"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that," I replied quietly. "My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices...."
There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. "You think ... you think it came from the stars, Captain?"
"Maybe even from beyond the stars," Cohn said in a low voice.
Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.
Spinelli said, "Do we look her over, Captain?"
They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.
"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli," I said sharply. "Certainly!"
The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.
It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.