The Other Side of Nowhere

The log-tape rewound and stopped. Braden threw off the switch. The skipper came into the control-room.

"Check-up complete, sir," said Braden.

The skipper rumbled acknowledgement. He glanced around the serried rows of instruments. He flicked on the vision screens. - There were no ports to see through, of course. Cameras are better than the human eye. - The spaceport looked strange from this height. The landing-grid itself was higher, but the other ships on the tarmac looked small, like toys. The trains of cargo trucks winding here and there - empty trucks to be loaded again, and loaded ones to be unloaded - looked like children's Playthings.

"Five minutes to lift, Mr. Braden," rumbled the skipper. "Cargo doors checked. The crew's at lift-off stations. If you want to call someone to bid them a fond farewell..."

"There's no one, sir," said Braden. "Maybe the passengers should be told, though."

"Tell them if you like," growled the skipper. "I'll have nothing to do with them. Didn't want them. Groundlings should stay aground!"

Braden pushed the general, communicator button.

"Passengers, attention!" he said curtly. "The ship is about to lift off. You can watch through the vision screens in your quarters, if you like. That is all." He lifted his thumb from the button. "Yes, sir. Anything else?"

The skipper rumbled. Apparently he rumbled as a necessary preliminary to speech; he made sounds first and then formed them into words.

"I don't know you, Mr. Braden," he said sardonically. "I never saw you before or ever heard of you. But this I say; you'll find this like no voyage you ever made before!"

"So I understand, sir," said Braden. "We're carrying the biggest weight ever lifted in one ship and we're to land that biggest weight by rocket. So I'm told."

The skipper grunted.

"I didn't have that in mind. You're plainly a very conscientious young officer, Mr. Braden. If you didn't bring a blaster aboard - against all rules and regulations of the Space Patrol - I shall think it remarkable. And if you did..."

"Yes, sir?"

"Officially, I shall deplore it. I warn you, Mr. Braden, I run this ship my own way!"

Braden said matter-of-factly:

"That's your privilege, sir. Meanwhile..."

"Not disturbed, eh? Sure of yourself, eh? Staunch character?"

"Not necessarily, sir," said Braden. "You're right about the blaster, though. I do have one."

The skipper made a sound that Braden could not interpret.

"In that case, Mr. Braden," he grunted, "I advise you to carry it."

The sound came again from the skipper. It was oddly like a chuckle. But then the field- detector buzzer made a humming noise. The force-fields of the spaceport grid were closing about the ship. The hull-temperature indicators flickered as the fields touched and shifted. Eddy currents formed and warmed individual plates, and moved to other ones. The fields at first were small - 100-kilowatt energies and upward. But the Rim Star's mass became centered in the complicated, intangible powerfields. The ship was enveloped by an invisible web of energy. Somewhere over at the edge of the spaceport, men with control-levers in their hands watched instruments and fed power to the grid-coils. The input to the grid went up from 10,000 - 20,000 kilowatts to 50,000.

Then multiples of megawatts. The ship stirred. She wavered.

She lifted.

Slowly at first, she rose to the half-mile height of the circular steel structure which enclosed the spaceport, which actually was the spaceport. The irregular ring of bare steel girders drifted downward. There was suddenly a horizon. The Rim Star had risen above the grid. It was possible to look for miles beyond the city's roofs. There were forests, very far away. There were hills. A river, not visible from the spaceport, flowed in unreasonable curves across the suddenly visible landscape. The ship continued to ascend. The city beneath shrank. The river dwindled and the hills diminished beneath the ship as she rose.

She went up and up. Presently the sky darkened and then the horizon was not flat but curved, and a little later the planet's surface was not bowl-shaped but visibly the near side of a tremendous globe. And the sky became even darker, and infinitesimal sparkles of light began to appear in it.

Now the ship rose at an ever-increasing rate. There was the tiniest possible jog when the ship's own gravity came on at lowest intensity. It would adjust as the ship went ever farther out, and no more than a similar sensation would be felt when the grid-fields cut off.

The skipper rumbled to himself. Then he said:

"Very good, Mr. Braden. I've taken over here. Now you can check the work the steward did for you. I'm sure it's competently done, but you can make certain - with your blaster available!"

His air was definitely sardonic. Braden said, "Very well, sir," and left the control-room. Outside, he found himself scowling. He hesitated for a moment and went to the cabin in which he'd dumped his ship-bag. He was annoyed with himself. On the face of it, it was absurd to anticipate trouble before the ship was even in clear space. If any began - and on a long voyage trouble is always possible - the proper course is always to bring it to a head before the troublemakers are ready for it. In such a case seeing a bulge of a certain shape in an officer's pocket very often quiets the most nerve-racked and ship-happy of crewmen. But at the beginning...