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

like it to me.”
    “They’re not,” Grimes told her. “The L and the R stand for Lloyds’ Register. TF is Tropical Fresh, T is Tropical, S is Summer, W is Winter, and WNA is Winter North Atlantic.”
    “But what does it mean? And how do you know?”
    “I know because the history of shipping—all shipping—has always fascinated me. I should have recognized this ship at first glance, but I did not, because she has no right here. (But have we?) But here she is, and here we are—and we’re luckier than her people because we shall be able to survive even if we can’t find our way back . . .”
    And then, still in the lead, he was shuffling over the black-painted plating until he came to a section of white-painted rails. He threw his body forward, grasped the rails with his gloved hands. He remained in this position until he had once again oriented himself, until his “up” and “down” were the “up” and “down” of the long-dead people of the dead ship. He was looking into a promenade deck. There was the scrubbed planking, and ahead of him was white-painted plating, broken by teakwood doors and brass rimmed ports—and with dense, black shadows where the glare of the Quest’s searchlights did not penetrate. With a nudge of his chin he switched on his helmet lantern; he would be needing it soon.
    The wooden deck would effectively insulate his boot soles from the steel plating beneath it, so he made a scrambling leap from the rail to one of the open doorways, pulled himself into the alleyway beyond it. There were more doors—some open, some ajar and secured by stay hooks, some shut. Grimes waited until the others had joined him, then pulled himself along a sort of grab rail to the first of the partially open doors. His gloved fingers fumbled with the stay hook, finally lifted it. The door swung easily enough on its hinges, which were of polished brass.
    He let himself drift into the cabin, the glare of his helmet light gleaming back at him from burnished metal, from polished wood. There was a chest of drawers, and there were two light chairs that seemed to be secured to the deck, and there were two bunks, one above the other. The upper bunk was empty.
    The Commodore stared sadly at the pair of figures in the lower bunk, the man and the woman held in place by the tangle of still-white sheets. He had seen Death before, but never in so inoffensive a guise. The bodies, little more than mummies, had been drained of all moisture by their centuries-long exposure to a vacuum harder even than that of normal interstellar Space, or even that of intergalactic Space, and yet lacked the macabre qualities of the true skeleton.
    Todhunter’s voice was hushed. “Do you think, sir, a photograph?”
    “Go ahead, Doctor. They won’t mind.”
    It’s a long time, he thought, it’s a long, long time since you minded anything. . . . But how did it come to you? Was it sudden? Did the cold get you first, or did you die when the air rushed out of your lungs in one explosive burst? He turned to look at Sonya, saw that her face was pale behind the visor of her helmet. He thought, We should be thankful. We were lucky. He said, “We shan’t learn much by looking in the other cabins.”
    “Then where can we learn something?” asked Calhoun in a subdued voice.
    “In the control room—although they didn’t call it that.”
    He led the way along alleyways—in some of which drifted dessicated bodies—and up companionways, careful all the time to maintain the sense of orientation adapted to the derelict. Through public rooms they passed, the glare of their helmet lanterns, broken up into all the colors of the spectrum, flung back at them from the ornate crystal chandeliers. And then, at last, they came out into the open again, on to a great expansive of planking on either side of which the useless lifeboats were ranged beneath their davits. All around them was the emptiness, and there was Faraway Quest , her searchlights blazing,