Spacehounds of IPC

A narrow football of steel, the Interplanetary Vessel Arcturus stood upright in her berth in the dock like an egg in its cup. A hundred feet across and a hundred and seventy feet deep was that gigantic bowl, its walls supported by the structural steel and concrete of the dock and lined with hard–packed bumper–layers of hemp and fibre. High into the air extended the upper half of the ship of space—a sullen gray expanse of fifty–inch hardened steel armor, curving smoothly upward to a needle prow. Countless hundred of fine vertical scratches marred every inch of her surface, and here and there the stubborn metal was grooved and scored to a depth of inches—each scratch and score the record of an attempt of some wandering cosmic body to argue the right–of–way with the stupendous mass of that man–made cruiser of the void