She was floating along the wreck-pack's edge.
The Sargasso of Space
By Edmond Hamilton
Helpless, doomed, into the graveyard
of space floats the wrecked
freighter Pallas.
Captain Crain faced his crew calmly. "We may as well face the facts, men," he said. "The ship's fuel-tanks are empty and we are drifting through space toward the dead-area."
The twenty-odd officers and men gathered on the middle-deck of the freighter Pallas made no answer, and Crain continued:
"We left Jupiter with full tanks, more than enough fuel to take us to Neptune. But the leaks in the starboard tanks lost us half our supply, and we had used the other half before discovering that. Since the ship's rocket-tubes cannot operate without fuel, we are simply drifting. We would drift on to Neptune if the attraction of Uranus were not pulling us to the right. That attraction alters our course so that in three ship-days we shall drift into the dead-area."