The Other Side of Nowhere
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Год: 1964
- Язык: английский
- Год: Berkley Medallion
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Other Side of Nowhere». Краткое содержание книги:
For centuries space travelers had dreaded a place they called the Other Side of Nowhere — a place in the universe where up was down, where right was wrong, and where all direction was lost...
To save the RIM STAR Braden had to bring the ship to the place of nightmare, the Other Side of Nowhere...
He was about to pass the galley. He raised a blaster to readiness, but the galley was empty. He ran on, panting, and saw the door of his own cabin. The steward... The door was open and his cabin was empty. The steward had recovered and had left the cabin.
Braden swore - he should have killed the steward. Here were the skipper's quarters; he went past them. There was the control-room door, and it was open. "It's Braden!" he panted, and fairly dived inside the room. If there were an ambush, calling out his name would seem to be a warning to the skipper, and they'd expect Braden to stop for an answer. But if the skipper were inside, the fact that he'd come in at a headlong run would be assurance that it wasn't a mutinous member of the crew. He burst into the control-room, blasters ready to kill as many men as possible if he'd been ambushed.
It was empty of all life.
But there was a dead man on the floor.
It was the crewman with the sharp eyes, the first man Braden had had empty his ship-bag in the forecastle. He lay on the floor, his head at a completely impossible angle to his body. His neck was broken.
Silence. Stillness. Braden listened with impassioned intensity. If the skipper was dead, he had to get the passengers to a lifeboat and take to space regardless. The skipper'd said the ship would not outlive him by more than twenty-four hours. If he was alive, the two of them must hunt down the mutineers ruthlessly, killing them any way they could. So he listened for a sound that might be the skipper.
Something whirred, and he whirled to face it. But this was one of the times when all the readings of the ship's innumerable instruments were recorded on the log. The log-tape whirred between its guides. There was a tiny humming sound. It stopped. The state of the ship was on tape, so far as the ship alone was concerned. But it was somehow shocking that the ship, the Rim Star - the enortnous thing which had been created by men and was tended by men and which men almost thought of as animate - it was somehow shocking that the ship was oblivious to men. A dead man on the control-room floor called for no record on the narrow strip of tape which was the great ship's memory. The dead man did not matter. Nor did Braden, nor the skipper, nor Derr Carmody nor even - incredibly - Diane.
Braden shook his head to clear his mind of such irrelevancies. Then he heard a tiny squeaking noise.
The door of a locker opened. The skipper was wedged in it. He squirmed out. His expression was blank. He seemed filled with a bitter astonishment. But he made a gesture that commanded silence and pointed urgently at the door. Braden went to it and looked out, down the corridor.
The skipper went down on his hands and knees close by the control-board. A huge fat man, he looked grotesque in such a position. He crawled under the knee-space, breathing heavily. He scraped at something and backed out, with a miniature microphone and hair-thin wires in his hand. He jerked the wires, and they broke. He threw the tiny object on the floor.
"A damned bad business!" he said querulously. "But no more eavesdropping, anyhow! I'm... frightened, Braden! This man came in here. No knock. No word. He just came in. Thinking me unconscious, he had some cord in his hands to truss me up so I'd be helpless. He was composed and businesslike. I lolled in my chair, pretending to be sleeping. He came over to me and felt in my pocket. He took my blaster and put it in his own pocket. Then he began, very professionally, to wrap cord about my feet. I took him by the throat, Braden. Gently! I didn't want to kill him. Not as easily as that! I took him by the throat, and he jerked my blaster out of his pocket. So I snapped his neck."
The skipper wiped sweat from his face with his hands.
"But he'd pulled the trigger, Braden! He'd pulled the trigger, and my blaster didn't fire! It didn't go off! I've looked it over and... and somehow, some time, the steward got at it and it's all smashed inside! It's useless! I... I was never without my blaster, Braden! I can't imagine when he got it! I've been disarmed without knowing it, Braden!"
Braden said urgently:
"The passengers have four pocket blasters and some things that look like blasters and sound like them. We'd better join forces with them and start fighting."
"No!" protested the skipper. "I... I hid, to think. You saw it. There's something more important than that! Much more important! Don't you see? If the steward got at my blaster, what else has he got at? Has he guessed all my plans? Has he known all along what I was doing? It would be like him, Braden! I'm... I'm frightened!
Sweat beaded his face again.
"I've... got to find out!" he panted, almost whimpering. "It couldn't be! But that man over there - he didn't come in here to cut my throat, he came to bind me so I'd wake up helpless... Maybe because they knew I'd planned to trap them, that I got the steward to bring them aboard as a crew. Maybe they wanted to laugh at me as they laughed at..."
Then the skipper's throat clicked shut.
"I'll find out!" he said hoarsely. "I'll come back!"
As if blindly, he went out of the control-room, his hands clenching and unclenching. He turned into his own quarters. Braden was unbearably tense for several seconds. There were now four crewmen instead of five; they and the steward had to kill everybody else on the ship or be destroyed. Even though they could not be everywhere in so gigantic a vessel, the skipper should not go about unarmed. Braden thought of Diane, and a vast, impatient urgency filled him. In a situation like this, initiative is everything. When trouble comes, the advantage is always with those who start it. The crew had tried to take the ship without using arms. They'd failed. Now if two raging men began to hunt them they'd be rocked back on their heels. The skipper and Braden should take ruthless and violent action. They should put the fear of hell into the crewmen; keep them confused; wipe them out as they were found. It was their duty as merchant-space officers, and they should do their duty now, while the choice of action lay with them. But the moment for action was passing quickly!
The passengers were barricaded in their quarters, and the two ship's officers were doing nothing either to increase their safety or to prevent the mutineers from recovering from the setbacks they'd suffered, which must give rise to simple desperation. Now there could be nothing but absolute victory for the crewmen or absolute defeat. And victory for them would mean much more than defeat for their antagonists. Braden was bitterly aware that piracy is not undertaken solely for profit. There are men to whom criminality is satisfying in itself, men who experience a kind of ecstasy in acting against all honor and decency and mercy. Braden had met them. They find joy in hatred, and bliss in malevolence, and pleasure in causing disaster to others. The power to injure gives them satisfaction. They are subject to a strange, inverted ambition. So the seizure of the Rim Star would be only partly for the treasure aboard. The act would mean indulgence in enormity... in atrocity.
Braden hated men who could act on such motives. He raged, pacing helplessly in the control-room while time passed. Time in which the crewmen could recover from their first failure and realize the stark necessity of success - for them. He heard a sound behind him and whirled. It was an emergency intercom buzz from one of the boxes on the wall of a passageway. He threw the switch and the steward's voice came on. "Calling control-room. Captain, sir?" The voice was smooth and suave and obsequious. The steward didn't know where Braden was. He didn't know whether the skipper knew about the shooting in the passengers' quarters. He didn't know what had happened to the man with the sharp eyes who lay in a shapeless heap on the control-room floor. But he could ask. He hadn't definitely intended to murder Braden. He hadn't done anything that proved he had that intention in mind. He could insist that the suspicions of the crewmen he'd expressed were justified, that he'd been completely loyal; and he could claim total ignorance that any of the food he'd served had been doctored. "Captain, sir?" His voice was openly uneasy. It was good acting. "What the hell do you want?" demanded Braden.