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

TheCorianis 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 theCorianis 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. TheCorianis 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 theCorianis 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.

TheCorianis 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