"Look what I found! I think it's her log!"
It was a flat steel box with an illuminated tape at its front end, on which a date was printed. A line of spidery Dardrean script was engraved on a plate on the top of the box.
"Ra-Twelve," Peer translated. "That's her name."
"So it's a Dardrean ship! But they're using the Empire calendar," Channok pointed out, "which would make it an Empire crew.... How do you work this thing? If it is her log, it might give us an idea of what's happened."
"Afterwards, Channy! I just found another door leading off the other end of the control room—"
The door opened into a second passage, parallel to the one by which they had come forward, but only half as long and very dimly lit. Filled with uneasy speculations, Channok forgot his own instructions and let Peer take the lead.
"More cabins!" her voice said, just as he became aware of the wrecked door-frame out of which the light was spilling ahead of her.
A woman had been using that cabin. A woman who had liked beautiful and expensive things, judging by what was strewn about. It looked, Channok thought, as if she hadn't had time to finish her packing.
"Her spacesuit's gone, though," Peer's voice announced from the interior of a disordered closet.
Channok was inspecting the door. This was the first indication that there had been any violence connected with whatever had happened on the Ra-Twelve. The door had been locked from without and literally ripped open from within by a stream of incandescence played on it by a gun held probably not much more than a foot away. That woman had wanted out in an awful hurry!