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...
It was black where Braden and the skipper and the tied-up mutineer listened to the steward's voice. All over the ship the voice boomed. It reverberated in the holds. It was intolerably loud in the drive-compartment. It boomed hollowly in every section of the passageway from the abandoned passenger quarters to the ship's controlroom. All through the ship... everywhere... the steward's voice echoed and reechoed and reverberated resonantly between the curving metal walls.
"Listen, captain," said the voice persuasively, "you know you haven't any help. You can't hope for any help. You're alone and you'll stay alone. But I'll make a bargain with you. We're ready to leave the ship. Before we leave, we can let in space. We can make the ship an empty shell. And if we do that, you'll die here, all alone, and you'll stay alone for the next ten million years! But we'll make a deal!"
"Mr. Braden," said the skipper sardonically, "you're about to hear an attempt to bribe me!"
The steward's voice came again, cajoling and somehow plausible.
"Don't you think I should be offered something too, sir?" Braden asked.
The skipper growled. Braden felt along the corridor wall. He found a monitor-box that contained instruments which reported to the control-room the temperature and air-pressure and CO2 content and innumerable other items about conditions in this part of the ship. The steward had used such a monitor-box intercom when Braden was alone in the control-room and the skipper was discovering that his bomb had been disarmed and his blast-rifles made away with.
"We can go away leaving the ship bled of air," said the steward, "or we can leave you here with the ship all tight, and you can get to ground in her and be a hero, and you can have Sharkey..."
The steward's voice went on, with a sort of deferential blandness to propose that the skipper return the part he'd taken from Lifeboat One and let the surviving mutineers go free, taking the money in No. 2 hold. They'd repaired the lifeboat, he said suavely, but they didn't have too much confidence in it. They'd rather have the original part. So to get that part he'd bargain... It was not a reasonable offer, even if the skipper had been alone to face all the mutineers upon the ship. It surely would not have been fulfilled. But the steward offered it in a fashion at once obsequious and flattering and cajoling.
Then Braden said ironically into the intercom:
"Steward, I have to be bribed too! What do you offer me?"
There was silence. Braden's presence on the ship was a distinct shock. But then the steward's voice grew bright and surprised and very admiring indeed. And it still sounded through the general communication speakers all over the ship.
"Mr. Braden!" he said warmly. "You have surprised me! You're a very brilliant man, Mr. Braden! Very brilliant! I see I'll have to make a better bargain! Very well! Mr. Braden, I'll give you a million credits out of No. 2 hold if you'll shoot the captain! A million credits! You can leave the ship with us, leaving no sign behind you, or you can take the Rim Star into port with a good story of how you recaptured her..."
For a moment, Braden forgot that he was surrounded by abysmal darkness, because the steward's voice was so plausible and deferential and respectfully admiring. He could see the steward in his mind, as if in reality. The straw-colored hair, and the singular, apparently flabby skin on his face which wasn't flabby at all when one looked at it closely.
"... Just one moment is all it will take you, Mr. Braden!" the steward was saying brightly. "Just a pull of the trigger and you have a million credits! Think what you can do with a million credits, Mr. Braden! The girls..."
"The devil!" Braden said disgustedly.
"He's mad!" the skipper rumbled. "Trying to get us to kill each other! The man's mad! He's possessed of a devil..."
"I think he is," said Braden coldly. "And I'm going to let that devil out of him with a blaster bolt!"
Silence for half a second. Then the steward spoke again. There was a quivering rage in his voice now, that was literally demoniac.
"Come and try it, Mr. Braden! I'm in the control-room. Come and kill me! Captain, you'll come! You'll come and I'll burn you down and you know it, but you'll come because..."
What followed was literally unbearable, because the steward taunted the skipper. He began to tell the story of taking the Melpomene. He began the story with the officers dead and the passengers captives of the piratical crew. He started to tell in detail what the passengers went through before they were murdered. He mentioned Sharkey. He mentioned the skipper's wife and daughter. The skipper began to move heavily in the darkness and the bound man began to shriek again in terror past description.
Braden moved through the darkness, blaster in hand, headed for the control-room. He had to stop the story of such enormities. It must be stopped! He did not think coldly. He did not think clearly. He thought only of getting to the control-room and killing the chattering, despicably boasting steward, even though three blast-rifles might be waiting to burn him down as he came down the corridor to the control-room door.
He heard indescribable sounds behind him. The skipper could not walk, but he was crawling to get at the man he had to kill, no matter if the skipper's pocket blaster was a toy in comparison to the weapons the other man had.
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.