Again he listened. The ship was silent as the proverbial grave. He cracked the inspection hatch and peered out. It was dark as the grave, too.
Boldly he opened the hatch and stepped out. Under the light of his headlamp, Farradyne inspected four rectangular metal boxes, painted a nondescript gray. Cables led from one to another, terminating in white metal connectors. The boxes were bolted to the deck by the self-tapping bolts that had come through his ceiling.
From one of the boxes ran a cable that led to a wall-connector.
Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment. This made it possible to install some bit of gear for pleasure, comfort or added maneuvering without having to tear half the ship apart to run the necessary wiring.
The enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.
Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the space-suit at the next level and hung it in a suit locker, and continued to walk up the stairway that would lead him to the spacelock and the salon.
Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships many miles distant, and the far-off blur of bright, red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the natives used for a printed language.
He left the viewport and went higher in his ship until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the large round opening across the field to another starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was just as dark as his, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.
The problem of where he was called him to the control room.
He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped quite a bit and Farradyne found that, while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up after a swing of his sword at the mythical enemy. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches instead of prowling and the smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Cassiopeia had gained some weight, enough to squash her throne and Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra. It was likely that some of these were merely displaced stars, but no one could tell Sirius from anything else without a set of astronomical instruments and a few years of study unless he knew which way Sirius was from this position.