Star Light (short story)

"Star Light" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov.

Arthur Trent is a starship pilot and the young accomplice of Brennmeyer, an elderly and brilliant researcher.

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.

He murders Brennmeyer with a knife and flees by himself, confident that the ship's automatic search-and-compare program shall locate a usable star and planet for him.

Trent realizes, to his horror, that the star must be a recent nova, which distorts the pattern into one that the computer shall never be able to find in its maps.