Read "Search the Sky" by Frederik Pohl online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
They were all naked. Why not? There's no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Their laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful -- no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with a red rubber bone.
A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago. Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.