External links
- Star Light title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
 | This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1960s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Star Light is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the October 1962 issue of Scientific American and reprinted in Asimov's 1968 collection Asimov's Mysteries .
Arthur Trent is a starship pilot and the young accomplice of Brennmeyer, an elderly and brilliant researcher. Brennmeyer has been planning a crime for thirty years. They have stolen a quantity of a valuable substance called "krillium" that is needed to build robots, and can be sold for millions on any civilized world. Due to the size of the galaxy and lack of any central government, no cooperation between police of different planets is possible except for the closest ones, so as long as they are far enough from the point of origin, no search will be possible, nor any reason for the locals to believe the krillium was illegally obtained.
Brennmeyer has compiled extensive data on stars and inhabited planets for many thousands of light-years around. He plans a randomly directed jump through hyperspace, which shall place them well beyond the reach of the police. Then, another jump will be made toward the closest planet in the Brennmeyer's database. (They will jump randomly because the time required to compute an ordinary jump is long enough that the police would catch them before the computation is complete, and also because there will be no chance of anyone knowing their destination.) He has engaged Trent to pilot their getaway ship, since he cannot do so himself. Trent, however, does not wish to share the wealth. He murders Brennmeyer with a knife and flees by himself, confident that the ship's automatic search-and-compare program will locate a usable star and planet for him. He leaves all the evidence for the police to find, since he is sure that they shall not be able to catch him.
He makes the jump, then waits for the computer to match the local stars to its stored patterns. Much time elapses, however, without a match being found. Trent realizes, to his horror, that one bright star must be a recent nova, which distorts the pattern into one the computer will never be able to find in its maps. He lacks the knowledge to override the search procedure, and his life support will not last indefinitely. The story ends with Trent wishing that he had kept the knife.
| | This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1960s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
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"Blockade" is the nineteenth and penultimate episode of the second season of the military science fiction television series Stargate Universe. The episode originally aired on May 2, 2011 on Syfy in the United States. The episode was directed by longtime director and producer of the Stargate franchise Andy Mikita. It was written by Linda McGibney.