"Sir, would you tell Dr. Leicher that we have everything set up now?"
Leicher nodded and turned to leave. "I guess we have nothing to do now
but wait."
When the light from the nova did come, Commander Benedict was back at
the plate again--the forward one, this time, since the ship had been
turned around in order to align the astronomy lab in the nose with the
star.
Alpha Centauri A began to brighten and spread. It made Benedict think
of a light bulb connected through a rheostat, with someone turning that
rheostat, turning it until the circuit was well overloaded.
The light began to hurt Benedict's eyes even at that distance and he
had to cut down the receptivity in order to watch. After a while, he
turned away from the plate. Not because the show was over, but simply
because it had slowed to a point beyond which no change seemed to take
place to the human eye.
Five weeks later, much to Leicher's chagrin, Commander Benedict
announced that they had to leave the vicinity. The ship had only been
provisioned to go to Alpha Centauri, scout the system without landing
on any of the planets, and return. At ten lights, top speed for the
ultradrive, it would take better than three months to get back.
"I know you'd like to watch it go through the complete cycle," Benedict
said, "but we can't go back home as a bunch of starved skeletons."
Leicher resigned himself to the necessity of leaving much of his work
unfinished, and, although he knew it was a case of sour grapes,
consoled himself with the thought that he could as least get most of
the remaining information from the five-hundred-inch telescope on Luna,
four years from then.
As the ship slipped into the not-quite-space through which the
ultradrive propelled it, Leicher began to consolidate the material he
had already gathered.
* * * * *
Commander Benedict wrote in the log:
_Fifty-four days out from Sol. Alpha Centauri has long since faded back
into its pre-blowup state, since we have far outdistanced the light
from its explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It_--
"Pardon me, Commander," Leicher interrupted, "But I have something
interesting to show you."
Benedict took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair.
"What is it, Doctor?"
Leicher frowned at the papers in his hands. "I've been doing some work
on the probability of that explosion happening just as it did, and I've
come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before, the
probability was small. A little calculation has given us some
information which makes it even smaller. For instance: with a possible
error of plus or minus two seconds Alpha Centauri A began to explode
the instant we came out of ultradrive!
"Now, the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it
should happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seventh
seconds."