yway!" Kent cried, as he and Crain hastened up into
the pilot house. The crew was running to the deck-windows.

"Right ahead there, about fifteen degrees left," Liggett told Kent and
Crain, pointing. "Do you see it?"

Kent stared; nodded. The wreck-pack was a distant, disk-like mass
against the star-flecked heavens, a mass that glinted here and there in
the feeble sunlight of space. It did not seem large, but, as they
drifted steadily closer in the next hours, they saw that in reality the
wreck-pack was tremendous, measuring at least fifty miles across.

Its huge mass was a heterogeneous heap, composed mostly of countless
cigar-like space-ships in all stages of wreckage. Some appeared smashed
almost out of all recognizable shape, while others were, to all
appearances unharmed. They floated together in this dense mass in space,
crowded against one another by their mutual attraction.

There seemed to be among them every type of ship known in the solar
system, from small, swift mail-boats to big freighters. And, as they
drifted nearer, the three in the pilot-house could see that around and
between the ships of the wreck-pack floated much other matter--fragments
of wreckage, meteors, small and large, and space-debris of every sort.

The _Pallas_ was drifting, not straight toward the wreck-pack, but in a
course that promised to take the ship past it.

"We're not heading into the wreck-pack!" Liggett exclaimed. "Maybe we'll
drift past it, and on out the dead-area's other side!"

* * * * *

Captain Crain smiled mirthlessly. "You're forgetting your
space-mechanics, Liggett. We will drift along the wreck-pack's edge, and
then will curve in and go round it in a closing spiral until we reach
its edge."

"Lord, who'd have thought there were so many wrecks here!" Kent
marvelled. "There must be thousands of them!"

"They've been collecting here ever since the first interplanetary
rocket-ships went forth," Crain reminded him. "Not only meteor-wrecked
ships, but ships whose mechanisms went wrong--or that ran out of fuel
like ours--or that were captured and sacked, and then set adrift by
space-pirates."

The _Pallas_ by then was drifting along the wreck-pack's rim at a
half-mile distance, and Kent's eyes were running over the mass.

"Some of those ships look entirely undamaged. Why couldn't we find one
that has fuel in its tanks, transfer it to our own tanks, and get away?"
he asked.

Crain's ey