The Other Side of Nowhere

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...