[Pg 390]

She was floating along the wreck-pack's edge.

The Sargasso of Space

By Edmond Hamilton

Captain Crain faced his crew calmly. "We may as well face the facts,men," he said. "The ship's fuel-tanks are empty and we are driftingthrough space toward the dead-area."

The twenty-odd officers and men gathered on the middle-deck of thefreighter Pallas made no answer, and Crain continued:

"We left Jupiter with full tanks, more than enough fuel to take us to[Pg 391]Neptune. But the leaks in the starboard tanks lost us half our supply,and we had used the other half before discovering that. Since the ship'srocket-tubes cannot operate without fuel, we are simply drifting. Wewould drift on to Neptune if the attraction of Uranus were not pullingus to the right. That attraction alters our course so that in threeship-days we shall drift into the dead-area."

Rance Kent, first-officer of the Pallas, asked a question: "Couldn'twe, raise Neptune with the radio, sir, and have them send out afuel-ship in time to reach us?"

"It's impossible, Mr. Kent," Crain answered. "Our main radio is deadwithout fuel to run its dynamotors, and our auxiliary set hasn't thepower to reach Neptune."

"Why not abandon ship in the space-suits," asked Liggett, thesecond-officer, "and trust to the chance of some ship picking us up?"

The captain shook his head. "It would be quite useless, for we'd simplydrift on through space with the ship into the dead-area."

The score of members of the crew, bronzed space-sailors out of everyport in the solar system, had listened mutely. Now, one of them, a talltube-man, stepped forward a little.

"Just what is this dead-area, sir?" he asked. "I've heard of it, but asthis is my first outer-planet voyage, I know nothing about it."

"I'll admit I know little more," said Liggett, "save that a good manydisabled ships have drifted into it and have never come out."

"The dead area," Crain told them, "is a region of space ninety thousandmiles across within Neptune's orbit, in which the ordinary gravitationalattractions of the solar system are dead. This is because in that regionthe pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other.Because of that, anything in the dead-area, will stay in there untiltime ends, unless it has power of its own. Many wrecked space-ships havedrifted into it at one time or another, none ever emerging; and it'sbelieved that there is a great mass of wrecks somewhere in the area,drawn and held together by mutual attraction."

"And we're drifting in to join them," Kent said. "Some prospect!"

"Then there's really no chance for us?" asked Liggett keenly.

Captain Crain thought. "As I see it, very little," he admitted. "If ourauxiliary radio can reach some nearby ship before the P