Title: The Graveyard of Space
Author: Marlowe, Stephen, 1928-2008
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Graveyard of Space" ***


  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.

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 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."

Diane's eyes widened. "You mean--out there?"

"I mean out there. If we find a series eighty cruiser--and we might--and
if I'm able to transfer the radarscopes after we find out they're in
good shape, then we have a chance."

Diane nodded slowly. "If there are any other minor repairs to make, I
could 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 air
to spare, Diane. If we both look, we'll cover more ground. I hate to ask
you, because it won't be pretty out there. But it might be our only
chance."

"I'll go, of course. Ralph?"

"Yes?"

"What is this sargasso, anyway?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He shrugged as he read the meters on the compressed air tanks. Four
tanks full, with ten hours of air, for two, in each. One tank half full.
Five hours. Five plus forty. Forty-five hours of air.

They would need a minimum of thirty-five hours to reach Mars.

"No one knows for sure about the sargasso," he said, wanting to talk,
wanting to dispel his own fear so he would not communicate it to her as
he took the spacesuits down from their rack and began to climb into one.
"They don't think it's anything but the ships, though. It started with a
few ships. Then more. And more. Trapped by mutual gravity. It got bigger
and bigger and I think there are almost a thousand derelicts here now.
There's talk of blasting them clear, of salvaging them for metals and so
on. But so far the planetary governments haven't co-operated."

"But how did the first ships get here?"

"It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. One theory is ships
only, and maybe a couple of hunks of meteoric debris in the beginning.
Another theory says there may be a particularly heavy small asteroid in
this maze of wrecks somewhere--you know, superheavy stuff with the atoms
stripped of their electrons and the nuclei squeezed together, weighing
in the neighborhood of a couple of tons per square inch. That could
account for the beginning, but once the thing got started, the wrecked
ships account for more wrecked ships and pretty soon you have--a
sargasso."

Diane nodded and said, "You can put my helmet on now."

"All right. Don't forget to check the radio with me before we go out. If
the radio doesn't work, then you stay here. Because I want us in
constant radio contact if we're both out there. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir, captain," she said, and grinned. It was her old grin. He had
not seen her grin like that for a long time. He had almost forgotten
what that grin was like. It made her face seem younger and prettier, as
he had remembered it from what seemed so long ago but was only three
years. It was a wonderful grin and he watched it in the split-second
which remained before he swung the heavy helmet up and in place over her
shoulders.

Then he put on his own helmet awkwardly and fingered the outside radio
controls. "Hear me?" he said.

"I can hear you." Her voice was metallic but very clear through the suit
radios.

"Then listen. There shouldn't be any danger of getting lost. I'll leave
a light on inside the ship and we'll see it through the ports. It will
be the only light, so whatever you do, don't go out of range. As long as
you can always see it, you'll be O.K. Understand?"

"Right," she said as they both climbed into the Gormann '87's airlock
and waited for the pressure to leave it and the outer door to swing out
into space. "Ralph? I'm a little scared, Ralph."

"That's all right," he said. "So am I."

"What did you mean, it won't be pretty out there?"

"Because we'll have to look not just for series eighty Gormanns but for
any ships that look as old as ours. There ought to be plenty of them and
any one of them could have had a Gormann radarscope, although it's
unlikely. Have to look, though."

"But what--won't be pretty?"

"We'll have to enter those ships. You won't like what's inside."

"Say, how will we get in? We don't have blasters or weapons of any
kind."

"Your suit rockets," Ralph said. "You swing around and blast with your
suit rockets. A porthole should be better than an airlock if it's big
enough to climb through. You won't have any trouble."

"But you still haven't told me what--"

"Inside the ships. People. They'll all be dead. If they didn't lose
their air so far, they'll lose it when we go in. Either way, of course,
they'll be dead. They've all been dead for years, with no food. But
without air--"

"What are you stopping for?" Diane said. "Please go on."

"A body, without air. Fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch on the
inside, and zero on the outside. It isn't pretty. It bloats."

"My God, Ralph."

"I'm sorry, kid. Maybe you want to stay back here and I'll look."

"You said we only have ten hours. I want to help you."

All at once, the airlock swung out. Space yawned at them, black
enormous, the silent ships, the dead sargasso ships, floating slowly by,
eternally, unhurried....

"Better make it eight hours," Ralph said over the suit radio. "We'd
better keep a couple of hours leeway in case I figured wrong. Eight
hours and remember, don't get out of sight of the ship's lights and
don't break radio contact under any circumstances. These suit radios
work like miniature radar sets, too. If anything goes wrong, we'll be
able to track each other. It's directional beam radio."

"But what can go wrong?"

"I don't know," Ralph admitted. "Nothing probably." He turned on his
suit rockets and felt the sudden surge of power drive him clear of the
ship. He watched Diane rocketing away from him to the right. He waved
his hand in the bulky spacesuit. "Good luck," he called. "I love you,
Diane."

"Ralph," she said. Her voice caught. He heard it catch over the suit
radio. "Ralph, we agreed never to--oh, forget it. Good luck, Ralph. Good
luck, oh good luck. And I--"

"You what."

"Nothing, Ralph. Good luck."

"Good luck," he said, and headed for the first jumble of space wrecks.

       *       *       *       *       *

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 even boots--

As if the man had stripped of his clothing first.

He found out why a moment later, and it left him feeling more than a
little sick. There were other corpses aboard the ship, a battered
Thompson '81 in worse shape than their own Gormann. Bodies, not
skeletons. But when they had entered the sargasso they had apparently
struck another ship. One whole side of the Thompson was smashed in and
Ralph could see the repair patches on the wall. Near them and thoroughly
destroyed, were the Thompson's spacesuits.

The galley lockers were empty when Ralph found them. All the food
gone--how many years ago? And one of the crew, dying before the others.

Cannibalism.

Shuddering, Ralph rocketed outside into the clear darkness of space.
That was a paradox, he thought. It was clear, all right, but it was
dark. You could see a great way. You could see a million million miles
but it was darker than anything on Earth. It was almost an
extra-dimensional effect. It made the third dimension on earth, the
dimension of depth, seem hopelessly flat.

"Ralph!"

"Go ahead, kid," he said. It was their first radio contact in almost
half an hour.

"Oh, Ralph. It's a Gormann. An eighty-five. I think. Right in front of
me. Ralph, if its scopes are good--oh, Ralph."

"I'm coming," he said. "Go ahead inside. I'll pick up your beam and be
along." He could feel his heart thumping wildly. Five hours now. They
did not have much time. This ship--this Gormann eighty-five which Diane
had found--might be their last chance. Because it would certainly take
him all of three hours to transfer the radarscope, using the rockets
from one of their spacesuits, to their own ship.

He rocketed along now, following her directional beam, and listened as
she said: "I'm cutting through the porthole now, Ralph. I--"

Her voice stopped suddenly. It did not drift off gradually. It merely
ceased, without warning, without reason. "Diane!" he called. "Diane, can
you hear me?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He tracked the beam in desperate silence. Wrecks flashed by, tumbling
slowly in their web of mutual gravitation. Some were molten silver if
the wan sunlight caught them. Some were black, but every rivet, every
seam was distinct. The impossible clarity of blackest space....

"Ralph?" Her voice came suddenly.

"Yes, Diane. Yes. What is it?"

"What a curious thing. I stopped blasting at the port hole. I'm not
going in that way. The airlock, Ralph."

"What about the airlock?"

"It opened up on me. It swung out into space, all of a sudden. I'm going
in, Ralph."

Fear, unexpected, inexplicable, gripped him. "Don't," he said. "Wait for
me."

"That's silly, Ralph. We barely have time. I'm going in now, Ralph.
There. I'm closing the outer door. I wonder if the pressure will build
up for me. If it doesn't, I'll blast the outer door with my rockets and
get out of here.... Ralph! The light's blinking. The pressures building.
The inner door is beginning to open, Ralph. I'm going inside now."

He was still tracking the beam. He thought he was close now, a hundred
miles perhaps. A hundred miles by suit rocket was merely a few seconds
but somehow the fear was still with him. It was that skeleton, he
thought. That skeleton had unnerved him.

"Ralph. It's here, Ralph. A radarscope just like ours. Oh, Ralph, it's
in perfect shape."

"I'm coming," he said. A big old Bartson Cruiser tumbled by end over
end, a thousand tonner, the largest ship he had seen in here so far. At
some of the portholes as he flashed by he could see faces, dead faces
staring into space forever.

Then Diane's voice suddenly: "Is that you, Ralph?"

"I'm still about fifty miles out," he said automatically, and then cold
fear, real fear, gripped him. _Is that you, Ralph?_

"Ralph, is that--oh, Ralph. Ralph--" she screamed, and was silent.

"Diane! Diane, answer me."

Silence. She had seen someone--something. Alive? It hardly seemed
possible. He tried to notch his rocket controls further toward full
power, but they were straining already--

The dead ships flashed by, scores of them, hundreds, with dead men and
dead dreams inside, waiting through eternity, in no hurry to give up
their corpses and corpses of dreams.

He heard Diane again then, a single agonized scream. Then there was
silence, absolute silence.

Time seemed frozen, frozen like the faces of the dead men inside the
ships, suspended, unmoving, not dropping into the well of the past. The
ships crawled by now, crawled. And from a long way off he saw the
Gormann eighty-five. He knew it was the right ship because the outer
airlock door had swung open again. It hung there in space, the lock
gaping--

But it was a long way off.

He hardly seemed to be approaching it at all. Every few seconds he
called Diane's name, but there was no answer. No answer. Time crawled
with the fear icy now, as cold as death, in the pit of his stomach, with
the fear making his heart pound rapidly, with the fear making it
impossible for him to think. Fear--for Diane. I love you, Di, he
thought. I love you. I never stopped loving you. We were wrong. We were
crazy wrong. It was like a sargasso, inside of us, an emptiness which
needed filling--but we were wrong. Diane--

       *       *       *       *       *

He reached the Gormann and plunged inside the airlock, swinging the
outer door shut behind him. He waited. Would the pressure build up
again, as it had built up for Diane? He did not know. He could only
wait--

A red light blinked over his head, on and off, on and off as pressure
was built. Then it stopped.

Fifteen pounds of pressure in the airlock, which meant that the inner
door should open. He ran forward, rammed his shoulder against it,
tumbled through. He entered a narrow companionway and clomped awkwardly
toward the front of the ship, where the radarscope would be located.

He passed a skeleton in the companionway, like the one he had seen in
another ship. For the same reason, he thought. He had time to think
that. And then he saw them.

Diane. On the floor, her spacesuit off her now, a great bruise,
blue-ugly bruise across her temple. Unconscious.

And the thing which hovered over her.

At first he did not know what it was, but he leaped at it. It turned,
snarling. There was air in the ship and he wondered about that. He did
not have time to wonder. The thing was like some monstrous, misshapen
creature, a man--yes, but a man to give you nightmares. Bent and
misshapen, gnarled, twisted like the roots of an ancient tree, with a
wild growth of beard, white beard, heavy across the chest, with bent
limbs powerfully muscled and a gaunt face, like a death's head. And the
eyes--the eyes were wild, staring vacantly, almost glazed as in death.
The eyes stared at him and through him and then he closed with this
thing which had felled Diane.

It had incredible strength. The strength of the insane. It drove Ralph
back across the cabin and Ralph, encumbered by his spacesuit, could only
fight awkwardly. It drove him back and it found something on the floor,
the metal leg of what once had been a chair, and slammed it down across
the faceplate of Ralph's spacesuit.

Ralph staggered, fell to his knees. He had absorbed the blow on the
crown of his skull through the helmet of the suit, and it dazed him. The
thing struck again, and Ralph felt himself falling....

Somehow, he climbed to his feet again. The thing was back over Diane's
still form again, looking at her, its eyes staring and vacant. Spittle
drooled from the lips--

Then Ralph was wrestling with it again. The thing was almost protean. It
all but seemed to change its shape and writhe from Ralph's grasp as they
struggled across the cabin, but this time there was no weapon for it to
grab and use with stunning force.

Half-crazed himself now, Ralph got his fingers gauntleted in rubberized
metal, about the sinewy throat under the tattered beard. His fingers
closed there and the wild eyes went big and he held it that way a long
time, then finally thrust it away from him.

The thing fell but sprang to its feet. It looked at Ralph and the mouth
opened and closed, but he heard no sound. The teeth were yellow and
black, broken, like fangs.

Then the thing turned and ran.

Ralph followed it as far as the airlock. The inner door was slammed
between them. A light blinked over the door.

Ralph ran to a port hole and watched.

The thing which once had been a man floated out into space, turning,
spinning slowly. The gnarled twisted body expanded outward, became fat
and swollen, balloon-like. It came quite close to the porthole, thudding
against the ship's hull, the face--dead now--like a melon.

Then, after he was sick for a moment there beside the airlock, he went
back for Diane.

       *       *       *       *       *

They were back aboard the Gormann '87 now, their own ship. Ralph had
revived Diane and brought her back--along with the other Gormann's
radarscope--to their battered tub. The bruise on her temple was badly
discolored and she was still weak, but she would be all right.

"But what was it?" Diane asked. She had hardly seen her attacker.

"A man," Ralph said. "God knows how long that ship was in here. Years,
maybe. Years, alone in space, here in the sargasso, with dead men and
dead ships for company. He used up all the food. His shipmates died.
Maybe he killed them. He needed more food--"

"Oh, no. You don't mean--"

Ralph nodded. "He became a cannibal. Maybe he had a spacesuit and raided
some of the other ships too. It doesn't matter. He's dead now."

"He must have been insane like that for years, waiting here, never
seeing another living thing...."

"Don't talk about it," Ralph said, then smiled. "Ship's ready to go,
Diane."

"Yes," she said.

He looked at her. "Mars?"

She didn't say anything.

"I learned something in there," Ralph said. "We were like that poor
insane creature in a way. We were too wrapped up in the asteroid and the
mine. We forgot to live from day to day, to scrape up a few bucks every
now and then maybe and take in a show on Ceres or have a weekend on
Vesta. What the hell, Di, everybody needs it."

"Yes," she said.

"Di?"

"Yes, Ralph?"

"I--I want to give it another try, if you do."

"The mine?"

"The mine eventually. The mine isn't important. Us, I mean." He paused,
his hands still over the controls. "Will it be Mars?"

"No," she said, and sat up and kissed him. "A weekend on Vesta sounds
very nice. Very, very nice, darling."

Ralph smiled and punched the controls. Minutes later they had left the
sargasso--both sargassos--behind them.

THE END





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