nd passengers lying in the same silent death.

The salons held beautifully-dressed women, distinguished-looking men,
lying about as the meteor's shock had hurled them. One group lay around
a card-table, their game interrupted. A woman still held a small child,
both seemingly asleep. Kent tried to shake off the oppression he felt as
he and Krell and Liggett continued down to the tank-rooms.

They found their quest there useless, for the tanks had been strained by
the meteor's shock, and were empty. Kent felt Liggett grasp his hand and
heard him speak, the sound-vibrations coming through their contacting
suits.

"Nothing here; and we'll find it much the same through all these wrecks,
if I'm not wrong. Tanks always give at a shock."

"There must be some ships with fuel still in them among all these," Kent
answered.

* * * * *

They climbed back, up to the ship's top, and leapt off it toward a
Jupiter freighter lying a little farther inside the pack. As they
floated toward it, Kent saw their men moving on with them from ship to
ship, progressing inward into the pack. Both Kent and Liggett kept Krell
always ahead of them, knowing that a blow from his bar, shattering their
glassite helmets, meant instant death. But Krell seemed quite intent on
the search for fuel.

The big Jupiter freighter seemed intact from above, but, when they
penetrated into it, they found its whole under-side blown away,
apparently by an explosion of its tanks. They moved on to the next ship,
a private space-yacht, small in size, but luxurious in fittings. It had
been abandoned in space, its rocket-tubes burst and tanks strained.

They went on, working deeper into the wreck-pack. Kent almost forgot the
paramount importance of their search in the fascination of it. They
explored almost every known type of ship--freighters, liners,
cold-storage boats, and grain-boats. Once Kent's hopes ran high at sight
of a fuel-ship, but it proved to be in ballast, its cargo-tanks empty
and its own tanks and tubes apparently blown simultaneously.

Kent's muscles ached from the arduous work of climbing over and
exploring the wrecks. He and Liggett had become accustomed to the sight
of frozen, motionless bodies.

As they worked deeper into the pack, they noticed that the ships were of
increasingly older types, and at last Krell signalled a halt. "We're
almost a mile in," he told them, gripping their hands. "We'd better work
back out,