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.