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.
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.
IV
Bedell tensed a little where he sat in an easychair in a lounge on board the Corianis. The lights had blinked; there was a barely noticeable jar. In a partly-filled dining-room just beyond him, people continued with what might be either breakfast or lunch, depending on when they got up. Those who sipped at drinks did not miss a drop. Jack Bedell gazed around him and automatically cocked an eye where speaker-units permitted warnings and information to be given to the entire ship at once. But nothing happened. Nothing. In a city, perhaps, one might not notice if the electricity flickered, or if the floor bumped slightly; but in a ship in space such things are matters of importance.
After a little, Bedell stood up and moved toward the door of that particular room. He glanced along the corridor outside. Yes. At the end there was a view-port, closed now because the ship was in overdrive and there was nothing to be seen. But such ports were very popular among ship passengers at landing-time; they offered the thrill of seeing a world from hundreds, then scores, and then tens of miles as the ship went down to its landing.
A stout woman got in his way, and Bedell diffidently moved aside. He went on to the end of the corridor. There was a manual control by which the shutters outside the port could be opened. He took the handle to open them.
Someone said hesitantly, "Is-is that allowed?"
Bedell turned. It was a girl, a fellow-passenger. He'd noticed her. With the instinct of one who is shy himself, he'd known that she suffered, like himself, the unreasonable but real agonies of self-consciousness. She flushed as he looked at her.
"I - I just thought it might be-forbidden," she half-stammered.
"It's quite all right," he said warmly. "I've done it before, on other ships."
She stood stock-still and he knew she wished herself away; he'd felt that way, too. So he turned the handle and the shutters drew aside. Then he forgot the girl completely for a moment; his hair tried to stand on end.
Because he saw the stars. In overdrive, one does not see the stars; in mid-journey, one does not go out of overdrive. But the stars were visible now-more, there was an irregular blackness which shut out many of them. It moved very slowly with relation to the ship. It was an object floating in emptiness. It could be small and very near, or farther away and many times the size of the Corianis.
There was another object, jagged and irregular. There were others. The Corianis was out of overdrive and in very bad company, something like three light-years from port.
He swallowed, and then moved aside.
"There are the stars," he told the girl. He very carefully kept his voice steady. "They're all the colors there are. Notice?"
She looked; and the firmament as seen from space is worth looking at. "Oh-h-h!" she cried. She forgot to be shy. "And that blackness…"
"It's the effect of the overdrive field," he said untruthfully.
She looked. She was carried away by the sight. Bedell figured she would probably find someone to tell about it, and if there was an emergency-and there was- the fewer passengers who knew about it, the better.
She asked eager questions, and then she turned and looked at him and realized, that she had been talking; she was embarrassed.
"Look!" said Bedell uncomfortably. "I've done quite a lot of space-travel, but I-I find it hard to talk to people, though it's perfectly proper for fellow-passengers to talk. I'd be grateful…"
She hesitated; but his diffidence was real. He'd spoken because she would not tell anyone that the ship was out of overdrive. Maybe-maybe-something could be done about it. And people who are shy can often talk together because they understand.
"Then we'll find a place to sit down," he suggested.
Presently, inconspicuously, he wiped sweat off his forehead. The ship would be about halfway on its journey. If it made a signal, and if the signal could reach so far, it would reach the two nearest planets some three years from now, when the Corianis was forgotten. There were other resources, but they depended on the ship being missed right away. That wasn't likely.
So he talked to the girl. Her name was Kathy Sanders. She was secretary to an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce.