red in the next ship-day, nor in the next.
For, though one of the _Pallas'_ radio-operators was constantly at the
instruments under Captain Crain's orders, the weak calls of the
auxiliary set raised no response.

Had they been on the Venus or Mars run, Kent told himself, there would
be some chance, but out here in the vast spaces, between the outer
planets, ships were fewer and farther between. The big, cigar-shaped
freighter drifted helplessly on in a broad curve toward the dreaded
area, the green light-speck of Neptune swinging to their left.

On the third ship-day Kent and Captain Crain stood in the pilot-house
behind Liggett, who sat at the now useless rocket-tube controls. Their
eyes were on the big glass screen of the gravograph. The black dot on it
that represented their ship was crawling steadily toward the bright red
circle that stood for the dead-area....

They watched silently until the dot had crawled over the circle's red
line, heading toward its center.

"Well, we're in at last," Kent commented. "There seems to be no change
in anything, either."

Crain pointed to the instrument-panel. "Look at the gravitometers."

Kent did. "All dead! No gravitational pull from any direction--no, that
one shows a slight attraction from ahead!"

"Then gravitational attraction of some sort does exist in the dead-area
after all!" Liggett exclaimed.

"You don't understand," said Crain. "That attraction from ahead is the
pull of the wreck-pack at the dead-area's center."

"And it's pulling the _Pallas_ toward it?" Kent exclaimed.

Crain nodded. "We'll probably reach the wreck-pack in two more
ship-days."

* * * * *

The next two ship-days seemed to Kent drawn out endlessly. A moody
silence had grown upon the officers and men of the ship. All seemed
oppressed by the strange forces of fate that had seized the ship and
were carrying it, smoothly and soundlessly, into this region of
irrevocable doom.

The radio-operators' vain calls had ceased. The _Pallas_ drifted on into
the dreaded area like some dumb ship laden with damned souls. It drifted
on, Kent told himself, as many a wrecked and disabled ship had done
before it, with the ordinary activities and life of the solar system
forever behind it, and mystery and death ahead.

It was toward the end of the second of those two ship-days that
Liggett's voice came down from the pilot-house:

"Wreck-pack in sight ahead!"

"We've arrived, an