Loneliness and monotony change men queerly, undermine character and sanity. And three years is a long time. Quarrels flared up and became feuds. Between two members of the crew, Kalson and Wrymore, a particularly bitter hatred developed.
The crew were permitted no weapons, but Kalson was found shot to death. The crew and their quarters were searched by the officers. No weapons were found. There are many places small side arms can be hidden in the length of a ship.
Captain Wallace didn't confine Wrymore, for there was no definite proof of his guilt. But he informed him he would be turned over for trial at the first port reached.
Then there was the starboard-dorsal rocket jet, forever threatening disintegration, which no amount of tinkering ever made right. At any unusual sound the crew would freeze, their expressions set. Had that jet gone at last?
But with all this Wallace could cope. A stern man, old in the service, he was fully capable of controlling a crew unnerved by the ceaseless watching of infinity. He strode through the ship, as stern and calm as though in his office on Earth, holding the men to their duty, their sanity.
But when the "flame of all colors" appeared....
The Denebola pointed her sharp nose homeward; the frozen, dead lumps of the asteroids dropped behind. A new and clearer expression found its way to the faces of the crew.
And then Wrymore flung himself out of a storage compartment, where he'd been sent for a replacement part during one of the interminable repair jobs on the rocket jet. He dashed into the engine room, and the astonished engineers dragged him from behind a convertor, a trembling wreck of a man, near to madness. He told them Kalson's ghost was in the storage cabin—he'd seen it, a crawling flame-like thing, in which all the colors of the spectrum flickered and twined.
They put him in sick bay—and the next "day" an electrician calmly reported to the officer on watch the presence of "a funny-colored thing something like a slow flame" in the forward thermal chamber. Investigation revealed nothing but the inexplicable presence of an amount of hydrogen gas.