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

 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.

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.

Ill

From outside, something visible did occur. True, theCorianis 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
uncount-

able 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 theCorianis 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 theCorianis' mass. It jolted the few hundreds of cubic miles of celestial trash which had