The Other Side of Nowhere

"He's in hospital somewhere," said Braden. "I'd guess he was jumped and beaten up."

The Shipping Officer used the communicator again and found the man who had first been accepted as mate on the Rim Star. He admitted with profanity that he would not sail on the Rim Star.

"And any man is a fool who does!" he rasped.

Braden's name was substituted for his on the official records. The Shipping Office was meticulous about such matters. Space traffic had to be watched closely. History told about piracies and worse before the modern strict regulations went into effect. Braden got the list of the Rim Star's signed-on crew. There were six names listed. Five of the men gave the same spaceport boardinghouse as the place where they could be reached when wanted. Braden put his finger on the sixth name.

"I think this man is in the hospital," he said. "It happened last night or early this morning. Which will mean overtime pay for the men who have to do his work."

Again the Shipping Office checked. Again it took time. Yes, the sixth man had been brought to a public hospital from the spaceport gate about 4 A.M. He'd been badly beaten. There were two fractures. So the Shipping Office noted that the Rim Star would take off with one crewmember short, and therefore the pay of the rest of the crew would be raised accordingly. This was all recorded, and any discrepancy would eventually come to light and would follow the Rim Star implacably wherever she went.

Braden went to pick up his crew. They were gone. The boardinghouse keeper stolidly insisted he knew nothing. Braden began to search spaceport restaurants and dives of various kinds. Two and a half hours to duty-time. He drew blanks and more blanks. Two hours left. He went down the long line of joints toward the spaceport gate. When only one hour was left, he found a message waiting for him in a particularly greasy eating-place. If the Rim Star's mate came in looking for his crew, he should call the ship.

Braden called, and the steward answered.

"About the crew, sir," he said respectfully, when Braden asked curtly what the call was about. "It occurred to me, sir, that you might have trouble finding them, so I took the liberty of hunting them up. They're waiting for you at the spaceport gate, sir."

"Very well," said Braden. "Hereafter, though, I'll do my own work, if you please!"

He hung up, fuming. There are many ways to undermine an officer's position on board ship. One is to do his work for him. It seemed to Braden that there would be much more than the usual amount of friction before things settled down on the Rim Star. For valid psychological reasons it is wisest to sign on a crew for one voyage only, and get a fresh crew for the next. Long, tedious weeks and months in space have the same effect as the same time spent in close confinement in a jail. With nothing to see and only routine duties to do in space flights, when most men go aground they only want never to see their shipmates again. When they start on another voyage, they bristle in anticipation of forming similar new hatreds. So an officer has to establish his authority at the beginning and guard against anything that could be taken as weakness. Men on the verge of going ship-happy from confinement can be unbelievably petty and have to be ridden hard. It isn't wise to let anybody take over any part of an officer's duties.

Braden took a skimmer to the spaceport. There were five men waiting for him at the gate. They looked very much like other space crewmen. They eyed him with the painstakingly blank expression of men being sized up. It was a familiar experience to Braden. There was a man with scarred and battered features, but no new signs of conflict. A hard-faced man with a small new cut on his chin. A man with a purple bruise on his cheekbone. A lean man with sharp eyes. A chubby man with an expression of insistent innocence. Braden decided that he'd met them by the pile of freight the previous night. He suspected that the sixth crew-member had proved himself uncongenial to the other five and was in hospital as a result. They looked like that kind of crew.

"I think," said Braden deliberately, "that there's no use in speeches. You'll find out about me aboard ship, and what I don't know about you I'll find out after we lift off. You've got your ship-bags. Come along!"

He led the way. The loading-cranes had moved now, and the very tallest of them seemed to be topping off the Rim Star's cargo with the largest single piece of fabricated steel that Braden had ever seen. At a guess, it would be the bottom-tier girder for a landing-grid. It would form part of a gigantic steel framework, no less than half a mile in diameter and nearly as high - one of those structures that made space commerce possible. One such structure rimmed the spaceport here, and ships came sedately down from the sky, cradled in the force-fields it generated. Later they would rise skyward again, thrust out into emptiness by the same powerful force-fields.

Before landing-grids were invented, ships could lift off only on rockets or on the Lawlor space-drive. But rockets required enormous amounts of fuel to get them out into space, more fuel to carry that fuel, and still more to carry that. Lift-offs and landings on space-drive created such ferocious turbulence in the atmosphere - such fierce local hurricanes - that no structure could remain standing within miles of a heavy ship's lift-off point, and clouds of dust blanketed all growing things for a distance of over fifty square leagues. Single exploration voyages could be lifted off in this way, but real space commerce would have been impossible without landing- grids.