he would be powerless to control.
It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off, and he did not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the possibility that he might be being followed. There was no one behind him who looked in the least suspicious, and no one in front of him either. But how could he be completely sure?
The answer was that he couldn’t. He had to trust his instincts, and so far they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free, independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.
And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.
Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length and breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were, exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups of blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.
They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been taken so completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the middle of the promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but his eyes were quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.
At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out of the stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a velocity so great as to be almost unimaginable.
Then he realized that it wasn’t a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it wasn’t rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or encircled the Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading out into space again. He could see the long, bright trail left by its rocket jets, the diffuse incandescence in its wake.
6
AN OFFICER with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at Corriston’s elbow. He hadn’t turned to depart, and for some reason he seemed reluctant to do so. The spaceship’s erratic course seemed to absorb him to the exclusion of all else.
He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a strange look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a moment, then looked quickly away.
Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.
Watching the freighter’s hull blaze with friction as it went into a narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe that the particular manner of a spaceman’s departure was simply one, tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew.
Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the eye could hardly follow it.
“It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it explodes on land”, someone at Corriston’s elbow said. “I wouldn’t care to be within a hundred miles of it”. “Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right — any city within a radius of thirty miles. This is really something to watch!”
The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet, an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence and put an end to its life.
The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman on the Station’s wide-view promenade.
There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence spiraling outward into space.
As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under conditions of maximum visibility.
It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who were not even quite sure that the freighter had exploded.
But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around Corriston seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how blindly hopeful they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the first. There were a few moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost reverent shuffling of feet.
Then the young man at Corriston’s elbow cleared his throat and said in a barely audible whisper: “It didn’t come down in the sea”.
“I know”, Corriston said. “It came down in North America, close to the Canadian border”.
“In the United States?”.
“Yes, I think so. We can’t be sure. It’s too much to hope there was no destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude”.
Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who had taken complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more attention to himself when he should have been bending all of his efforts toward making himself as inconspicuous as possible.
Fortunately the agitation of everyone on thie promenade was helping to remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as silently vanish.
He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his way backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him. He let himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who had taken such an emotional pounding that he could endure no more. Suddenly he saw his chance and took it. There was another small group of civilians close to the group he had joined, and he ducked quickly behind them, using their turned- away backs as a shield. He edged toward a paneled door on his right, his only concern for the moment being a comparatively simple one. He must get away from the crowded promenade as swiftly as possible.
He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long, brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated terms.
There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came abreast of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed the stool opposite her, and fought off an incongruous but almost irresistible impulse to sit down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy. Yes, he could do with a bit of both, Corriston thought.
It was sheer insanity, but he did sit down. He eased himself into the stool and ordered a cup of coffee.
“Something with it?” the waitress asked. “A sandwich, or” —
“No, no, I don’t think so”, Corriston said quickly. “Just the coffee”.
The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. “It was pretty terrible what happened. Wasn’t it?”.
“Did you see it?” Corriston asked.
