"Must be ship," said the skag.
Hysterical laughter gripped the officer. From the skag's throat emerged identical sounds, uproarious cackles; but the brilliant eyes barely flickered.
From his place in the lifeboat, Second Officer Charlie Guhn had heard no sound for several hours. He felt cramped in a gray microcosm where it was hopeless to escape. His mind turned to the cause of the skags' revivification; it was his knowledge of physics that provided him the correct answers. The transparent shells surrounding the skags were of time-impervious materials. Upon entering minus point, the creatures retrograded in time to a point previous to their suspended animation.
What did they want? What did they plan? Without these answers, Guhn had no means to deal with them. Rather than dispatch the lifeboat, the deck officer resolved to attempt snapping the entire vessel back into normal space. He lowered himself to the foc'sle quarters. Here, the bodies of six crewmen neatly piled together stunned his eyes. At first, he supposed they were dead but a confirmatory touch of their flesh showed they were not. Tortured faces stared at him, as if trying to project a message.
Guhn stole along the portside catwalk to the engine rooms. Finding no one, he mounted to the deck. Upon hearing the heavy tread of stumbling feet, he flattened himself against a bulkhead niche and waited.
Suddenly, words roared out in the still passageway, sung in a strong-timbered brogue:
"Oh, our officers are eager
And our crew is full of fight!
And we're blastin' off for Vega