Short Story: Time Fuze

 "Time Fuze" by Randall Garrett as published in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Quotes:

Commander Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the sweatband. "Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come out of ultradrive a couple 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."

Commander Benedict's mind whirled around the monstrousness of the whole thing like some dizzy bee around a flower. What if there had been planets around Centauri A? What if they had been inhabited? Had he, all unwittingly, killed entire races of living, intelligent beings?

Synopsis:

Man's first interstellar craft comes out of "ultradrive" around our nearest neighbor in space, only to find it starting to nova. The ship quickly moves off to a safe distance and the ship's commander and astronomer discuss the unlikelihood of the event while the crew set up the necessary equipment to study the rare phenomena in detail. 

Eventually the ship heads for home and the astronomer compiles the data they've collected. Mid-voyage he comes to the commander with some troubling conclusions. The odds against the nova happening when it did are even greater than originally thought, and he's come to the conclusion that it was their ship coming out of it's experimental drive that caused the nova. Using the distance of the other two stars in the Centauri system, which did not nova, they work out a safe distance for coming out of the drive near Sol.

As they continue on their way home the Commander has a horrible thought. What if entering the ultradrive has the same effect on a nearby star as exiting it does? It doesn't take them long to get an answer to this question...

Thoughts:

I'd encountered the name Randall Garrett before reading this story, and I think I've even read a couple of his other short stories, but it's been so long ago I don't remember for certain. He was very prolific in the 50's and 60's. 

This is a well written little story, with an interesting, if nasty premise. At least it's nasty if you're pro-space exploration. Which I certainly am and a fairly hefty majority of the SF audience of the time would've been. If you fall into that camp this would qualify as horror as well as science fiction, even though it lacks any of the standard tropes of horror.