The Corianis Disaster

VI

Barely a day after the departure of the Corianis from Kholar, a hastily-chartered mail-ship lifted off to carry corrected instructions to the emissaries negotiating a trade-treaty on Maninea. This other ship went out some twenty thousand miles from the planet Kholar, winked into overdrive, stayed in overdrive with its position relative to Kholar changing at the rate of seven hundred fifty thousand million miles per hour, and arrived at the Maninean solar system on schedule and without incident. But the Corianis had not arrived before her. The Corianis was overdue. There had been a disaster; the Corianis was missing.

The shipping-service force on Maninea tore its collective hair. There was a ship aground, taking off for Ghalt. It carried away with it a plea from the shipping service for ships to help hunt for the missing Corianis. The mail-ship sped back to Kholar; it carried a plea for aid in the urgently necessary search. Meanwhile, Man-inea would take all possible measures. Kholar would do the same.

The main reason for hope, about the Corianis, was that she carried on board the very latest distress-signal system for ships of her size and class. She carried a rocket which could drive some thousands of rffiles away from a disabled ship, and then detonate a fission-type atomic bomb. The rocket was of iron, which would be volatized by the explosion. It would be spread as a cloud of iron particles in space. In less than a week the innnitesimally thin cloud should spread to a million miles. In a month it would be a sizeable patch of vapor. It would be thinner than an ordinary hard vacuum, but it could be detected. In six months it would still be detectable, and it would cover an almost certainly observable area of a spectrotelescope's field between Kholar and Maninea.

The point was that there are no iron-atom clouds in space. Should one appear it would have to be artificial and hence a distress-signal. In the case of the Corianis, her course was known; one could know along what line to look for an appeal for aid.

So, immediately, the shipping-service force on Maninea sent up a space lifeboat with a spectrotelescope on board. It would look for an iron cloud in space along the line to Kholar. The evidence for such a cloud would be the fact that it absorbed iron-spectrum frequencies from the starlight passing through it.

If the Corianis set off her signal-bomb a mere one hundred sixteen thousand thousand million miles from Maninea, the cloud could be detected within a week. If it were set off farther away, its detection would be delayed. But ships to search had been asked for; when they came, they'd follow the Corianis' course back toward Kholar, stopping to look for iron-clouds every few light-days along the way. They'd pick up an artificial cloud of iron vapor long before light passing through it could get to either planet.

So the shipping-service forces hoped. The job of finding one space-ship on a sight-light-year course, with possible errors hi all three dimensions-it wasn't an easy one. But if the shipping service did find the Corianis, it could feel proud.

But it didn't. It only found out where the Corianis had vanished.