thought. That skeleton had unnerved him.

"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—

But it was a long way off.

He hardly seemed to be approaching it at all. Every few seconds he called Diane's name, but there was no answer. No answer. Time crawled with the fear icy now, as cold as death, in the pit of his stomach, with the fear making his heart pound rapidly, with the fear making it impossible for him to think. Fear—for Diane. I love you, Di, he thought. I love you. I never stopped loving you. We were wrong. We were crazy wrong. It was like a sargasso, inside of us, an emptiness which needed filling—but we were wrong. Diane—

He reached the Gormann and plunged inside the airlock, swinging the outer door shut behind him. He waited. Would the pressure build up again, as it had built up for Diane? He did not know. He could only wait—

A red light blinked over his head, on and off, on and off as pressure was built. Then it stopped.

Fifteen pounds of pressure in the airlock, which meant that the inner door should open. He ran forward, rammed his shoulder against it, tumbled through. He entered a narrow companionway and clomped awkwardly toward the front of the ship, where the radarscope would be located.

He passed a skeleton in the companionway, like the one he had seen in another ship. For the same reason, he thought. He had time to think that. And then he saw them.

Diane. On the floor, her spacesuit off her now, a great bruise, blue-ugly bruise across her temple. Unconscious.

And the thing which hovered over her.

At first he did not know what it was, but he leaped at it. It turned, snarling. There was air in the ship and he wondered about that. He did not have time to wonder. The thing was like some monstrous, misshapen creature, a man—yes, but a man to give you nightmares. Bent and misshapen, gnarled, twisted like the roots of an ancient tree, with a wild growth of beard, white beard, heavy across the chest, with bent limbs powerfully muscled and a gaunt face, like a death's head. And the eyes—the eyes were wild, staring vacantly, almost glazed as in death. The eyes stared at him and through him and then he closed with this thing which had felled Diane.

It had incredible strength. The strength of the insane. It drove Ralph back across the cabin and Ralph, encumbered by his spacesuit, could only fight awkwardly. It drove him back and it found something on the floor, the metal leg of what once had been