"Murray Leinster - The Corianis Disaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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, theCorianis 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, theCorianis 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, theCorianis 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 theCorianis. 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
theCorianis 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 theCorianis was at least as unreasonable. Something of the sort had to happen some
time or another, but it didn't have to be theCorianis— and it didn't have to be the particular mass of
planetary debris it was.