Stephen Marlowe

“ He waved his hand in the bulky spacesuit. "Good luck," he called. "I love you, Diane."
"Ralph," she said. Her voice caught. He heard it catch over the suit radio. "Ralph, we agreed never to—oh, forget it. Good luck, Ralph. Good luck, oh good luck. And I—"
"You what."
"Nothing, Ralph. Good luck."
"Good luck," he said, and headed for the first jumble of space wrecks.
It would probably have taken them a month to explore all the derelicts which were old enough to have Gormann series eighty radarscopes. Theoretically, Ralph realized, even a newer ship could have one. ”

“ Ralph said over the suit radio. "We'd better keep a couple of hours leeway in case I figured wrong. Eight hours and remember, don't get out of sight of the ship's lights and don't break radio contact under any circumstances. These suit radios work like miniature radar sets, too. If anything goes wrong, we'll be able to track each other. It's directional beam radio."
"But what can go wrong?"
"I don't know," Ralph admitted. "Nothing probably." He turned on his suit rockets and felt the sudden surge of power drive him clear of the ship. He watched Diane rocketing away from him to the right. ”

“ They were back aboard the Gormann '87 now, their own ship. Ralph had revived Diane and brought her back—along with the other Gormann's radarscope—to their battered tub. The bruise on her temple was badly discolored and she was still weak, but she would be all right.
"But what was it?" Diane asked. She had hardly seen her attacker.
"A man," Ralph said. "God knows how long that ship was in here. Years, maybe. Years, alone in space, here in the sargasso, with dead men and dead ships for company. He used up all the food. His shipmates died. Maybe he killed them. ”

“ Diane said.
He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was next to impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen—and completely impossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you false information. You could shut it off and pray—but the odds would still be a hundred to one against you.
"There!" Diane cried. "On the left! The left, Ralph—"
[Pg 61]
He saw it too. At first it looked like a jumble of rocks, of dust as the asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms which pursued their erratic, dangerous orbits through the asteroid belt. ”

“ Bent and misshapen, gnarled, twisted like the roots of an ancient tree, with a wild growth of beard, white beard, heavy across the chest, with bent limbs powerfully muscled and a gaunt face, like a death's head. ”

“ We don't have blasters or weapons of any kind."
"Your suit rockets," Ralph said. "You swing around and blast with your suit rockets. A porthole should be better than an airlock if it's big enough to climb through. You won't have any trouble."
"But you still haven't told me what—"
"Inside the ships. People. They'll all be dead. If they didn't lose their air so far, they'll lose it when we go in. Either way, of course, they'll be dead. They've all been dead for years, with no food. But without air—" [Pg 65]
"What are you stopping for?" Diane said. "Please go on."
"A body, without air. ”

“ One theory is ships only, and maybe a couple of hunks of meteoric debris in the beginning. Another theory says there may be a particularly heavy small asteroid in this maze of wrecks somewhere—you know, superheavy stuff with the atoms stripped of their electrons and the nuclei squeezed together, weighing in the neighborhood of a couple of tons per square inch. ”

“ There were other corpses aboard the ship, a battered Thompson '81 in worse shape than their own Gormann. Bodies, not skeletons. But when they had entered the sargasso they had apparently struck another ship. One whole side of the Thompson was smashed in and Ralph could see the repair patches on the wall. ”