When they separated, he thought of something.
"Now, why the hell didn't I remember that a passenger ship has to have a spare overdrive unit?" he demanded of himself. "How silly can I get? Everything's all right. It must be!"
But it wasn't.
V
The Corianis lay dead in space. Dark objects floated about her; they were lumps, bits, masses, mountain-sized things which millions of years before had been part of a planet.
There'd been only the skipper and the first officer and a quartermaster in the control-room when the disaster happened. Utterly without warning of any sort, the overdrive unit bucked and roaring arcs leaped and crackled; the overdrive unit turned to scrap metal in less than seconds. The brownish, featureless haze outside the unshuttered ports vanished. There were myriads of stars-and objects.
Something the size of a mountain-range turned slowly, off to one side of the ship. Innumerable other floating things hung suspended on every hand.
Save for the arcs-and they were momentary-there was no sound. There was a jar from the bucking of the Unit before it slumped into melted metal, but there was no flash of flame-no explosion of any sort. Yet the ship which had moved at the rate of three-quarters of a trillion miles per hour was still, and the first officer gaped stupidly out the ports, and the quartermaster began to shake visibly where he stood.
This was while the Corianis lay dead in space. But the skipper sprang across the control-room. He flipped on the ship's radars and swung the control which would warm up the planetary drive, normally used only for lifting from a space-port and for landing. The radars began to register. The Corianis was within miles of a floating rock-and-metal continent which existed in emptiness. She was within tens of miles of hundreds of bits of cosmic junk, ranging from the size of sand-grains to that of houses. Within hundreds of miles, there were thousands of floating dangers.
The "ready" light for planetary drive glowed green. The skipper jerked the lever to minimum power; the ship gathered way. He steered her clear of the nearest dangers. Below, the engine-room crew matter-of-factly cut away the wrecked drive-unit and began to braze the spare to functioning connection.
Time passed. The skipper, sweating, navigated the Corianis among the leisurely, rolling, gigantic things which could crush the ship's hull like an eggshell. It took him hours to get to where he dared use more than a quarter-gravity drive. It was more hours before he dared use half-gravity. Many hours passed before the radars promised safety if he went again into overdrive.
When the brown haze settled before the control-room ports once more, the skipper was jumpy; the ship would be at least ten hours late to Maninea. The skipper let his third officer make the announcement over the public-address system. He couldn't do it himself; his throat clicked spasmodically shut when he tried to talk.
The Corianis should have been destroyed! She should have gone out of existence in a monstrous gout of flame; by this instant she should be no more than a cloud of vapor-fine particles, floating in emptiness. She had hit an enormous mass of planetary wreckage while speeding faster than light; she had hit a solid object she could not skip beyond. She had burned out her overdrive in what could only have been a collision! But it was not conceivable that the ship would remain as she was, solid and unstrained, after-a collision with a continent of metal out between the stars.
The skipper knew he couldn't be alive. He had a strange, numb conviction that he was a ghost, and the ship and all on board her with him. Despite this belief, however, he was cautious in his approach to Maninea. Ordinarily he'd have come out of overdrive for a corrective sight something over a minute short of estimated time of arrival; a thousand thousand million miles is leeway enough for anybody. But the skipper cut overdrive three hours short of arrival, and an hour, and twice more before he went on interplanetary drive again and called down hoarsely for permission to land. The Corianis was more than thirteen hours late.
Even so, she didn't land immediately. Instead of getting clearance in forty-five seconds, it required more than an hour to get permission to descend. There was confusion aground; there was argument; there was acute apprehension and flat disbelief and the deepest of deep suspicion. When the Corianis did settle on the spaceport tarmac, there was hysteria.
Because the Corianis-at least a Corianis-was already aground. She had landed on Maninea just forty-seven hours thirteen minutes after lifting off from Kholar. She had brought home the Planetary President of Maninea, the Speaker of the Senate of Maninea, and various persons dependent upon them. She had also brought the Minister of State for Kholar, the Minister of Commerce, the Chairman of the Lower House Committee on Extra-Planetary affairs, and a mass of aides, assistants, secretaries, wives, children, and servants. The ship itself was still aground at the spaceport.
When the Corianis landed-the Con'anw-with-a-burned-out-drive-unit-she settled down beside herself. There were two Corianis. There were two Planetary Presidents of Maninea. There were also two Speakers of the Senate, two Ministers of State for Kholar, two Ministers of Commerce, two Chairmen of the Lower House Committee, and two of very nearly everybody else who'd sailed from Kholar. And the twos, the twins, the sets, the pairs of individuals, were not merely as much alike as two peas are like each other. They were as much alike as a pea is to itself. They were exactly alike.
It was quite impossible. It was utterly impossible.
But it was even more embarrassing.
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.