The Voyage of the Space Beagle — A.E. Van Vogt

The starship Space Beagle is a big ship bound for deep space. With a crew of hundreds, cargo space for a mind-boggling array of alien artifacts and shipments of precious objects, it ventures to planets never before visited by humans, risking destruction and death in its quest for new and unusual experiences.

Only the courage and resourcefulness of the crew stand between them and the perils of the spaceways. And the perils are many, ranging from a creature that can survive for eons in the cold dark vacuum of space, only to regain a power monstrous enough to withstand all the Space Beagle's weaponry, to a mutiny that threatens to destroy the ship from within and lay it open to alien attack.