1963
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
A shorter version of this work appeared in ANALOG Science Fact—ScienceFiction.
All of the characters in this bookare fictitious, and any resemblanceto actual persons, living or dead,is purely coincidental.
Transcriber's Note:
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyrighton this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errorshave been corrected without note. A table of contents, though not present in the original publication,has been provided below:
For
mon cher ami
Frère Gascé
a man whom I may truly call ...
... my brother
Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang onthrough the eternal night. There was no impression of swimming;the fish shape had neither fins nor a tail. It was asthough it were hovering in wait for a member of somesmaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, sothat it, in turn, could pounce and kill.
But still it moved and sang.
Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the typecould have told that this particular fish was dying.
In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder—long,tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed noneof the exterior markings one might expect of either a livingthing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth silver-pinkexterior was featureless.
That one exception was a long, purplish-black, rougheneddiscoloration that ran along one