Produced by Greg Weeks and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://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.
Illustrated by H. W. McCauley]
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 toshare it?"
"No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered oldGormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching theparade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes.
Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was likewhen she had worked by his side at the mine. It had not been much of amine. It had been a bust, a first class sure as hell bust, likeeverything else in their life together. And it had aged her. Had it onlybeen three years? he thought. Three years on asteroid 4712, a speck ofcosmic dust drifting on its orbit in the asteroid belt between Jupiterand Mars. Uranium potential, high--the government had said. So they hadleased the asteroid and prospected it and although they had not finishedthe job, they were finished. They were going home and now there werelines on Diane's face although she was hardly past twenty-four. Andthere was a bitterness, a bleakness, in her eyes.
The asteroid had ruined them, had taken something from them and givennothing in return. They were going home and, Ralph Meeker thought, theyhad left more than their second-hand mining equipment on asteroid 4712.They had left the happy early days of their marriage as a ghost forwhomever tried his luck next on 4712. They had never mentioned the worddivorce; Diane had merely said she would spend some time with her sisterin 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 herhead 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. Youhad to be alert on an old tub like the Gormann '87. A hundred tonner, ithad put in thirty years and a billion and some miles for several owners.Its warning devices and its reflexes--it was funny, Ralph thought, howyou ascribed something human like reflexes to a hundred tons of batteredmetal--were unpredictable.
"I don't see anything," Diane said.
He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was nextto impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen--and completelyimpossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you falseinformation. You could shut it off and pray--but the odds would still bea 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 asthe asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms whichpursued 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 uptoward them. Ralph waited, expecting the automatic pilot to answer theradar warning and swing them safely around the obstacle. So Ralphwatched and saw the dark jumble of rocks--silvery on one side where thedistant 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 spacearound them. They tumbled slowly, in incredible slow motion, end overend and around and around each other, as if they had been suspended in aslowly 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 missthings in our way, but failed to compensate afterwards and bring us backto course. Now--"
Suddenly Ralph dived for the controls. The throbbing rockets of theGormann '87 had not responded to the radar warning. They were rocketingon toward the sargasso, rapidly, dangerously.
"Hold on to something!" Ralph hollered, and punched full power in theleft rockets and breaking power in the right forward rocketssimultaneously, attempting to stand the Gormann '87 on its head andfight off the deadly gravitational attraction of the sargasso.
The Gormann '87 shuddered like something alive and Ralph felt himselfthrust to the left and forward violently. His head struck the radarscreen and, as if mocking him the radar bell clanged its warning. Hethought he heard Diane scream. Then he was trying to stand, but thegravity of sudden acceleration gripped him with a giant hand and heslumped back slowly, aware of a wetness seeping from his nose, hisears--
All of space opened and swallowed him and he went down, trying to reachfor Diane's hand. But she withdrew it and then the blackness, like someobscene 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 painfullystiff, but he had crawled over to where Diane was down, flat on herback, behind the pilot chair. He found the water tank unsprung andbrought her some and in a few moments she blinked her eyes and looked athim.
"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 hewas giddy and growing rapidly more so--as if they did not havesufficient oxygen to breathe.
Then he heard it. A slow steady hissing, probably the sound feared mostby spacemen. Air escaping.
Diane looked at him. "For God's sake, Ralph," she cried. "Find it."
He found it and patched it--and was numb with the cold and barelyconscious when he had finished. Diane came to him and squeezed his handand that was the first time they had touched since they had left theasteroid. Then they rested for a few moments and drank some of theachingly 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 ownGormann '87 had disturbed. It was a sargasso like the legendary SargassoSeas 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. Whetherthe 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 theradar."
Diane went aft while he remained there in the tiny control cabin. By thetime 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 likethat. 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 theyhaven't been replaced since this tub rolled off the assembly line,they're thirty years old. She's a
n '87."
"Is there anything we can do?"
He shrugged. "We're going to try. We'll check the air and water and seewhat we have. Then we start looking."
"Start looking? I don't understand."
"For a series eighty Gormann cruiser."
Diane's eyes widened. "You mean--out there?"
"I mean out there. If we find a series eighty cruiser--and we might--andif I'm able to transfer the radarscopes after we find out they're ingood shape, then we have a chance."
Diane nodded slowly. "If there are any other minor repairs to make, Icould be making them while you look for a series eighty Gormann."
But Ralph shook his head. "We'll probably have only a few hours of airto spare, Diane. If we both look, we'll cover more