Murray Leinster - The Corianis Disaster

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THE

CORIANIS

DISASTER

Murray Leinster

When theCorianis vanished in space between Kholar and Maninea, she was missed at once, which was

distinctly unusual. Jack Bedell was aboard her at the time, but his presence had nothing to do with it; it

was pure chance. Ordinarily a ship is missed only when her follow-up papers, carried from her port of

departure by another ship, arrive at her port of destination and say that she left at such-and-such a time,

bound for the place where she didn't arrive. This can be a surprisingly long time later.

But in the case of theCorianis, there was no time lost. The Planetary President of Maninea had paid a

state visit to Kholar for the beginning of negotiations for a trade-treaty between the two neighbor worlds.

Now he headed back home on theCorianis, which was chartered for the trip. Important political figures

of Kholar accompanied him to try to finish the trade-treaty job on Maninea. It was a charming picture of

interplanetary political cordiality, and Jack Bedell got passage by accident. It was a short hop

anyhow—barely six light-years— calling for two days in overdrive. Then, the day after theCorianis'

departure, a political storm blew up in the Planetary Congress of Kholar, and a second ship was

chartered to follow and give new and contradictory in-

structions to the Kholarian negotiators. So the second ship arrived less than two days after theCorianis

should have touched ground. Only, theCorianis hadn't; it had vanished in space.

From any viewpoint, it was a nasty business. There was a limit to the distance at which ships could

communicate in space, and there was a limit to the speed of radiation by which a distress signal could be

sent; the combination was depressing. Call a light-second an inch: then six light years is thirty-six miles. In

this frame of reference, a ship like theCorianis— a big one—is smaller than a virus particle; and if

something happens to it on the two-day run, the job of finding it is strictly comparable to finding one lost

virus-particle on several dozen miles of highway, with only a very few other motes able to move around

and look for it.

It was an extra-nasty bit of business, too, because the Planetary President of Maninea was on board,

accompanied by the Minister of State of Kholar; the Minister of Commerce of Kholar; the Speaker of

the Planetary Senate of Maninea; the Chairman of the Lower House Committee on Extra-Planetary

Affairs of Kholar; and a thronging assortment of assistants, aides, secretaries, wives, children, and

servants. They were ah1settled down for the journey when Jack Bedell diffidently applied for passage.

Somebody misunderstood, and thought him part of the two official parties; he got on board less than ten

minutes before take-off.

He wasn't important; he was only a mathematical physicist. When theCorianis was realized to be

missing, people worried about the more important people and felt badly about the women and children.

Nobody was disturbed about Bedell, but theCorianis needed to be found and helped in her emergency.

Nobody had ever yet located a ship once vanished in space, but theCorianis was remarkably

well-found, with special devices for distress signals. She might be located.

Naturally, when she lifted off there was no faintest hint of disaster ahead. She was a huge ship and

licensed for journeys of any length within the galaxy. On the Kholar City spaceport she towered

twenty-five stories high, and was at least as much in diameter. She was an imposing spectacle as she

waited for the clear-to-rise signal. When she rose, she was even more stately.

She lifted at 4:11 Kholar City time. In two minutes, the sky outside her ports was dark. In four minutes,

stars appeared and automatic shutters cut off the burning light of the local sun. In twelve minutes, she was

well out of atmosphere and merely a speck of dazzling sunlight reflected down to those who watched her

departure. She was an artificial star, visible in daylight. She went on out and out and out for some tens of

thousands of miles, then she swung slightly about some inner axis; she steadied.

She flicked instantaneously out of sight as her overdrive field sprang into being, and drove for the

Maninean solar system at some hundreds of times the speed of light. By the nature of the structured field

about her, theCorianis could not remain stationary. Wherever the field was, the fact of being there was

intolerable. It acted as if it, and all its contents, were possessed of a negative inertia, so that enormous

energy would be needed to hold it still. The theory of the overdrive field was not fully understood, but the

best guess was that it partly neutralized those cosmic forces which tend to keep things as they are, and

what they are, and where they are. Nobody knew just how delicate the balance of such forces might be,

but the overdrive field worked.

Anyhow, theCorianis translated herself from one place to another with a celerity that was unthinkable.

She did not so much move through space as exist for infinitesimal parts of a second in a series of places

where she could not continue to exist. Yet she was safe enough. Since two things cannot be in the same

place at the same time, theCorianis could not come to be in a place where

there was something else; she could not collide with a meteor, for example. If one existed at the spot

where she should be a single one-millionth-of-a-second ahead—why —she skipped that space and

existed temporarily where otherwise she would have been two one-millionths-of-a-second in the future.

There were limits to the process, to be sure; it was doubtful as to how far a ship in overdrive could skip;

it would not be wise to risk collision with a sun, or even a small planet. But such a thing had never been

known to happen.

So the big ship seemed to float, utterly tranquil, in her bubble of modified space, while actually she

changed her position with relation to the planet she'd left at the rate of some seven hundred fifty thousand

million miles per hour. She was divided into dozens of compartments with separate air-systems and

food-supplies for each, and she had two overdrive units—one a spare—and she was equipped with

everything that could make for safety. If any ship should have made the journey from Kholar to Maninea

without incident, that ship was theCorianis. It seemed that nothing less than a special intervention of

cosmic ill-will could possibly do her any harm.

The cause of her disaster, however, was pure blind chance. It was as unreasonable as the presence of

Jack Bedell among her passengers. He was a small man with a thoughtful expression and a diffident

manner. To a few men working in extremely abstruse research, Bedell was a man to be regarded with

respect. But he was almost painfully shy; to an average under-secretary he was unimpressive. He was on

theCorianis because a man he'd gone to Kholar to consult had stepped in front of a speeding ground-car

the day before his arrival in Kholar City, and there was no reason for him to stay there. The whole thing

was accident.

The disaster to theCorianis was at least as unreasonable. Something of the sort had to happen some

time or another, but it didn't have to be theCorianis— and it didn't have to be the particular mass of

planetary debris it was.

For the first twenty-seven hours of her journey, the state of things aboardship was perfectly normal. The

j Planetary President of Maninea remained in his suite, except for a single formal appearance at dinner.

The Minister of State of Kholar practiced equal dignity. The Kholarian Minister of Commerce

relaxed—which meant that he strolled through the public rooms and looked over the girl secretaries with

a lecherously parental air. Other political figures did other things, none of them outstanding. Nurses took

children to the children's diversion-rooms, and some were obediently diverted, while others howled and

had to be taken back to their mothers. Jack Bedell wandered about, watching his fellow-passengers with

interest, but much too shy to make acquaintances.

The time for sleep arrived—the time by Kholar City meridian, which the passengers observed. It

passed. The time for getting up arrived. It passed. The time for breakfast came around. It went by.

Bedell sat in a recreation-room, mildly watching his ship-companions, when the disaster took place. He

was probably the only person in the passenger's part of the ship who noticed. The vanishing of the

Corianis was not spectacular, to those who vanished with it.

The lights dimmed momentarily; there was the faintest possible jar. That was all.

Ill

From outside, something visible did occur. True, theCorianis could not be seen; where she was, she

existed for such immeasurably small fractions of a microsecond that she wouldn't have been visible even

in the light of a close-crowding sun. But there was no sun hereabouts; the sun Kholar was a

fourth-magnitude star back along the ship's course, the sun of Maninea was a third-magnitude star ahead.

Here was only starlight.

It was very faint and unable to make anything seem brighter than the tiny glitterings of the galaxy's

uncount-

able distant suns. Even if somebody had been hereabouts in a ship out of overdrive, it is unlikely that any

warning would have appeared. Now and again a tiny pin-point of light winked out and on again. It

couldn't have been observed; there were too many stars, and too few of them blinked out for too-short

instants. But there was something out here.

It was debris—a clump of lumps of stone and metal, hurtling to nowhere. They were the fragments of a

planet, broken to bits and thrown away through space by die explosion of a nova, like the one that

formed the Crab Nebula. The explosion happened before men, back on Earth, had learned to warm

themselves by camp-fires. The gas-nebula part of the explosion was long-since expanded to nothingness,

but the fragments of a world went on. There were scraps of stone the size of pebbles, and lumps of metal

the size of mountains. Some floated alone, up to hundreds of miles from any other. But there was a loose

mass of objects gathered together by then: small gravitational fields, which was of the size but not the

solidity of a minor moon.

All these objects flew onward as they had since the galaxies were closer and almost new. The

moon-sized mass of clumped objects crossed the path along which theCorianis translated itself. The ship

was invisible, the planetary debris undetectable.

There was a sudden, monstrous flare of light. It blazed frenziedly where the largest clump of fragments

floated. It was an explosion more savage than any atomic explosion; it volatilized a quantity of metal

equal to half theCorianis' mass. It jolted the few hundreds of cubic miles of celestial trash which had

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