On deck, Charlie Guhn sickened briefly as acceleration took hold. Still, free space takeoffs weren't as tormenting as shaking off six to eight gravities in a surface departure. More, on some of the big planets. He wondered vaguely why the skipper preferred a narcol stupor to reality. Who knew? Perhaps thirty years of probing the black void and the deeper black of hyperspace would gnaw away any man's defenses. It took a wife and kids to anchor a man to a world. Guhn, himself, was grateful for his family on Earth and the days he would spend with his feet planted firm on terrestrial soil. He was privileged in a way Capt. Jock Warren could never know.
When the acceleration stress decreased he descended to the hold feeling suddenly chilled. Close to the beryllium bulkheads heat was lost more readily than in other sections. Guhn made his way through the dimly lit, lightly storaged passages, skirting bales of priceless baka silk, hogsheads of delicious platinum-hued wine from grapes grown in the soil of Rigel IX, and lead-sheathed crates of long-lived curium isotopes, native to Rigel's fourth planet.
He approached the compartment that contained the skags. Here he halted, sensitive to the enigma which had baffled the galaxy. The strange frozen skags constituted the first and only evidence of a non-humanoid culture yet found.
They were known to have been intelligent. Their cities, lacy things of steel and plastic, still reached for clouds on the slag-red sands of Rigel IV, silent and deserted. In vaults beneath cities' surface had been discovered the last few inhabitants, perfectly preserved in death.
Controlling his repulsion, Charlie Guhn studied the three skags lying in composed attitudes within their globe-shaped transparent shells. Blue tentacles stuck out of bulbous heads like medusae. Inhumanly majestic faces, but lacking nostrils and ears, were supported by strong granite bodies with abnormally long arms and legs. At first glance, they appeared to be perverted human mutations. In their repose, they seemed almost alive.
Unable to look longer, Guhn climbed the nearest ladder. At the top, a crewman commented to him: "Must've been frightful in life, them skags. We'd had a battle, then, sir; a real bloody battle."
The ship's speaker vibrated with Mark Caldwell's magnified voice: "Attention, all hands. We are entering minus point."
In his cabin, Capt. Jock Warren mumbled in his narcol stupor but his burly body never stirred.