uple of hundred million miles from the first star ever
visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the damned thing
practically blows up in your face."

Leicher could see that Benedict was upset; he rarely used the same
profanity twice in one sentence.

They had been downright lucky, at that. If Leicher hadn't seen the star
begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn't known what it meant, or if
Commander Benedict hadn't been quick enough in shifting the ship back
into ultradrive--Leicher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of
gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship.

The intercom buzzed. The commander answered, "Yes?"

"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.