Married people -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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