LITMIR.BIZ

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space, blocking the stars in sections as it flowed past. The blunt, stocky shape reminded Rhodan of a thumb. It lacked any hint of the flattened appearance to which the crawlers owed their name.

      At their first sight of the object, the control crew broke out in angry curses. Rhodan felt relieved at their reaction: he had wondered if the crew of the Palenque would ever release its tension.

      But at what cost ... ?

      "Let's take a closer look at that thing," Sharita ordered.

      Rhodan felt a vibration under his feet as the Palenque's engines accelerated to maximum and sent the ship after the object.

      In the control center holo, the rotating shadow grew ever larger, its outlines becoming increasingly sharper. Rhodan thought he saw metal reflecting the dim light of the stars. Long, regular lines, and at one end ... a black abyss, framed by sharp-edged tongues of metal that twisted in all directions. One prominent spike looked like it was being pulled back and forth by the rotation of the object, almost as though it was waving. What an absurd thought.

      "Hey, that thing is waving at us!" Alemaheyu exclaimed. Apparently, he had no concerns about expressing even the craziest interpretations out loud.

      "Can the chatter! That thing out there is just a piece of dead metal, nothing else."

      Dead metal ... Rhodan thought there was a grain of truth in what Sharita said.

      The Palenque made a short hyper-light jump. When it reentered normal space, the object was immediately in front of it—at a distance of a quarter-million kilometers.

      It was unmistakably a technological artifact. It reminded Rhodan of the rockets used by the human race during his time with the U.S. Space Force nearly three thousand years ago, before man discovered the Arkonides.

      Except that this rocket had been torn in half. They were looking at a remnant, and the burn marks on the metal tangle at one end indicated that the split had been the result of an explosion. Had an accident occurred on board? Or had someone shot at the ship? And—Rhodan realized it was the critical question at the moment—what had happened to the other half?

      He turned to the hyperdetection officer. "Any other objects like this one in the vicinity?"

      Driscol hesitated, then shook his head.

      Sharita gave Driscol an angry look. To Rhodan she said, "You are forgetting your status. You are on the Palenque ... "

      " ... as a guest. I know. Nor am I claiming any authority to command. I just asked a question. And I only took it upon myself to do that because there isn't much time."

      "You don't say!"

      "I do. And there are other things you act like you're not aware of. That thing out there"—Rhodan pointed to the control center holo, in which the wreckage now took up almost all of the image—"is moving at just under light-speed, and we've matched our velocity to its."

      "So?"

      "That means we're in relativistic territory. At the moment I can only make a rough estimate in my head since I don't have access to the ship's syntron, but I'd guess that for each minute we spend at this speed, something like a hundred minutes are going by on Terra and the other League of Free Terrans worlds. We've got to drop out of this speed as fast as we can or we'll have wasted any chance we have of rescuing the crawler's crew."

      Sharita nodded, as if agreeing only reluctantly. "That's true. Very well. First we'll haul that thing on board—who knows, it might be valuable. And then we'll find our people!"

      Rhodan didn't reply. He believed he knew what had happened to Crawler Eleven. If he was right, it would not make the crew of the Palenque happy.

      The Palenque returned to the original search area, combing it for a second time in a series of hyper-jumps, supported by a swarm of crawlers that were just as industrious as they were blind. When this search also proved fruitless, Sharita expanded the search radius.

      While this was going on, no one worried about the wreck that had been recovered and which now rested in one of the Palenque's hangars. Not in the hanger used by Crawler Eleven—the symbolism would have been too much for the crew—but in the hangar designed to accommodate the ship's space-jet, empty because the owners of the Palenque had been unable to bring themselves to invest in the auxiliary craft. It was not a lack of curiosity that kept the prospectors from examining their discovery: the bottom line was that the wreck was something dead, and their concern was focused on the living.

      But with each hour that passed, it became increasingly clear that the crew of Crawler Eleven now lived only in the minds of their fellow prospectors. There wasn't the slightest trace of the vehicle to be found in the Ochent Nebula.

      Rhodan watched, a helpless onlooker, as the prospectors' hopes died bit by bit. At first, sheer tension allowed them to avoid the truth. The members of the control center crew tapped into the hyperdetector's data and went through it with their own eyes in the desperate hope of discovering anomalies that the ship's syntron had overlooked. Alemaheyu Kossa wrote search programs on the fly that analyzed the incoming and stored data from fresh perspectives. But their efforts yielded no results; all they found were small, scattered clouds of cosmic dust. Exhaustion replaced tension, and desperation grew. It simply couldn't be! Their crewmates had to be alive! They fought the ever more pressing need for sleep, determined to not leave their comrades in the lurch. But the hyperdetector remained silent, and as the search radius steadily grew, the probability of finding Crawler Eleven steadily shrank.

      Finally, Rhodan felt compelled to speak up. "Commander, I believe there is no point in continuing this search."

      "Oh?" The glare from the bruised-looking eyes clearly added: And what makes you think you know so much about it?

      "The crawler's crew is dead."

      "And how can you know this? The crawler had enough air and supplies to last for weeks."

      "I'm aware of that. But it doesn't matter. The crawler has been destroyed."

      "That can't be." Sharita rose abruptly from her seat and stood up straight, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from her uniform jacket. "We have combed the entire area. The last vestiges of the hyper-storm have died out. The hyperdetectors are operating at full capacity. If there was even one piece of debris bigger than a speck of dust out there, we would have found it."

      "Exactly."

      "What do you mean by that?"

      "That in all likelihood, not even a speck of dust from Crawler Eleven remains."

      Sharita's right hand closed around the grip of her beamer. "Now I understand what you're trying to say! Those damned Akonians! I'll make them pay! Who else could be behind this? If not them, then it was the Dishheads! I'll ... "

      Rhodan shook his head. "No. This was not their doing."

      "And who else, pray tell? Don't tell me it's the Arkonides, and they're the reason you're here hanging on our ... tail."

      "No. My mission is what I have told you. I'm here to make contact with the Akonians through unofficial channels and improve Terra's relationship with them. Granted, the Akonians are all over the Ochent Nebula, but it wasn't the Akonians who destroyed the crawler. It was that thing there." The Immortal pointed to a small holo at the edge of the control center showing the hangar containing the recovered wreck. "Or I should say, its missing half."

      Pearl Laneaux, who up to now had been occupied with the hyperdetector data at one of the consoles, spoke up. "There's something to that. The thing was moving at nearly light-speed when we retrieved it. An object's mass increases toward infinity the closer it comes to the speed of light. Even a collision with a toy ball moving at that speed would be fatal. Only the tiniest particles would be left of both bodies."

      "That could be," the commander allowed. "But why is half of that thing still left? Assuming your suspicion is correct, then shouldn't there be just a single cloud of particles remaining?"

      "That's true," Rhodan conceded. "But the thing may not have come apart in the collision

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