Alien Emergencies - James White [53]
A few seconds after the Rhabwar emerged into normal space, Lieutenant Dodds announced, “Wreckage ahead, sir.”
“I don’t believe…!” Fletcher began incredulously. “The accuracy of your astrogation is much too good, Dodds, to be due to anything but sheer luck.”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” Dodds replied, grinning. “Distance is twelve miles. I’m locking on the scope now. You know, sir, this could be the fastest rescue ever recorded.”
The Captain did not reply. He was looking pleased and excited and a little bit wary of so much good luck. On the screen the wreckage showed as a flickering gray blur spinning rapidly in the blackness. Out here on the Rim the stellar density was low, and most of the available light came from the long, faintly shining fog bank, which was the parent galaxy. Suddenly the image became brighter but even more blurred as Dodds switched to the infrared receptors and they saw the wreckage by its own heat radiation.
“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