ks.

* * * * *

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. But it
wasn't likely, because if someone could afford a newer ship then he
could afford a better radarscope. But that, he told himself, was only
half the story. The other half was this: with a better radarscope a ship
might not have floundered into the sargasso at all....

So it was hardly possible to pass up any ship if their life depended on
it--and the going was slow.

Too slow.

He had entered some dozen ships in the first four hours turning, using
his shoulder rockets to blast a port hole out and climb in through
there. He had not liked what he saw, but there was no preventing it.
Without a light it wasn't so bad, but you needed a light to examine the
radarscope....

They were dead. They had been dead for years but of course there would
be no decomposition in the airless void of space and very little even if
air had remained until he blasted his way in, for the air was sterile
canned spaceship air. They were dead, and they were bloated. All
impossibly fat men, with white faces like melons and gross bodies like
Tweedle Dee's and limbs like fat sausages.

By the fifth ship he was sick to his stomach, but by the tenth he had
achieved the necessary detachment to continue his task. Once--it was the
eighth ship--he found a Gormann series eighty radarscope, and his heart
pounded when he saw it. But the scope was hopelessly damaged, as bad as
their own. Aside from that one, he did not encounter any, damaged or in
good shape, which they might convert to their own use.

Four hours, he thought. Four hours and twelve ships. Diane reported
every few moments by intercom. In her first four hours she had visited
eight ships. Her voice sounded funny. She was fighting it every step of
the way he thought. It must have been hell to her, breaking into those
wrecks with their dead men with faces like white, bloated melons--

In the thirteenth ship he found a skeleton.

He did not report it to Diane over the intercom. The skeleton made no
sense at all. The flesh could not possibly have decomposed. Curious, he
clomped closer on his magnetic boots. Even if the flesh had decomposed,
the clothing would have remained. But it was a skeleton picked
completely clean, with no clothing, not e