The Corianis Disaster

III

From outside, something visible did occur. True, the Corianis 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 uncountable 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 the Corianis 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 the Corianis' mass. It jolted the few hundreds of cubic miles of celestial trash which had gathered into a clump. It made a flame of white-hot metal vapor ten miles in diameter, which in milliseconds expanded and dimmed, and in hundredths of a second had expanded so far that it did not even glow.

From a few thousand miles away, it would have looked like a fairly bright spark which went out immediately. From a few million, it would have seemed the temporary shining of a rather faint star. At a distance the Corianis would cover in three heartbeats, a naked eye could not have seen it at all. It was merely some few thousands of tons of metal turned to vapor and expanding furiously. Presently it would constitute a cloud of iron-and-nickel atoms floating in space-which would be unusual; there are calcium clouds between the stars, and hydrogen clouds, but no iron-and-nickel ones. But this would be one.

The Corianis was gone.