The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Graveyard of Space, by Milton Lesser

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Title: The Graveyard of Space

Author: Milton Lesser

Release Date: April 25, 2010 [EBook #32133]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's note:

This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive research
did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication
was renewed.

[Illustration: Illustrated by H. W. McCauley]

[Illustration]

Nobody knew very much about the Sargasso area of the void; only one
thing was certain: if a ship was caught there it was doomed in--

The Graveyard Of Space

_by_

_Milton Lesser_

He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to
share it?"

"No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old
Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the
parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes.

Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like
when she had worked by his side at the mine. It had not been much of a
mine. It had been a bust, a first class sure as hell bust, like
everything else in their life together. And it had aged her. Had it only
been three years? he thought. Three years on asteroid 4712, a speck of
cosmic dust drifting on its orbit in the asteroid belt between Jupiter
and Mars. Uranium potential, high--the government had said. So they had
leased the asteroid and prospected it and although they had not finished
the job, they were finished. They were going home and now there were
lines on Diane's face although she was hardly past twenty-four. And
there was a bitterness, a bleakness, in her eyes.

The asteroid had ruined them, had taken something from them and given
nothing in return. They were going home and, Ralph Meeker thought, they
had left more than their second-hand mining equipment on asteroid 4712.
They had left the happy early days of their marriage as a ghost for