The ship of Orthis loomed before them, lightless, lifeless, cradled in the ashes of destruction. It had a look of patience. It had lain here for a thousand years, untouched by time or rust, entombed in silence and the endless night, eternal as the dead suns that rove forever in uncorrupting space. It seemed that it could wait until the end of the universe, cherishing its trust. Awe came upon Trehearne, and with it a kind of fear. They found the lock port. It stood wide open, the valves still clean and shining. There could be no corrosion here, with every atom of air and moisture frozen in the purifying cold. The light of Trehearne's belt-lamp showed him, on the floor of the lock chamber, the scored marks of a man's boot. They might have been made only yesterday. The three men paused outside that open port. They looked at each other through the glassite plates of their helmets, and their faces were strange. Then Trehearne stepped aside, and Quorn also. Edri bent his head. He moved forward to the port. Slowly, without sound, he clambered into the ship of Orthis. The others were close behind him. Their belt lamps cut hard slashes of light across the airless dark. They passed through the lock chamber and came into a corridor running fore and aft. It was utterly still. The heavy drag of their boots on the metal deck made not the slightest sound. It was like walking in a fever-dream, and the deadness of the ship, the black, inert, unstirring deadness, was more oppressive than the desolation in which it lay. The rocks and cliffs had never moved, they had never been built by the hands of men, no thought or hope had ever entered into them. Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out. The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying interstellar radiation. Most of that stuff is beyond me, but I can see that much." One section of the laboratory contained a complicated mass of coils and prisms and intricate banks of reflectors arranged around what must have been a great central tube. There was a small platform at the focal point of the mechanism, fitted with straps. Along one bulkhead was a stack of metal cages for experimental animals. Several of the little creatures were still there. They had died, the quick death of airlessness and cold, but their bodies were still perfect. They had, then, survived the voyage. The ultra-speeds of interstellar flight had not harmed them.