The Other Side of Nowhere

"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!"