"Cold," she said.
He had not noticed it, but he was still numb and only half conscious, half of his faculties working. It was cold. He felt that now. And he was giddy and growing rapidly more so—as if they did not have sufficient oxygen to breathe.
Then he heard it. A slow steady hissing, probably the sound feared most by spacemen. Air escaping.
Diane looked at him. "For God's sake, Ralph," she cried. "Find it."
He found it and patched it—and was numb with the cold and barely conscious when he had finished. Diane came to him and squeezed his hand and that was the first time they had touched since they had left the asteroid. Then they rested for a few moments and drank some of the achingly cold water from the tank and got up and went to the viewport. They had known it, but confirmation was necessary. They looked outside.
They were within the sargasso.
The battered derelict ships rolled and tumbled and spun out there, slowly, unhurried, in a mutual gravitational field which their own Gormann '87 had disturbed. It was a sargasso like the legendary Sargasso Seas of Earth's early sailing days, becalmed seas, seas without wind, with choking Sargasso weed, seas that snared and entrapped....
"Can we get out?" Diane asked.
He shrugged. "That depends. How strong the pull of gravity is. Whether the Gormann's rocket drive is still working. If we can repair the radar. We'd never get out without the radar."
"I'll get something to eat," she said practically. "You see about the radar."