Transcriber's note:
This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive researchdid not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publicationwas 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 the[Pg 60]parade 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—"