He paced the Control room, stopped and looked over at Ketrik whose eyes were fixed steadily on the visipanel. "See anything yet?"
Ketrik merely shook his head, not looking up. That panel magnified their course several times, and Ketrik had the sharpest eyes in the Patrol.
"Damned if I like it a bit," Janus muttered, staring again at the crazy needle that seemed about to jump its bearings. "Devries, tell Blake to cut all jets. We'd better go into a drift until we are a little better able to determine what's wrong."
Devries stepped to the tube and gave the order to Blake in the rocket room. A moment later the Wasp was in the drift. Blake came forward to see what was up. Far behind rolled the hideous green ball that was Neptune, and immeasurably far ahead somewhere was Pluto. Devries stepped again to the chart and saw that the hair-line indicator still had Pluto right on the nose.
"I think I've got something," Ketrik spoke from the panel. The men crowded around him, peering into the square of blackness that seemed to swim as Ketrik turned the magnifying dial.
"I see it!" Blake exclaimed. "Something ... a meteor? Looks like it's drifting right at us."
But Ketrik shook his head, and his eyes narrowed. "That looks to me like a derelict, and it's my opinion that we're drifting at it."
"A spacer?" Commander Janus asked excitedly. "Can you make it out, Ketrik? Maybe it's Perrin! I hope to God it is, it'll save us days!"
But the next few minutes revealed that it wasn't Perrin's pirate ship. The drifting spacer was much larger, and of different design, with no name or emblem of any kind. And it was solid black, preventing easy detection against the blackness of space.
"It's a derelict all right," Devries said. "See that ragged gap in the hull near the stern?" He pointed and the others crowded around to look. He was right. In the side of the hull near the stern was a great jagged hole, that looked as though it had been made either by collision with a rogue meteor, or the blast of a space cannon.