Rather than sit idle he snapped on the
reader--but, although facts and figures were dunned into his ears--he
really heard very little. He couldn't apply himself--not with a new
specter leering at him from the bulkhead.
The dangers of the space lanes were not to be numbered, death walked
among the stars a familiar companion of all spacemen. And to the Free
Trader it was the extra and invisible crewman on every ship that raised.
But there were deaths and deaths--And Dane could not forget the gruesome
legends Van Rycke collected avidly as his hobby--had recorded in his
private library of the folk lore of space.
Stories such as that of the ghostly "New Hope" carrying refugees from the
first Martian Rebellion--the ship which had lifted for the stars but had
never arrived, which wandered for a timeless eternity, a derelict in free
fall, its port closed but the warning "dead" lights on at its nose--a
ship which through five centuries had been sighted only by a spacer in
similar distress. Such stories were numerous. There were other tales of
"plague" ships wandering free with their dead crews, or discovered and
shot into some sun by a patrol cruiser so that they might not carry their
infection farther.
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