He found it and patched it--and was numb with the cold and barely
conscious when he had finished. Diane came to him and squeezed his hand
and that was the first time they had touched since they had left the
asteroid. Then they rested for a few moments and drank some of the
achingly cold water from the tank and got up and went to the viewport.
They had known it, but confirmation was necessary. They looked outside.
They were within the sargasso.
The battered derelict ships rolled and tumbled and spun out there,
slowly, unhurried, in a mutual gravitational field which their own
Gormann '87 had disturbed. It was a sargasso like the legendary Sargasso
Seas of Earth's early sailing days, becalmed seas, seas without wind,
with choking Sargasso weed, seas that snared and entrapped....
"Can we get out?" Diane asked.
He shrugged. "That depends. How strong the pull of gravity is. Whether
the Gormann's rocket drive is still working. If we can repair the radar.
We'd never get out without the radar."
"I'll get something to eat," she said practically. "You see about the
radar."
Diane went aft while he remained there in the tiny control cabin. By the
time she brought the heated cans back with her, he knew it was hopeless.
Diane was not the sort of woman you had to humor about a thing like
that. She offered him a can of pork and beans and looked at his face,
and when he nodded she said:
"It's no use?"
"We couldn't fix it. The scopes just wore out, Diane. Hell, if they
haven't been replaced since this tub rolled off the assembly line,
they're thirty years old. She's an '87."
"Is there anything we can do?"
He shrugged. "We're going to try. We'll check the air and water and see
what we have. Then we start looking."
"Start looking? I don't understand."
"For a series eighty Gormann cruiser."