"How about living things on the stars themselves?" asked Karin.
"I don't believe it. Not for a moment. I know there's been talk about flame creatures living at temperatures of millions of degrees centigrade. But nobody has ever met them."
"Jan, what do we do?"
"You tell me. We have an excellent radiation shield system. But we can't keep it going indefinitely. And sooner or later, our food concentrates will run out."
"So we're stuck here. Hopelessly marooned."
"Right. Too bad we're so bored with each other."
Karin said nothing, and once more Jan turned to the controls, hoping against hope. But no matter in which direction he made his attempt, the ship was quickly brought up short. The rubber band had not weakened.
The hours passed, while the two stars continued to blaze at them, watchful and unwinking. Jan adjusted the radiation controls, permitting some of the heat that escaped direct reflection from the polished sides to get past the shielding screen, and warm the ship.
On the whole, as it took some of the load from the screen and lengthened the system's useful life, it was a wise move. But it did make the ship uncomfortable. Karin, he noted, was bearing up well. There were no complaints from her, and it was she who suggested that they put themselves on emergency rations.
It was at the end of thirty hours of their strange imprisonment that they began to be aware of dangers other than those from radiation and hunger. Both the green star and the yellow, as Jan had observed, possessed fairly small coronas. Quite unexpectedly, the green star flared up, and tongues of garish flame licked out for a distance of several million miles. Its action set off a silent uproar in space.