“I’ll be back,” he said.  “I hope with good news.  I’ve reason to be hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men.  They have things all prepared and tidy.  I suspect I’ll find these ships with stores of air and fuel, maybe even food, so that if Weald should manage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they’d only have to bring out crews.”

He lifted the space helmet down from its rack and put it on.  He tested it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his eye-level.  He fastened a space rope about himself, speaking through the helmet’s opened faceplate.

“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 silence.

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 spaceship 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.

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 anything 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.  “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 carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly heavy in the ship’s gravity-field.  There were two spacesuits and a curious assortment of parcels.  He spread them out, flipped aside his faceplate, and said briskly, “This stuff is cold!  Turn a heater on it, will you, Maril?”