Over in the corner!
Screwed into the oak paneling was a chronometer, plainly visible because of its shiny dial. A rather quaint-looking model, an antique, with cute little brass doodads around the dial… Wasting no time, he undid the screws, carefully slipped the chassis out with his fingertips, and cradled it in his palm. The glossy, brass-plated bottom bore the engraving CORIOLANUS.
That was it—the name of Momssen’s ship.
His eyes swept the cabin. So it was in this room and in this very same chair that Momssen had sat during the final moments!
He opened Lloyd’s Shipping Register to the C’s.
CONDOR, CORINTHIAN, CORSAIR, CORIOLANUS: Registered with the company of… rest mass 19,000 tons… launched in the year… uranium-hydrogen reactor, type… cooling system… maximum thrust… introduced on the Terra-Mars line; listed as missing following a collision with the Leonids; located sixteen years later by a patrolship in the aphelion of its orbit… underwent class A repairs at Ampers-Hart… reintroduced by the Southern Company on the Terra-Mars line… licensed as general cargo transport… insurance premium… Ho hum… Ha, here it is:… under the name THE BLUE STAR.
He shut his eyes… Gosh, it’s quiet in here. So that’s it—they changed the name. To make it easier to hire a crew, I bet. Maybe that’s what the agent had meant when he said…
He began thinking back to when he was still a cadet. One of their patrolships from the Base had discovered the wreckage… Those were the days when meteorite warnings always came too late… Then there was the Commission’s report, brief and to the point: “Conditions beyond control. No one at fault.”… What about the crew? The evidence indicated that not all of them had been killed instantly… that among the survivors was the skipper, and that, thanks to him, the crew—though cut off from one another by the collapsing bulkheads and with no hope of being rescued—had held out to the end, down to the last oxygen bottle… But there was something else, some morbid detail that the press had played up for weeks, until some new sensation had put it out of the public’s mind… What in the world was it?