“Sensors?” the Captain asked.
“Non-organic material only, sir,” Haslam reported. “No atmosphere present. Relative to the ambient temperature, it is very warm, suggesting that whatever happened occurred recently and probably as a result of an explosion.~~
Before the Captain could reply, Dodds said, “More wreckage, sir. A larger piece. Distance fifty-two miles. Spinning rapidly.”
“Give me the numbers for closing with the larger piece,” Fletcher ordered. “Power Room. I want maximum thrust available in five minutes.”
“Three more pieces,” said Dodds. “Large, distance one hundred plus miles, widely divergent bearings, sir,”
“Show me a distribution diagram,” said the Captain, responding quickly. “Compute courses and velocities of all the pieces of wreckage, with a view to tracing the original point of the explosion. Haslam, can you tell me anything?”
“Same temperatures and material as the other pieces, sir,” Haslam reported. “But they are at the limit of sensor range, and I could not say with certainty that it is composed entirely of metal. None of the pieces encloses an atmosphere, even residual.”
“So if organic material is present,” said Fletcher grimly, “it is no longer alive.”
“More wreckage, sir,” said Dodds.
This is not going to be a fast rescue, thought Conway. It might not even be a rescue at all.
Fletcher must have been reading Conway’s mind, because he pointed at the big repeater screen. “Don’t give up hope, Doctor. The first indications are that a ship has suffered a catastrophic explosion, and the distress beacon was released automatically as a result of the malfunction and not by one of the survivors, if any. But look at that display..
The picture on the screen did not mean very much to Conway. He knew that the winking blue spot was the Rhabwar and that the white traces that were appearing every few seconds were wreckage detected by the ship’s expanding radar and sensory spheres. The fine yellow lines that converged at the center of the screen were the computed paths taken by the wreckage from the point of the explosion, and what should have been a simple picture was confused by groups of symbols and numbers that flickered, changed or burned steadily beside every trace.
The distribution of the wreckage seems a bit lopsided for an explosion,” Fletcher went on, “and although the scale is too small for it to be apparent on the screen, it appears to have originated from a short, flat arc rather than a point. Then, there is the virtually uniform rate of spin on the pieces of wreckage, and their relatively small number and large size. When a ship is torn apart by an explosion, usually caused by a power-reactor malfunction, debris size is small and the rate of spin negligible. Also, the temperature of this wreckage is too low for it to have originated in a reactor explosion, which we now know would have to have occurred less than seven hours ago.
“The probability is,” the Captain ended, “that it was a hyperdrive generator malfunction, Doctor, and not an explosion.”
Conway tried to control his irritation at the other’s lecturing and faintly condescending tone, realizing that the Captain could not help his academic background. Conway knew that if one of a matched set of hyperdrive generators was to fail, the other was supposed to cut out automatically; the vessel concerned would emerge suddenly into normal space somewhere between the stars, and sit there, unable to make it home on impulse drive, until either it repaired the sick generator or help arrived. But there had been instances when the safety cutoff on the good generator had failed or had been a split second late in functioning, which meant that a part of the ship had been proceeding at hyperspeed while the rest had been slowed instantaneously to sublight velocity. The effect on the vessel concerned was, at best, only slightly less catastrophic than a reactor explosion-but at least there would be no heat fusion, radiation and the other complications of a reactor blowup to worry about. The chance of finding survivors was very slightly increased.
“I understand,” said Conway. He flipped the intercom switch on his console and said, “Casualty Deck, Conway here. You may stand down. Nothing will be happening for at least two hours.”