Our supplies came late, on a private craft chartered for the emergency.
A paintless but powerful geodesic flyer, the Erewhon looked like a scarred veteran of less legal missions.
Her captain was a squat, shambling man, hard of eye and close of mouth—the sort of civilian likely to need refuge in the hazardous fringes of Nowhere.
Instead of the men and women we needed to relieve our weary crews, she brought only two passengers—an old soldier and a girl.
A queer story and a queerer riddle came with them.
The story—all I could learn of it—was told to me by Captain Scabbard when he came aboard the station with a sealed pouch of orders from our sector base.
The old soldier and the girl, as he told the story, had boarded the chartered flyer in some haste, along with their odd cargo, just before it lifted.
Trouble came with them.
His spacemen were not the finest sort, Captain Scabbard admitted.
They were not used to discipline, and he suspected that some of them were relieving the hazardous tedium of the long voyage to Nowhere with smuggled drugs.
They baited the old soldier and tried to make love to the girl.
They were used to free companions, the captain said, and they couldn’t understand such a girl. Her proud aloofness just inflamed them.
Even the ship’s mate joined the game.
On the mate’s watch, they got the soldier drunk, locked him hi his stateroom and attacked the girl in her room.
Captain Scabbard was still confused about the ending of the story.
The girl had disabled two of her attackers, with some unexpected trick or weapon.
Angered, the others became uglier than ever.
She screamed for the soldier.
Less drunk than he had seemed, the soldier picked the lock and came out to join the fight.
Though he had been disarmed, he and the girl fought five able spacemen.
Two had finally fled. The other three, Captain Scabbard believed, had been killed.
“But we couldn’t find the bodies.”
His eyes flickered uneasily back toward the lock, where his passengers were wailing to come aboard the station.
“I ain’t makin‘ no formal charges. They ain’t makin’ none.
The soldier told me to just forget the incident. But the mate and two more are gone, and we couldn’t find the bodies.” He shivered apprehensively.
“Maybe you never stopped to think how hard it is to get rid of a dead body in a stateroom on a sealed space flyer.
It ain’t just hard—it’s impossible!
In my time around Nowhere I’ve seen a lot of funny things, but I ain’t never seen nothing to match that soldier and his girl!” That’s part of what made the story queer.
I thanked Captain Scabbard and told him that I would interview his passengers before I let them come aboard the station. He grew angry. He was afraid of them, I soon realized.
He wanted to get them off his ship, but I stood firm.
We had troubles enough already.
Nowhere Near had an ugly name in the Legion, for good cause.
Duty there was both dull and dangerous.
A third of our thirty-man crew was normally rotated each year, but the last relief complement had been aboard that lost ship.
An unwise search had cost us twelve more lives.
The station commander, cracking under the strain, had committed a strange suicide by steering a rescue rocket into the heart of the space called Nowhere.
His death had left me the acting commander, although my actual promotion had only now arrived in Captain Scabbard’s green-sealed pouch.
I was still very young, very conscious of my peculiar duty.
With only sixteen men and two free companions, I was standing guard against a danger that none of us understood.
Old enough to be cynical, most of the men under me had a bitter feeling that Nowhere Near was a forgotten stepchild of the Legion.
They had been cruelly jolted when they learned that the Erewhon had brought us no replacements for the missing men or relief for those who had already served long beyond their normal tour of duty.
I was prepared for trouble—but not asking for it.
“You are under charter to the Legion,” I reminded Captain Scabbard.
“That means your port and flying orders come from me.
This is no place for tourists, and I don’t want the sort of problem you have just reported.
Your passengers will have to convince me that they have some legitimate business here.”
Grumbling sullenly, he agreed to let me interview them in the station lock.
When he sent them to meet me there, the first thing I saw was the old soldier’s shocking sloppiness.
Out of uniform, he wore a flaming yellow civilian sweater and shapeless old fatigue pants, one leg tucked inside his oversize spaceboots and the other dropping outside.
He was short and thick and flabby—scarcely fit for his heroic role in Captain Scabbard’s tale.