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