Produced by Greg Weeks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's note:
This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive research
did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication
was renewed.
[Illustration: Illustrated by H. W. McCauley]
[Illustration]
Nobody knew very much about the Sargasso area of the void; only one
thing was certain: if a ship was caught there it was doomed in--
The Graveyard Of Space
_by_
_Milton Lesser_
He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to
share it?"
"No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old
Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the
parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes.
Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like
when she had worked by his side at the mine. It had not been much of a
mine. It had been a bust, a first class sure as hell bust, like
everything else in their life together. And it had aged her. Had it only
been three years? he thought. Three years on asteroid 4712, a speck of
cosmic dust drifting on its orbit in the asteroid belt between Jupiter
and Mars. Uranium potential, high--the government had said. So they had
leased the asteroid and prospected it and although they had not finished
the job, they were finished. They were going home and now there were
lines on Diane's face although she was hardly past twenty-four. And
there was a bitterness, a bleakness, in her eyes.
The asteroid had ruined them, had taken something from them and given
nothing in return. They were going home and, Ralph Meeker thought, they
had left more than their second-hand mining equipment on asteroid 4712.
They had left the happy early days of their marriage as a ghost for
whomever tried his luck next on 4712. They had never mentioned the word
divorce; Diane had merely said she would spend some time with her sister
in Marsport instead of going on to Earth....
"We'd be swinging around to sunward on 4712," Ralph mused.
"Please. That's over. I don't want to talk about the mine."
"Won't it ever bother you that we never finished?"
"We finished," Diane said.
He smoked the cigarette halfway and offered it to her. She shook her
head and he put the butt out delicately, to save it.
Then a radar bell clanged.
"What is it?" Ralph asked, immediately alert, studying the viewport. You
had to be alert on an old tub like the Gormann '87. A hundred tonner, it
had put in thirty years and a billion and some miles for several owners.
Its warning devices and its reflexes--it was funny, Ralph thought, how
you ascribed something human like reflexes to a hundred tons of battered
metal--were unpredictable.
"I don't see anything," 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--"
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.
But it was not dust.
"Will you look at that," Diane said.
The jumble of rocks--which they were ready to classify as dust--swam up
toward them. Ralph waited, expecting the automatic pilot to answer the
radar warning and swing them safely around the obstacle. So Ralph
watched and saw the dark jumble of rocks--silvery on one side where the
distant sunlight hit it--apparently spread out as they approached it.
Spread out and assume tiny shapes, shapes in miniature.
"Spaceships," Diane said. "Spaceships, Ralph. Hundreds of them."
They gleamed like silver motes in the sun or were black as the space
around them. They tumbled slowly, in incredible slow motion, end over
end and around and around each other, as if they had been suspended in a
slowly boiling liquid instead of the dark emptiness of space.
"That's the sargasso," Ralph said.
"But--"
"But we're off course. I know it. The radar was probably able to miss
things in our way, but failed to compensate afterwards and bring us back
to course. Now--"
Suddenly Ralph dived for the controls. The throbbing rockets of the
Gormann '87 had not responded to the radar warning. They were rocketing
on toward the sargasso, rapidly, dangerously.
"Hold on to something!" Ralph hollered, and punched full power in the
left rockets and breaking power in the right forward rockets
simultaneously, attempting to stand the Gormann '87 on its head and
fight off the deadly gravitational attraction of the sargasso.
The Gormann '87 shuddered like something alive and Ralph felt himself
thrust to the left and forward violently. His head struck the radar
screen and, as if mocking him the radar bell clanged its warning. He
thought he heard Diane scream. Then he was trying to stand, but the
gravity of sudden acceleration gripped him with a giant hand and he
slumped back slowly, aware of a wetness seeping from his nose, his
ears--
All of space opened and swallowed him and he went down, trying to reach
for Diane's hand. But she withdrew it and then the blackness, like some
obscene mouth as large as the distance from here to Alpha Centauri,
swallowed him.
* * * * *
"Are you all right, Diane?" he asked.
He was on his knees. His head ached and one of his legs felt painfully
stiff, but he had crawled over to where Diane was down, flat on her
back, behind the pilot chair. He found the water tank unsprung and
brought her some and in a few moments she blinked her eyes and looked at
him.
"Cold," she said.
He had not noticed it, but he was still numb and only half conscious,
half of his faculties working. It _was_ cold. He felt that now. And he
was giddy and growing rapidly more so--as if they did not have
sufficient oxygen to breathe.
Then he heard it. A slow steady hissing, probably the sound feared most
by spacemen. Air escaping.