"Ralph. It's here, Ralph. A radarscope just like ours. Oh, Ralph, it's in perfect shape."
"I'm coming," he said. A big old Bartson Cruiser tumbled by end over end, a thousand tonner, the largest ship he had seen in here so far. At some of the portholes as he flashed by he could see faces, dead faces staring into space forever.
Then Diane's voice suddenly: "Is that you, Ralph?"
"I'm still about fifty miles out," he said automatically, and then cold fear, real fear, gripped him. Is that you, Ralph?
"Ralph, is that—oh, Ralph. Ralph—" she screamed, and was silent.
"Diane! Diane, answer me."
Silence. She had seen someone—something. Alive? It hardly seemed possible. He tried to notch his rocket controls further toward full power, but they were straining already—
The dead ships flashed by, scores of them, hundreds, with dead men and dead dreams inside, waiting through eternity, in no hurry to give up their corpses and corpses of dreams.
He heard Diane again then, a single agonized scream. Then there was silence, absolute silence.
Time seemed frozen, frozen like the faces of the dead men inside the ships, suspended, unmoving, not dropping into the well of the past. The ships crawled by now, crawled. And from a long way off he saw the Gormann eighty-five. He knew it was the right ship because the outer airlock door had swung open again. It hung there in space, the lock gaping—