The Other Side of Nowhere

"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.