Physicians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
The tape-speaker said, "_When the gong sounds, breakout will be five
seconds off._" It began to _ticktock_, slowly and deliberately.
Calhoun got into the control seat and strapped in. Murgatroyd said
peevishly, "_Chee!_" and went to position underneath the chair. The
voice said, "_Five--four--three--two--one--_"
The little Med Ship came out of overdrive, and instantly its emergency
rockets kicked violently and Murgatroyd held desperately fast. Then the
rockets went off. There'd been something unguessable nearby--perhaps
cometary debris at the extremest outer limit of a highly eccentric
orbit. Now there was a starfield and a sun within two light-hours. But
if Calhoun had stared, earlier, when there was no sun in sight at all,
now he gazed blankly at the spectacle before him.
There was a sun off to starboard. It was a yellow sun--a sol-type
star with a barely perceptible disk. There were planets. Calhoun saw
immediately one gas-giant near enough to be more than a point, and a
sliver of light which was the crescent of another more nearly in line
toward the sun. But he gazed at a belt, a band, a ribbon of shining
stuff which was starkly out of all reason.
It was a thin curtain of luminosity circling this yellow star. It was
not a ring from the breakup of a satellite within Roche's Limit. There
were two quite solid planets inside it and nearer to the star. It
was a thin, wide, luminous golden ribbon which looked like something
that needed a flatiron to smooth it out. It looked something like an
incandescent smoke ring. It was not smooth. It had lumps in it. There
were corrugations in it. An unimaginable rocket with a flat exhaust
could have made it while chasing its tail around the sun. But that
couldn't have happened, either.
Calhoun stared for seconds.
"Now," he said, "I've seen everything!" Then he grunted as realization
came. "And we're all right, Murgatroyd! It's not our computers that
went wrong. Somebody fed them wrong data. We arrived where we aimed
for, and there'll be a colonized planet somewhere around."
He unlimbered the electron telescope and began a search. But he
couldn't resist a closer look at the ribbon in space. It had exactly
the structure of a slightly wabbly wrinkled ribbon without beginning
or end. It had to be a complex of solid particles, of course, and
an organization of solid particles cannot exist in space without
orbital motion. But orbits would smooth out in the course of thousands
of revolutions around a primary. This was not smoothed out. It was
relatively new.
"It's sodium dust," said Calhoun appreciatively. "Or maybe potassium.
Hung out there on purpose. Particles small enough to have terrific
surface and reflective power, and big enough not to be pushed out of
orbit by light-pressure. Clever, Murgatroyd! At a guess it'll have been
put out to take care of the climate on a planet just inside it. Which
would be--there! Let's go look!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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