“I think so. But I still feel sorry for Mayhem. He’s expecting to wake up in a cold-storage corpse on Deneb IV but instead he’ll come to in a living body aboard a spaceship on collision course for the sun.”
“Just hope he—”
“I know. Succeeds. I don’t even want to think of the possibility he might fail.”
In seconds, the gleaming white dot crawled across the surface of the tri-dim chart from sector C-17 to sector S-1.
The Glory of the Galaxy was now nineteen million miles out from the sun and rushing through space at a hundred miles per second, normal space drive. The Glory of the Galaxy thus moved a million miles closer to fiery destruction every three hours—but since the sun’s gravitational force had to be added to that speed, the ship was slated to plunge into the sun’s corona in little more than twenty-four hours.
Since the ship’s refrigeration units would function perfectly until the outer hull reached a temperature of eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, none of its passengers knew that anything was wrong. Even the members of the crew went through all the normal motions. Only the Glory of the Galaxy’s officers in their bright new uniforms and gold braid knew the grim truth of what awaited the gleaming two-thousand ton spaceship less than twenty-four hours away at the exact center of its perihelion passage.
Something—unidentified as yet—in all the thousands of intricate things that could go wrong on a spaceship, particularly a new one making its maiden voyage, had gone wrong. The officers were checking their catalogues and their various areas of watch meticulously—and not because their own lives were at stake. In spaceflight, your own life always is at stake. There are too many imponderables: you are, to a certain degree, expendable. The commissioned contingent aboard the Glory of the Galaxy was a dedicated group, hand-picked from all the officers in the solar system.
But they could find nothing. And do nothing.