, with elaborate politeness. "We have not met before. I will ask you, though" ... he fixed Fortescue with his eyes... "to get handcuffs and such things and shackle these three men on the floor here. You will find them..."

He gave instructions. Fortescue, more or less awed by the skipper's air, went away. Duckworth regarded the mutineers doubtfully.

"If they stir," rumbled the skipper, "you may take measures. I insist, though, that they not be killed. Mr. Braden would not approve."

The irony in his tone was acid. Braden stirred uneasily. The skipper went on with painstaking precision.

"When they are suitably shackled - there's another man among you passengers, I believe - when they are cuffed and he arrives, I should like them to be put in the No. 1 lifeboat blister. Mr. Braden will show you where it is. He has a broken hand, which forces us to request this favor of you, and I have an ankle which prevents me from helping."

Two vision screens had gone out and come back on some time before. Two others had now been out for minutes. First one and then the other came back on. The last two went out. Hardy was restoring the vision-screen connections to their places. The stars, and the sun of Handel's Planet, looked perfectly normal in the screens that were now working, but Hardy's task was not quite complete. He'd come up presently, with Derr Carmody.

"All this," said the skipper, "is being recorded for the ship's log. I shall add that we will now drive for Handel's Planet. We cannot land, because the steward used all our rocket-fuel in an attempt to escape a phantom danger. But we will orbit our actual destination and try to get you passengers aground. Then Mr. Braden and myself will take the ship to where we can replenish her rockets. After that we will return to deliver her cargo."

Again the impression of irony was overwhelming. The skipper threw the log-recorder switch. The log-tape ceased to run. Then he said in an entirely changed voice:

"My daughter - my surviving daughter - will be pleased when she hears that. She does not believe in vengeance. But we will see what we will see!"

Fortescue came back with handcuffs and leg-irons which would be both comfortable and escape-proof. The skipper tested a blast-rifle for its value as a crutch. With it he limped ponderously to his cabin.

Braden supervised the transfer of the prisoners, duly cuffed, to the lifeboat blister, where they were fastened to small welded braces. Duckworth and Fortescue were joined by Hardy, and they took both Sharkey and the chubby man, still moaning, to the other crewmen imprisoned in the blister.

Presently Braden was alone in the control-room.

Diane came in. He nodded to her and said dourly:

"I wish things had worked out better."

He was not pleased with himself. He'd contrived to give the effect of being on the Other Side of Nowhere because otherwise he'd have had no chance at all to recover the ship. But it had worked too well. Braden was deeply suspicious of schemes and contrived achievements. He felt that he hadn't acted in a properly forthright, self-respecting manner.

Diane smiled at him. Tolerantly. She acted as if she disagreed with him but wouldn't say so. He was embarrassed.

"There's Handel's Planet," he said, pointing to a bright dot on the screen. He turned up the magnification. "We'll land you there by a space-boat from the ground. Then we'll go get more rocket-fuel, taking the prisoners with us..."

"I suspect," said Diane, "you'll have trouble getting them there."

Braden frowned and nodded. He would have trouble. He knew that if he were in the skipper's shoes, no man who'd boasted as the steward had, or shared in the atrocities he'd boasted of... no such man would live long. Life would be intolerable until such men were dead. Even then...

The image of Handel's Planet magnified. The planet had seas and green continents, and the snowcaps that are guarantees of the absence of poisonous gases and extremes of temperature in an Earth-type world.

"I think that you should try to land somehow," Diane said. "You've always been able to think of something to do."

He shook his head.

"Rockets will burn out fifty or sixty acres, at worst, even letting down the Rim Star; but a space-drive in atmosphere is something else. Even a space-boat creates a small but deadly hurricane when it takes off or lands in atmosphere. Trees blow down and houses explode and generally the effect is calamitous. But a ship the size of the Rim Star would create a full-scale typhoon. Everything within a hundred miles of where she landed would be wrecked. So we'll have to go on to some spaceport where our rockets can be refueled, and then come back for our landing. But we may have to go to several spaceports to get enough rocket-fuel."

"We... haven't a long schedule of shooting to do on Handel's Planet," said Diane, unhappily. "We may be gone when you get back."

There was silence. Diane seemed to be looking absorbedly at the now much-enlarged image of the planet on the screen. There were seas and landmasses and polar icecaps. There were clouds, and a storm system over an ocean. Over all there was the glamour that all oxygen- atmosphere planets seem to possess.

"I wish..."

"It would be... pleasant if you thought of a way to land," said Diane, almost dolefully. "You always have thought of necessary things..."

"But landing on space-drive..."

"Here's an island!" Diane said.

She pointed, on the screen. And Braden literally started. He stared at her. He took a deep breath.

"Wait here!" he said.

He left the control-room. At this distance from the local sun there should be no danger from trash in space.

He went to the skipper's quarters, where he found the skipper trying to learn to walk with a blast-rifle as a crutch.

"Yes, Mr. Braden?" the skipper asked frostily.

"The ship," said Braden with painstaking precision, "was to land on rockets because landing on space-drive would create a cyclone that would devastate 10,000 square miles, whipping trees to matchwood, and destroying everything men had built, including spaceports and roads to them."

"Quite true," said the skipper as coldly as before. "But what of it?"

"There are islands," said Braden, "that nothing has been built on yet. They're located in oceans that don't grow trees. They're far enough from the continents so a storm thrashing over even 10,000 square miles won't bother anybody. And there'll be some surface ships already built for surface exploration and the like. We can let down the Rim Star by space-drive to an island off a coast, and the storm will not matter. Haul her cargo away and she can take off in the same fashion. It would save several months in getting our cargo aground."

The skipper considered, then frowned.

"A very sound idea, Mr. Braden!" He spoke very deliberately. "Very sound! It has advantages over rocket descent. For one thing, it should be much safer for the ship. So you may put us into orbit around Handel's Planet and we'll work out the idea in detail. We shall have to get in touch with the people ashore, of course. They may need time to make arrangements. But it seems an excellent idea! I have even a personal reason for preferring this landing system, Mr. Braden." His tone became enigmatic. "A long journey with the men who murdered my wife and daughter in my care, Mr. Braden... Did you hear the steward boast?"

Braden went back to Diane. He set about the strictly man-style astrogation which is necesary inside of solar systems. He assigned Fortescue to take care of feeding the prisoners. He advised him to have a blaster ready and to take every possible precaution.

Then he threw himself into the work the new proposal - he thought of it as Diane's - involved. The skipper made no pretense of helping. He stayed in his cabin. Fortescue and Hardy had made makeshift splints for his ankle, but apparently he found it uncomfortable to walk, even with the blast-rifle crutch.

Duckworth was frantically busy. He was changing the script of the epic, The Other Side of Nowhere, to make it an adventure-documentary of the actual attempt to pirate the huge ship Rim Star. Some of the scenes would admittedly be staged, but Derr Carmody had been involved; and if she repeated before the cameras what she had actually experienced, the film could legitimately be called a documentary and would receive incredible publicity and be assured of triumph even before its release. Duckworth and Fortescue and Derr Carmody worked feverishly in preparation. And since all the replayed scenes centered upon Derr Carmody - and all but one scene would be replayed - a second turn of fame and stardom for her was assured.

All this was arranged during the days when the Rim Star slogged sturdily toward Handel's Planet in space-drive - not overdrive, which was not practical for such short distances. There were other arrangements to be made, too. All the details of her landing had to be discussed at irritating length with the construction supervisors in the new colony. This method of landing was a novel idea, and accordingly there was resistance to it. But the Rim Star carried stores that would mean the difference between merely adequate nourishment and really good food for the people aground. She carried cranes and bulldozers and earthmovers and roofing, and reading matter and antibiotics and beverages and ground cars. She had on board all the necessities for civilized life, or at least the means of making them. But if she were to go away to reload her rockets, it would be six months or more before she could return. Whereas if she landed now, the grid would be up and working in three months or less, and Handel's Planet would be part of civilization.

Duckworth was entranced. He set up the cameras to show the ship's descent through her own vision screens. He arranged for shots to be taken of interior scenes which to Braden made no sense whatever, since they were not in chronological order and were to fit between other scenes not yet staged. Braden did observe, though, that Derr Carmody behaved in a highly emotional fashion while the cameras were running. He marveled at it, but it was not his business.

He thought a great deal about Diane, who was busy with the camera work a deplorably large part of the time. He thought much less about the skipper. The skipper stayed in his quarters. Although a blast-rifle could be a substitute crutch, the skipper didn't seem to become proficient in using it. Braden only really saw him once. His expression was strange, then, for a deep and somehow terrible satisfaction lay below an outward impassiveness. But he spoke to Braden in his usual rumbling manner, but Braden was busy.

Plans for the descent involved choosing an island, in agreement with the authorities below. There had to be elaborate discussions of the time and direction of landing, and the fitting of such factors into the weather pattern of the planet. Even then there was delay while the buildings thus far constructed in the colony were battened down. It was a full six days after breakout before Braden turned on the drive and began to match the ship's velocity with that of the planet which seemed to revolve below the ship.

The Rim Star went down slowly. The vast curved surface of a world's hemisphere seemed to rise toward the ship. To the west, where haze and dust particles acted as a filter, the horizon was visibly pinkish. To the east, where the light was reflected from the same kind of ions and dust, the edge of the planet was faintly blue. There was a vast mottled stretch of land surface, with river systems and forests and mountain ranges changing the appearance of the island ever more markedly as the ship descended. There was the peculiar muddy color of the ocean bottom - here deeper, there more shallow - which also became visible in greater detail as it came nearer.

The winds began a hundred miles up. The big ship's drive-field was designed to have an effect on interstellar space itself, where matter existed only in the ratio of one atom per cubic centimeter. As she descended, the thousands and millions and trillions and quadrillions of atmospheric ions per cubic centimeter went mad in the stresses imposed by the field.

Braden, seated at the control-board, saw the storm develop. The water beneath the Rim Star turned white as the winds whipped the sea to waves and seized upon the waves and turned them to spray. Giant billows formed and instantly dissolved into monstrous clouds of mist driven by 500-mile winds. The island on which the ship was to land became invisible under a dome of whiteness as its surface deflected the winds.

The Rim Star rocked. Her gigantic size and unbelievable mass were not enough to hold her steady. Braden held her against random, monstrous thrusts. She went down and down. The air-pressure meters gave fantastic readings. The pressure alternated between the vacuum of space and the pressure of many atmospheres. The wind was freakish in its action. Braden saw a huge tree, torn bodily from the soil with roots and branches intact, being borne level with the ship five miles up. As the descent continued, the destruction became even greater. Eventually there came an end to the soaring trees and other such objects because there were no more left. At three miles the ship was enveloped in fog. Only radar could penetrate the turmoil, which seemed to be an inextricable mixture of sea and air and earth and thousand-mile winds.

The skipper came limping into the control-room. He said benignly:

"Mr. Braden, I heard a noise just now. I fear something was not properly checked when the Rim Star left the spaceport. A boat-blister was forced open by the violence of the winds."

Braden did not answer. He was extremely occupied. The ship remained under control, of course, but she required the most exact and careful handling if she was to be set down, not only on the island below but on a sort of plateau at one end which was the most desirable landing- spot.

"It appears," rumbled the skipper, "that the blister for the No. 1 lifeboat was torn open by the wind. That was where the Melpomene's crew was confined. I have closed it, Mr. Braden, but I think you should entertain the gravest fears for the safety of the prisoners."

Braden looked up. The skipper's face was filled with a terrible satisfaction. It was not the kind that would come of knowing that the murderers of one's wife and daughter had been killed instantly and quite painlessly by storm winds. The skipper's expression implied much more.

"I have closed it, Mr. Braden," repeated the skipper, rumbling. "I leave the ship in your hands. I am an old man, and I am battered, and I am very tired. Good luck!"

He went out of the control-room. The others were silent. Braden had nothing to say. Duckworth watched nervously as the cameras recorded what the screens showed. But eventually they showed nothing but whiteness.

Presently the ship touched ground. It was a gentle landing, considering her bulk, but it was perceptible. Braden steadily lessened the drive which, in preventing a headlong fall, had created the blank and screaming opacity outside. He eased the drive off very gently indeed. The ship did not tilt. He cut the drive. Nothing happened. The ship was solidly aground.

He reversed the drive to begin checking the winds it had caused previously.

It seemed hours before the tumult had died down enough to allow direct observation of the world outside. Then Braden went down the long, circling corridor of ramps and stairways. The collision doors were open, now. The two formerly empty compartments were now filled with air from Handel's Planet - it smelled of wetness and the sea. The ship was at rest.

The personnel lock-door at the very bottom could be opened under the shelter of the hull. There were gusts of wind. There was rain. The high clouds formed by the Rim Star's descent were not stable clouds. They couldn't be. They condensed. Rain came down in drops, in streams, in seemingly solid masses. It was rain such as might have been imagined to have fallen when the oceans were first filled. The ground was devastated. There was mud and stone and nothing else. For many miles around, the sea still flung itself up in waves and combers. But the Rim Star was aground.

Nothing in particular happened after that. In less than one full day the air was clear, and by the next day the colony's small ships were offshore, carrying men to unload the Rim Star. They brought out cranes and began to empty her holds. But there was a great deal of cargo to be taken off. Presently they were towing hastily-made empty barges to the island and towing them away again, loaded.

Braden went to the mainland presently. Duckworth and Hardy and Fortescue - and of course Derr Carmody and Diane - had gone briskly to work the minute they could get to the new continent. They were shooting sequences for that splendid adventure-documentary, The Other Side of Nowhere. Braden hung around restlessly. A few days before the picture-tape job was to be finished, Duckworth took Braden aside. Derr Carmody had thrown an outstanding temperamental tantrum that day, and shooting had been suspended.

"Mr. Braden," Duckworth said jerkily, "you've been hanging around all the time we've been shooting. I don't think it's my sex appeal that keeps you so absorbed, and I don't think it's Derr's... look here! I like Diane! If I had a daughter, Diane would be my choice. If I were your age... Dammit, what are you waiting for?"

Braden said awkwardly:

"I'm a merchant-space officer. I've a master's ticket, but the pay and the long voyages... It wouldn't be fair to Diane."

Duckworth made an impatient gesture.

"Have you talked to the skipper lately?"

"No," said Braden. "He sleeps most of the time, and I've spent most of my time ashore. Why?"

"My business," said Duckworth, "is making tape plays. I know how things ought to turn out. You saved the lot of us from being killed - or something considerably worse. So I figured out how this business ought to end. And I went to see the skipper."

Braden blinked at him.

"The skipper's finished," said Duckworth briskly. "He sleeps all the time because he's done the last two things he wanted to do. One was settling up with the men who murdered his wife and daughter, and the other was landing the biggest cargo in history to be landed without a grid. He doesn't want to be the skipper of the Rim Star any more. He's going back to where his other daughter lives - he'll go as a passenger on another ship - and he'll play with his grandchildren, and he'll sleep a lot, and the rest of the time he'll... remember."

"I wouldn't want..." began Braden.

"I wouldn't want to remember what he does, either," said Duckworth. "But he's through. He's made the Rim Star into a valuable property for his son-in-law. There's plenty of need for a ship that can carry a colony - men and tools and food and the materials for a grid - all at one time. The Rim Star's that ship. You'll have to take her back to port, and the skipper says his son-in-law will take his word that you're the best skipper he can possibly get for her. With new worlds to be colonized all the time you'll be busy..."

"If you're sure," Braden said urgently.

"I am sure. And Derr Carmody won't object. She'll raise the devil, of course, but that will be for the drama in such a scene. When Diane points out that there'll always be passengers on the Rim Star, and that on a colony-carrying voyage a skipper should have his wife along, she'll calm down. It's true, you know."

Braden said feverishly:

"Excuse me!"

He hurried away. Duckworth mopped his forehead as he looked after him.

Diane came out from where she'd been waiting, unseen, and joined Duckworth. She asked uneasily:

"What... what did he say?"

"If you'll let him find you - oh, quite by accident! - he'll tell you himself. But dammit, you've still got to work a camera for me until this job is finished!"

Diane smiled. Her eyes shone a little. Without a word she moved away, so she'd be where Braden could find her quite by accident.

The building of the colony went on.

THE END