"I don't see anything," Diane said.
He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was next to impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen—and completely impossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you false information. You could shut it off and pray—but the odds would still be a hundred to one against you.
"There!" Diane cried. "On the left! The left, Ralph—"
He saw it too. At first it looked like a jumble of rocks, of dust as the asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms which pursued their erratic, dangerous orbits through the asteroid belt.
But it was not dust.
"Will you look at that," Diane said.
The jumble of rocks—which they were ready to classify as dust—swam up toward them. Ralph waited, expecting the automatic pilot to answer the radar warning and swing them safely around the obstacle. So Ralph watched and saw the dark jumble of rocks—silvery on one side where the distant sunlight hit it—apparently spread out as they approached it. Spread out and assume tiny shapes, shapes in miniature.
"Spaceships," Diane said. "Spaceships, Ralph. Hundreds of them."
They gleamed like silver motes in the sun or were black as the space around them. They tumbled slowly, in incredible slow motion, end over end and around and around each other, as if they had been suspended in a slowly boiling liquid instead of the dark emptiness of space.