He was baffled and half angered by David’s tenderness towards his wife. Vixen had known them over the years and had watched Alice grow from a vibrant, beautiful girl into a harsh, treacherous creature who could look upon murder.
Vixen tried to allow for the neglect that David had shown her, but then he thought of his own wife. She had been patient. No, Alice would have been discarded as a worthless human by all but David who still saw in her the dreams he had held long ago.
For good or for evil, the Synthesis had produced a mighty upheaval in those upon whom it was performed.
With difficulty, Vixen performed the work of driving the probes into the brain of Dodge with precision. He would have enjoyed much more smashing that shining pate with a hammer, he thought. And his life would be no more forfeit than for what he was already doing. For assault and kidnaping they were already dead men.
He sat down when his work was through and watched David switch on the simultaneous channels of the selector that fed pulses to the brains of Dodge and of Alice. The room was silent and there was nothing to be done during the long hours ahead.
He must have slept, dozing in the uncomfortable chair by the wall. He was roused at last by the excited babbling of voices and recognized the speech of the Synthesized in their wild new tongue.
They were around the two tables, and the helmets and probes had been removed from the two figures. Dodge had been turned over and was struggling to sit up, his face suffused with the red blush of rage. He looked like a pudgy Buddha squatting on the table in the shapeless gown that covered him. Vixen felt a chill of dread.
But a slow change spread over the face of Dodge. He reminded Vixen suddenly of a man blind for many years who was seeing again the dawn. His face lighted, and he looked around.
After a moment, his head bowed, and he wept quietly.
David was not watching. He was beside Alice. She had not yet seen him, and Vixen could glimpse only the side of her face, but ugly lines of strain and dark intent seemed to have vanished. A quality of rightful youth had taken possession of her.
She turned then, and caught sight of David. Her arms went out to him, and he crushed her close to him. Vixen could see the tears rising in her eyes and spinning down her cheeks and heard her murmuring over and over, “My darling—”
Marianne sat beside Vixen, her face wistful but not bitter, and Vixen’s eyes continued to shift from the face of Dodge to Alice and back.
“If those two could be changed,” he whispered half to himself, “the whole world could be made over.”
“I’m next. You’ll let me be next?” he demanded urgently. “And after me, the whole world!”
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 all 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 aboard ship was perfectly normal. The 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.
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 the 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 ou
t 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.
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