Upon a Sea of Stars by A. Bertram Chandler Page A

carried a small battery of cameras.
    They had put on their helmets and then Grimes, plugging the lead from his suit radio microphone into the telephone socket, ordered Swinton, in the control room, to evacuate the airlock. They watched the needle of the gauge drop slowly, finally coming to rest on Zero. And then the valve opened.
    The strange ship hung out there in the absolute blackness, every detail picked out by the harsh glare of the searchlight. Her colors were bright, garish—the red that was almost purple, the broad band of pink paint, and then black, and then the white of the superstructure and the yellow of that odd assemblage of spars, of masts and booms.
    She looked, thought Grimes, out of context.
    But to any dweller in this nothingness—if there were any such dwellers— Faraway Quest would look out of context too.
    With an odd reluctance Grimes shuffled to the sill of the airlock door, made the little jump that broke contact between his magnetic boot soles and the steel deck. His reaction pistol was ready, and with economical blasts he jetted across the mile of emptiness. And then that odd expanse of red-purple plating was before him—and with a sudden shift of orientation he had the sensation of falling toward it head first. He used his pistol to turn himself and then to brake his speed. His landing was gentle, his boot soles making contact with the metal with no more than the slightest of jars. They made contact and they held. So , he thought, this ship is made of iron, or steel. But if I am right, when she was built nobody had thought of using aluminum as a structural material, and plastics had not been dreamed of . . .
    He felt the shock as Sonya Verrill landed beside him, and then Jones came in, and Todhunter, and the two engineers. Grimes waited until Calhoun and McHenry had sorted themselves out—hampered as they were by their equipment, they had fallen clumsily—and then led the way along the surface of painted metal.
    It was not easy going.
    A spaceman’s shuffle is a quite effective means of locomotion over a perfectly flat and smooth surface—but when the surface is made up of overlapping, riveted plates the feet must, frequently, be lifted, and there is the fear that, with magnetic contact broken, a long fall through emptiness will ensue.
    But they made progress, trudging towards a near horizon that was a purple painted angle-bar, glowing dully against the blackness.
    Todhunter called a halt, contorting himself so that his magnetic knee-pads touched the plating. He said, “This is odd. It looks like clumps of some sort of living organism growing on the plates. It’s dead now, of course.”
    “What I expected,” Grimes told him.
    “What you expected, sir?”
    “If and when we get back to Port Forlorn, Doctor, you must read a few of the books in my rather specialized library. . . . I remember that a bright young journalist from the Lorn Argus once did a feature article on it. She cooked up rather a neat title, From Dug-Out Canoe to Interstellar Liner .”
    “I don’t understand, sir.”
    “Neither do I, Doctor. But those barnacles will keep. They’ve been keeping for one hell of a long time.”
    They negotiated the angle-bar—like a ridge, it was, like the ridge of a roof with a pitch of 45 degrees—and beyond it was more of the purple-painted plating, and beyond that a stretch of pink paint, and beyond that was the dull-gleaming black. Grimes stopped at the border between the two colors, looked down at an odd, white-painted design—a circle, bisected by a line that had at one end the letter L, at the other the letter R. And from the right-hand end of this line was another line at right angles to it, and this was subdivided and lettered: IT, T, S, W, WNA. . . .
    “So this is—or was—one of our ships. . . .” Sonya Verill’s voice was faint yet clear in his helmet phones. “Of course, those letters could be odd characters from some utterly alien alphabet, but they don’t look