Graveyard of Space, The

Ralph and Diane Meeker thought the worst part of their journey was already behind them. Their mining venture in the asteroid belt has collapsed, their marriage is fraying, and the battered old Gormann ’87 is barely capable of getting them home alive. Then a radar malfunction sends them drifting into one of the most feared regions in space: a floating maze of derelict ships trapped together by gravity. Inside the sargasso, every wreck tells the same terrible story. Crews ran out of air. Food disappeared. Hope vanished one sealed compartment at a time. With their own radar system destroyed, Ralph and Diane have only hours to search the drifting hulks for replacement parts before they become part of the graveyard themselves. The deeper they push into the silent fleet, the more dangerous the mission becomes. Some of the ships hold more than corpses, and the isolation of space has twisted at least one survivor into something terrifying. The Graveyard of Space combines claustrophobic suspense with classic asteroid-belt adventure. Milton Lesser fills the story with drifting wrecks, failing equipment, and the cold terror of being trapped where rescue will never come. Beneath the danger is a damaged marriage forced to confront what years of disappointment have done to it. Ralph and Diane can survive the sargasso only if they stop treating each other like strangers. Milton Lesser published widely across science fiction magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, appearing in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, and Future Science Fiction. He later became even more famous as Stephen Marlowe, author of the Chester Drum mysteries and the Nebula Award-nominated The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. The Graveyard of Space captures Lesser at his most atmospheric, building dread from drifting silence, dead ships, and the terrifying loneliness of deep space.