Patrolship-2, coming to convoy us. I took a look through the eye-piece of the telescope. Familiar vessel on which I had spent so many months. Its long cylindrical alumite hull, with the pressure-dome over its single upper deck, was painted by sunlight on one side and starlight on the other as it headed diagonally toward us. By the range-finder on the telescope I measured its visual length.
"Ten thousand miles off us," I said to the captain.
"Yes. Just about. Now listen, Fanning—there'll be no contact. It will circle us, close at hand. If the passengers ask you why we need any convoy—we don't want any panic here you know."
What he had in mind about explaining this convoy was never disclosed. He was staring through a duplicate eye-piece, and suddenly his words were checked as he sucked in his breath.
"Good Lord, Fanning—"
I saw it also—a tiny puff of electronic light at the top of the oncoming patrolship's dome. There was nothing else to be seen, I searched the starfield in that second of premonitory horror. Absolutely nothing visible. Just that puff of light where an electronic shot must have struck.
"Fanning—you saw that?" Captain Wilkes murmured.
"Yes."
Another few seconds. It seemed an eternity. And then the Patrolship wavered; drunkenly lurching and slowly turning over! Ghastly silent drama, out there in space ten thousand miles away. We could not see its details; just the tiny image of the ship, lurching, turning end over end.
A derelict in space. My horrified imagination pictured the air hissing out, spewing wreckage and bodies out perhaps. Ship of the dead, all in those seconds. Then it was hanging poised, slowly turning on a drunken axis of its own. The leprous, smashed dome was for a moment visible as it turned.