The Corianis Disaster
Murray Leinster
I
When the Corianis 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 the Corianis, 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 the Corianis, 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 the Corianis' 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 instructions to the Kholarian negotiators. So the second ship arrived less than two days after the Corianis should have touched ground. Only, the Corianis 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 the Corianis-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 ah1 settled 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 the Corianis 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 the Corianis needed to be found and helped in her emergency. Nobody had ever yet located a ship once vanished in space, but the Corianis was remarkably well-found, with special devices for distress signals. She might be located.
II
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, the Corianis 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, the Corianis 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, the Corianis 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 the Corianis. 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 the Corianis 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 the Corianis was at least as unreasonable. Something of the sort had to happen some time or another, but it didn't have to be the Corianis-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.