Gefty Rammer came along the narrow passages between the _Silver Queen's_
control compartment and the staterooms, trying to exchange the haggard
look on his face for one of competent self-assurance. There was nothing
to gain by letting his two passengers suspect that during the past few
minutes their pilot, the owner of Rammer Spacelines, had been a bare
step away from plain and fancy gibbering.
He opened the door to Mr. Maulbow's stateroom and went inside. Mr.
Maulbow, face very pale, eyes closed, lay on his back on the couch,
still unconscious. He'd been knocked out when some unknown forces
suddenly started batting the _Silver Queen's_ turnip-shape around as the
_Queen_ had never been batted before in her eighteen years of
spacefaring. Kerim Ruse, Maulbow's secretary, knelt beside her employer,
checking his pulse. She looked anxiously up at Gefty.
"What did you find out?" she asked in a voice that was not very steady.
Gefty shrugged. "Nothing definite as yet. The ship hasn't been
damaged--she's a tough tub. That's one good point. Otherwise ... well, I
climbed into a suit and took a look out the escape hatch. And I saw the
same thing there that the screens show. Whatever that is."
"You've no idea then of what's happened to us, or where we are?" Miss
Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray
eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a
sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her
top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she
looked around fifteen. She'd been asleep in her stateroom when something
smacked the _Queen_, and she was sensible enough then not to climb out
of the bunk's safety field until the ship finally stopped shuddering and
bucking about. That made her the only one of the three persons aboard
who had collected no bruises. She was scared, of course, but taking the
situation very well.
Gefty said carefully, "There're a number of possibilities. It's obvious
that the _Queen_ has been knocked out of normspace, and it may take some
time to find out how to get her back there. But the main thing is that
the ship's intact. So far, it doesn't look too bad."
Miss Ruse seemed somewhat reassured. Gefty could hardly have said the
same for himself. He was a qualified normspace and subspace pilot. He
had put in a hitch with the Federation Navy, and for the past eight
years he'd been ferrying his own two ships about the Hub and not
infrequently beyond the Federation's space territories, but he had never
heard of a situation like this. What he saw in the viewscreens when the
ship steadied enough to let him pick himself off the instrument room
floor, and again, a few minutes later and with much more immediacy, from
the escape hatch, made no sense--seemed simply to have no meaning. The
pressure meters said there was a vacuum outside the _Queen's_ skin.
That vacuum was dark, even pitch-black but here and there came
momentary suggestions of vague light and color. Occasional pinpricks of
brightness showed and were gone. And there had been one startling
phenomenon like a distant, giant explosion, a sudden pallid glare in the
dark, which appeared far ahead of the _Queen_ and, for the instant it
remained in sight, seemed to be rushing directly towards them. It had
given Gefty the feeling that the ship itself was plowing at high speed
through this eerie medium. But he had cut the _Queen's_ drives to the
merest idling pulse as soon as he staggered back to the control console
and got his first look at the screens, so it must have been the light
that had moved.
But such details were best not discussed with a passenger. Kerim Ruse
would be arriving at enough disquieting speculations on her own; the
less he told her, the better. There was the matter of the ship's
location instruments. The only set Gefty had been able to obtain any
reading on were the direction indicators. And what they appeared to
indicate was that the _Silver Queen_ was turning on a new heading
something like twenty times a second.