uments visible through pinholes above his
eye-level. He fastened a space-rope about himself, speaking through the
helmet's opened face-plate.

"If our friends should wake up before I get back," he added, "please
restrain them. I'd hate to be marooned."

He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space-rope over one
vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him A little later
Maril heard the outer lock open. Then soundlessness.

Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out of
the ship to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for--and
what he'd found--was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could
imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine
falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a
gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all
seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the
nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and
to a flimsy space-rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's
airlock.

Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the
second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very
small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter
silence from hanging intolerably in the ship. They were traffic-sounds,
recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and nobody
knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words,
but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless ship.

Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the
four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd
gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control-room floor, and
then paused for lack of any place to go or thing to do. He sat down and
began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.

Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.

"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.

She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a
human being.

"N-no," she said unsteadily. "Not yet."

More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest
of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the
airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.

The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog
came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the
lock. He carr