The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin.

The space ships were miracles of power and precision, the man who manned them rich in endurance and courage.

Every detail had been checked and double checked, every detail except the cruiser vanished back into hyper space, and he was alone in the observation Bubble, ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun.

He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him, and wondered again what a danger had been that had so terrified the man before him.

Of one thing, he was already certain he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him.

The first bubble attendant had committed suicide, and the second was a mindless maniac on the Earth earth bound cruiser.

But it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it, or else they had imagined it all.

He went across a small room, his magnetized soul loud on the thin metal floor.

In the bubble's silence, He sat down in the single chair his weight.

There is light in the feeble artificial gravity, and revealed the known facts.

The bubble was a project of Earth Galactic Observation Bureau positioned there to gather data from observations that could not be made from within the galaxy.

Since metallic mass affected the hypersensitive instruments, the bubble had been made as small and light as possible.

It was for that reason that it could accommodate only one attendant.

The Bureau had selected Horn as the bubble's first attendant, and the cruiser left him there for his six months period of duty.

When it made his schedules to return with his replacement, he was found dead from a tremendous overdose of sleeping pills.

On the table was his daily report log and his last entry, made three months before.

I haven't attended to the instruments for a long time because it hates us and doesn't want us here.

It hates me the mouth of all, and keeps trying to get into the bubble to kill me.

I can hear it whenever I stop and listen, and I know it won't be long.

I'm afraid of it, and I want to be asleep when it comes.

But I left to make it soon because I have only twenty sleeping pills left.

And if the sentence was never finished, according to the temperature recording, instruments in the bubble.

His body ceased radiating heat the same night.

The bubble was clean, imigated, and inspected inside and out.

No sign of any inimical entity or force could be found.

Silverman was Horn's replacement.

When the cruiser returned six months later, bringing him Green to be Silverman's replacement.

Silverman was completely insane.

He bubbled about something that had been waiting outside the bubble to kill him, but his nearest to a rational statement was to say once, when asked for the hundredth time, what he had seen.

Nothing.

You can really see it, but you feel it watching you, and you hear it trying to get in to kill you.

One time I bumped the wool, and for God's sake, take me away from it, take me back to Earth.

Then he had tried to hide under the captain's desk, and the ship's doctor had led him away.

The bubble was minutely examined again, and the crew user employed every detective device it possessed to search surrounding space for light years in all directions.

Nothing was found.

When it was time for the new replacement to be transferred to the bubble, he reported to captain's McDowell everything is very green.

McDowell said, you are the next one.

His shaggy gray eyebrows met in a scowl.

It would be better if they would let me select the replacement instead of them.

He flushed with a touch of resentment, and said, the puah found by intelligence and initiative of thought satisfactory.

I know the characterisic seed.

Then need what they ought to have is somebody like one of my engine room rost boughs, too ignorant to get scared and too dumb to go nuts.

Then we could get the same report.

Six months from now, is said of ravings of a maniac.

I suggest, he said, stiffly, that you reserve judgment until that time comes, sir, And that was all he knew about the danger, real or imaginary, that had driven two men into insanity.

He would have six months in which to find the answer.

Six months meanings.

He looked at the chronometer and saw that twenty minutes had passed since he left the cruiser.

Somehow it seemed much longer.

He moved to light a cigarette, and his metal soul scraped the floor with the same startling loudness he had noticed before.

The bubble was as silent as a tomb.

It was not much larger than a tomb as fear, eighteen feet in diameter, made of things heat steel and creass, cross outside with narrow reinforcing girders keep the internal air pressure from rapturing it.

The floor under him was six feet up from the spher's bottom, and the space beneath held the air regenerator and waste converted units, the storage batteries, and the food cabinets.

The compartment in which he sat contained chair, table and narrow cut banks of dials, a remote control panel for operating the instruments mounted outside the hull, a microfilm projector, and a pair of exercises sprints attached to one wall.

That was all.

There was no means of communication, since the hyperspace communicator would have affected the delicate instruments with these radiations, but there was a small microfilm library to go with the projector, so that he should be able to pass away the time pleasantly enough.

But it was not the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind.

It had not been boredom that had turned Horn into a suicide and Silverman into something cracked sharply behind him, like a gunshot in the stillness, and he leaped to his feet, willing to face it.

It was only a metal real of data tape that had dropped out of the spectrum analyzer into the storage tray.

His heart was thumping fast, and his attempt to laugh at his nervousness sounded hollow and mirthless.

Something inside or outside the bubble had driven two men insane with his threat, and now that he was irrevocably asiled in the bubble himself, he could no longer dismiss the fear as products of their imagination.

Both of them had been rational, intelligent men, as carefully selected by the Observation Bureau as he had been.

He set in to search the bubble, overlooking nothing.

When he crawled down into the lower compartment, he hastiedated, then opened the longest blade of his knife before searching among the dark recesses down there.

He found nothing, not even as peck of Dutht.

Back in his chair again, he began to doubt his first conviction.

Perhaps there really had been some kind of an invisible force or entity outside the bubble.

Both Hall and Silverman had said that it had tried to get in to kill them.

They had been very definite about that part.

There were six windows around the bubble's walls, sat there to enable their attendant to see all the outside mounted instruments and dials.

He went to them to look out one by one, and from all of them he sawed the sea, the invast emptiness that surrounded him, the galaxy.

His galaxy was so far away that its stars were like dust in the other directions.

The empty gulf was so wide that galaxies and classes of galaxies were tiny, feeble specks of light shining across it.

All around him was avoid so huge that galaxies were only specs in it.

Who could know what forces or dangers might be waiting out there?

A light blinked, reminding him it was time to attend his duties.

The job required an hour, and he was nervous and not yet hungry.

When he had finished, he went to the exercise as springs on the wall and performed a workout that left him tired and sweating, but which at least gave him a small upetit.

The day passed, and the next he made another search of the bubble's interior, with the same results as before.

He felt almost sure then that there was nothing in the bubble with him.

He established a routine of work, past time, and sleep that made the first week pass fairly comfortably, but for the gnawing worry in his mind that something invisible was lurking just outside the windows.

Then one day he accidentally kicked the wall with his metal shoe tip.

It made a sound like that from kicking a tight scrash section of tin, and it seemed to him that it gave a little from the impact, as tin would do.

He realized for the first time how thin it was, how deadly dangerously thin.

According to the specification he had read, it was only one sixteenth of an inch thick.

It was as thin as a cardboard.

He sat down with pencil and paper and began calcreating.

The bubble had a surface area of one hundred forty six thousand and five hundred square inches, and the internal air pressure was fourteen pounds to the square inch, which meant that the thin metal skin contained a total pressure of two million, fifty one thousand pounds two million pounds.

The bubble in which he sat was a bomb waiting to explode.

The instant and in section of the thin metal weakened.

It was supposed to be an alloy so extremely strong that he had a high safety factor.

But he could not believe that any metal so thin could be so strong.

It was all right for engineers sitting safely on earth to speak of high safety factors, but his life depended upon the fragile war not cracking.

It made a lot of difference.

The next day, he thought he felt the hook to which the exercise's spring was attached crack loose from where it was welded to the wall.

He inspected the base of the hook closely, and as seemed to be a fine hairline fracture appearing around it, he held his ear to it, listening for any sound of a leak.

It was not leaking yet, but it could commence doing so at any time.

He looked out the windows at the illimitable void that was waiting to absorb his pitiful little supply of air, and he thought of the days he had howled and jerked at the springs with all its strength, not realizing the damage he was doing.

There was a sick feeling in his stomach for the rest of the day, and he returned again and again to examine the hairline around the hook.

The next day he discovered an even more serious threat.

The thin skin of the bubble had been spot welded to the outside enforcing girders.

Such welding often created hard, brittle spots that would soon crystallize from continued movement, and there was a slight temperature difference in the bubble between his working and sleeping hours.

Dead would daily reproduce a contraction and expansion of the skin, especially when he used the little cooking burner.

He quit using the burner for any purpose and began a daily inspection of every square inch of the bubble's walls, marking with white chalk oh the welding spots that appeared to be definitely weakened.

Each day he found more to mark, and soon the little white circles were scattered across the walls wherever he looked.

When he was not working at examining the walls, he could feel the windows watching him like staring eyes.

Out of self defense, he would have to go to them and step back at the emptiness.

Space was alian coldly, deadly alien.

He was a tiny spark of life in a hostile sea of nothing, and there was no one to help him.

The nothing outside was waiting day and night for the most infinitesimal leak or crack in the walls, the nothing that had been waiting out there since time without beginning, and would wait for time without end.

Sometimes he would touch his finger to the wall and think death is out there, only one sixteenth of an inch away.

His first fears became a black and terrible conviction.

The bubble could not continue to resist the attack for long.

It had already lasted longer that he should have two million pounds of pressure wanted out, and all the sucking nothing of intergalactic space wanted in, and only a thin skin, metal rotten with brittle wedding spots stood between them.

It wanted in.

The nothing wanted in.

He knew then that horn and Silverman had not been insane.

It wanted in, and some day it would get in.

When it did, it would explode him and jerk out his guts and lungs.

Not until that happened, not until the nothing filled the bubble and enclosed his hideous, turned inside out body, would it ever be content.

He had long since quit wearing the magnetized shoes, afraid that the vibration of them would weaken the bubble still more, and he began noticing sections where the bubble did not seem to be perfectly concave, as though the rolling meal as pressed the metal too thin in places, and it was welling out like an overinflated balloon.

He could not remember when he had last attended to the instruments.

Nothing was important but the danger that surrounded him.

He knew the danger was rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall, he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble skins contracted or expanded, and the nothing tapped and searched with his empty fingers for a flow or a crack that it could tear into a leak.

But the windows were far the worst.

With nothing staring in at him day and night, there was no escape from it.

He could feel it watching him, malignant and gloating, even when he hid his eyes and his hands.

The time came when he could stand it no longer.

The cot had a blanket, and he he used there, together with all his spare clothes, to make a tent, stretching from the table to the first instrument panel.

When he crawled under it, he found that a lower half of one window could still see him.

He used the clothes that he was wearing to finish the job, and it was much better than hiding there in the concealing darkness where nothing could not see him.

He did not mind going naked.

The temperature regulators in the bubble never let it go to cold.

He had no conception of time.

From then on, he emerged only when necessary to bring more food into his tent.

He could still hear the nothing tapping and sucking in its ceaseless search for a floor, and he made such emergencies as brief as possible, wishing that he did not have to come out at all.

Maybe if he could hide his tent for a long time and now make a sound, it would get tired and go away.

Sometimes he thought of the cruiser and wished they would come for him, but most of the time he thought of the thing that was outside trying to get in to kill him.

When the strain became too great, he would draw himself up in the position he had once occupied in his mother's womb and pretend he had never left earth.

It was easier there, but always before very long the bubble would tick or whisper, and he would freeze in terror, thinking this time is coming in.

Then one day suddenly two men were peering under his stent at him.

One of them said, my God again, and he wondered what he meant.

But they were very nice to him and help him put on his clothes.

Later in the rusa, everything was hazy, and they kept asking him what he was afraid of?

What was it?

What did you find?

He tried hard to think so he could explain it.

It was It was nothing.

What were you and horn and silverman afraid of?

What was it?

The voice demanded incessantly, I told you?

He said nothing.

They stared at him, and the haziness cleared a little as he saw they did not understand.

He wanted them to believe him, because what he told them was very true.

It wanted to kill us.

Please, can't you believe me?

It was waiting outside the bubble to kill us.

But they kept staring, and he knew they didn't believe him.

They didn't want to believe him.

Everything turned hazy again, and he started to cry.

He was glad when the doctor took his hand to lead him away.

The bubble was carefully expected inside and out, and nothing was found.

When it was time for the Green's replacement to be transferred to it, Larkin report to Captain's mc dowell.

Everything's ready lacking.

McDowell said, you're the next one.

I wish we knew what the danger is.

He scowled.

I still think one of my rastabows from the engine room might give us the same report six months from now, instead of the bubblings we'll get from you.

He felt his face flush, and he said stiffly, I suggest sir that you not jump to conclusions until the time comes.

The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace, and he was alone inside the observation bubble, ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun.

He looked out the windows at the gigant sea of emptiness around him, and wondered again what a danger had been that had so terrified the man before him.

Of one thing, he was already certain he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him, And of the nothing equation by Tom Godwin,