Project Solar Sail

by Arther C. Clarke

  Do you know they used to think of solar sails as romantic, Akiro? The idea of them inspired poetry, for heaven’s sake! Do you think Lewis imagined we’d someday take them so for granted? Or think of them so little? As little as one today appreciates something as lovely but mundane as a diamond?

  Or so beautifully ordinary as ice.

  ###

  David Brin once swore he would never become a “professional” author, but that resolution became harder to keep after his second novel, Startide Rising, won the prestigious Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best novel of 1983. Another novel, The Postman, received the John W. Campbell Award and is scheduled to be made into a film from Warner Brothers. With The Uplift War, a 1987 best-seller and Hugo winner, what more is there to say?

  David’s latest novel, entitled Earth, deals with the danger and hope facing this island oasis world of ours over the decades ahead. It was delayed for a while, because he donated so much time to helping organize Project Solar Sail.

  A Solar Privateer

  by Jonathan Eberhart

  No racehorse ever champed the bit like a solar privateer.

  To make flank speed on the sunlight’s push is like to take a year.

  But when you’re out with the stars set right, ’tis a sight to make you cry.

  No blast nor flames to rattle your brains—a seagull in the sky.

  On a big freight line you can make out fine, breaking orbit furled up tight.

  With a hot box booster on your tail you can make escape alright.

  But the privateer knows the Deadman’s Year on a drift to vee subee,

  With naught to do but sleep and stew till a sunbeam sets you free.

  It’s when he’s out on the dark and deep can the solar sailor smile.

  No cold LOX tanks or reactor banks—just Mylar by the mile.

  No stormy blast to rattle the mast—a sober wind and true.

  Just haul and tack and ball the jack like the water lubbers do.

  It’s a long road out and a long road back, just drifting on the sun.

  Your lover’s hair will all grow long, a-pining for your fun,

  Till looking upward from the ground, she’ll know you’ve ceased to roam;

  A golden spark in the endless dark—the light has brought you home.

  Sunjammer

  by Poul Anderson

  1

  “Ol’ Jonah was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  Ol’ Jonah was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  A storm at sea was getting mean,

  So he invented the submarine.

  Bravo, bravo, hurrah, for the transporteers!”

  Lazing along a cometary orbit, a million-odd miles from Earth, herdship Merlin resembled nothing so much as a small bright spider which had decided to catch an elephant and had spun its web accordingly. The comparison was not too farfetched. Sometimes a crew on the Beltline found they had gotten hold of a very large beast indeed.

  Stars crowded the blackness in the control-cabin viewports, unwinking wintry points of brilliance; the Milky Way cataracted around the sky, the Andromeda galaxy shimmered mysteriously across a million and a half light-years. The sunward port had automatically closed off, refusing so gross an overload. But Earth was visible in the adjacent frame, a cabochon of clear and lovely blue, with Luna a tarnished pearl beyond.

  Sam Storrs, who was on watch, didn’t sit daydreaming over the scene as Edward West would probably have done. He admitted there were few better sights in the system, but he’d seen it before, and anyway that wasn’t his planet yonder. He was a third-generation asterite, a gaunt, crease-cheeked, prematurely balding man who remembered too well the brother he had lost in the Revolution.

  Since there was no work for him to do at the moment, he was trying to read Levinsohn’s Principles of Modern Political Economy. It took concentration, and the whanging of a guitar from the saloon didn’t help. He scowled as Andy Golescu’s voice butchered the melody.

  “King Solomon was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  King Solomon was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  He shipped his wood on a boat for hire,

  ’Cuz a wheel’s no good without a Tyre.

  Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!”

  “Ye gods,” Storrs muttered, “how sophomoric is an adult allowed to get?”

  He reached for the intercom switch, with the idea of asking Golescu to stop. But no, better not. It’d be a long time yet before their orbit brought them back to Pallas. Crew solidarity was as important to survival as the nuclear generator.

  Andy’s okay, Storrs argued to himself. He just happens to be from Ceres. What do you expect of anyone growing up in that kind of hedonistic boomtown atmosphere ? It was different for me, out on the Trojans. There puritanism still has survival value.

  No doubt the company psychomeds had known what they were doing when the picked Storrs, West, and Golescu to operate Merlin. You needed a balance of personality types. Still Storrs wondered about asking for a transfer when they returned to base.

  “Ulysses was a transporteer, he was, he was . . .”

  The long-range radio receiver flashed. Storrs jerked. What the hell? That was no distress signal from a sunjammer, but a wide-beam call on the common band. He sucked in a breath and snapped the Accept switch.

  “. . . He stopped at Calypso’s isle for beers,

  And didn’t proceed for ten more years . . .”

  The loudspeaker seethed with cosmic static. “International Space Control calling Beltline Transportation maintenance ship eleven, computed to be in Sector Charlie Adam. Come in, number eleven . . . International Space Control—”

  “Here we are.” Storrs recollected his dignity. No Earthling was going to say that a citizen of the Asteroid Republic didn’t know the rituals. “Maintenance ship eleven, Merlin out of Pallas, Engineer-Captain Storrs on duty, acknowledging call from International Space Control. My precise position and orbit are . . .” He read figures off the navigator screen. Storrs’s skin began to prickle. The messages that drew a herdship off her path were normally automatic: beeps from a sailship registering trouble. Earth SCC seldom got involved directly.

  The ship’s transceiver web fixed on the incoming beam and the maser swung about, causing Merlin to counter-rotate a trifle.

  “Columbus was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  Columbus was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  They put the royal crown in pawn

  To shut him up and move him on.

  Bravo . . .”

  Golescu must have noticed the motion. His singing cut off abruptly. Storrs flipped the intercom open. “Got a call from Earth,” he said concisely, to fill the others in.

  His signal took half a dozen seconds to reach Earth. The operator stopped chanting, heard Storrs out, and then replied.

  “Hello, maintenance ship eleven. Stand by please. Switching you over to main office, groundside.” A low whistle drifted from the intercom. Golescu, posted at the engine, had heard.

  West entered, puffing from the climb up the companionway. He was a large man, his hair grizzled, face and stomach sagging a bit with middle age. But he was still highly able, Storrs admitted, and decent for an Earthman. To be sure, it helped that he was British. The Revolution had been fought mainly against North Americans.

  “Must be something big,” West said. “Headquarters and all that.” He settled into the navigator’s chair.

  “Hello, Merlin,” said a new voice on the radio. It was a baritone, clipped but heavy with authority. “Evan Bailey speaking, assistant director of ISCC’s Bureau of Safety.” This time it was West who whistled.

  “A serious emergency has come up,” Bailey went on. “There’s no time to lose. Please calculate an interception curve for sailship number 128, that’s one-two-eight. We’ll assume that you start acceleration at maximum thrust in, well, fifteen minutes. As soon as possible, anyhow. Is there by any chance another craft like yours reasonably near? You’ll want
every bit of help you can get.”

  “No,” Storrs answered. “Herdships are few and far between. You’re lucky we happen to be this close right now.”

  That was not entirely coincidence. The orbits of the maintenance ships were planned to keep them never too distant from the great vessels of the Beltline. Some of the best mathematicians in the Republic had computed the optimization paths followed by sail and power craft: an intricate, forever changing dance across half the solar system.

  West’s fingers had been playing a tattoo on the keys before him. “One-two-eight,” he murmured. “Yes, here we are. Cargo of . . . I say, this is an odd one. She’s carrying eight hundred metric tons of isonitrate from the Sword’s Jovian-orbit plant. Right now she’s approaching Earth, only about half a million kilometers away, in fact. There were no indications of trouble during her latest data dump.”

  “Isonitrate what?” Golescu inquired over the intercom.

  “An important industrial chemical,” West explained. “Alkali complex of 2,4-benzoisopro—”

  “Never mind,” Golescu said. “I’m sorry I asked. Uh, everything’s okay with our engines, if the gauges aren’t liars.”

  Bailey had hesitated awhile at the other end. Storrs visualized the man, plump in a lounger behind several acres of mahogany desk, sweating that something might happen to interrupt his placid climb through the bureaucracy. His words, when they came, wavered slightly.

  “The sun is going to flare.”

  “What?” Storrs jumped. An oath from Golescu bounced through the intercom. West paused at his work, hands frozen on the keys.

  Bailey continued, unaware of the interruption. “The big flare cycles are predictable far in advance these days, but indications of small, short-lived ones are often not observable more than forty-eight hours ahead.” His tone grew patronizing. “ ‘Clear weather season’ only means a period in which there will be no major flares and the probability of minor ones is low. Still finite, however. You asterites don’t have to worry about solar radiation, out where you are, so perhaps you forget these details. Around Earth, we’re highly conscious of them.”

  You smug planet hugger! Storrs hung on to politeness with both hands. “I know the details well enough,” he said stiffly. “I was only shocked. I can’t believe isonitrate was shipped if there was any measurable chance of a flare while the vessel was inside the orbit of Mars.”

  The beam went forth. While they waited for reply, West said in a mild voice, “Call it an immeasurable chance, then, Sam. The chap’s right, you know. Solar meteorology is still not a completed science. It’s either assume the hazard, knowing you’ll lose an occasional ship, or else have no space traffic whatsoever. A coincidence like this one was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “But for crying in the beer!” exclaimed Golescu from aft. “Why couldn’t it have happened to a cargo of metal or ice?”

  “It does, quite often,” Storrs reminded him. “Metal and ice aren’t hurt by radiation. Remember?” Sarcastically: “I’ve heard you gripe so often about how dull these cruises are most of the time. Well, here’s your chance for some action.”

  Bailey had hung fire again. A rustle, penetrating the dry star-whisper, suggested he had been searching through a report prepared for him. “The flare is expected in about twenty hours,” he said. “Predicted duration is three hours. Estimated peak in Earth’s vicinity is four thousand roentgens per hour. As you know, that will cause isonitrate to explode.”

  Storrs exploded himself. “Twenty hours! You bastards musta known about it at least two days ago! Why didn’t you alert us then? It’ll take us ten of those blithering hours just to make rendezvous!”

  “Take it easy there, Sam,” West said sotto voce. “Some of those high-caste officials are even touchier than that isonitrate.”

  As if in confirmation, Bailey’s words turned hard. “Kindly watch your language, Captain. The delay is unfortunate, I admit, but no one is to blame. The prediction was issued in the usual way, and records were checked as per regulations. The nearness of 128 was noted. However, it is an unmanned craft. You can’t expect an ordinary clerk to know the danger involved in this particular cargo. That was only pointed out when the data reached my office for routine double check. And then a policy decision had to be reached. We haven’t the lugger capacity to unload so much material in time. It would have been simple for us to send a crew out to bleed off the gas and thereby save the sailship from being destroyed. But a staff physicist showed this was impossible. I was informed of the dilemma the moment I came back from lunch, and immediately ordered contact be made with the nearest herdship. What more do you want, man?”

  Storrs unpinched his lips, sat down again, and said, “Well, Mr. Bailey, you might as well order that crew of yours to jettison. We can’t do anything more than that ourselves. Or have you some other suggestion?”

  Waiting out the transmission lag, he heard Golescu say, “Whoof! Looks as if there’s going to be more excitement than I bargained for.”

  West chuckled. “Weren’t you caroling about the mad, merry life of a transporteer?”

  “Shucks, Ed, I was only practicing my act. Those glamour boys from the scoopships and the prospector teams have been latching on to all the girls back home. Something’s got to be done for our kind of spaceman.”

  “That gas must positively not be released so close to our orbital facilities,” Bailey stated. “It would contaminate the entire inner region. If even a monolayer of vapor by-products were to coat the delicate optics we have up there—weather satellites, arms-control observatories—the cost would be astronomical!

  “You may valve it out when you are no less than a million kilometers outbound from cislunar space. That’s a direct order, by my authority under this jurisdiction and the Interplanetary Navigation Agreement. Are you recording? I repeat—”

  “Judas priest!” Golescu yelled. “You expect us to haul away a bomb?”

  A humming silence fell over the ship. Storrs became acutely aware of how the stars glistened, the power plant and ventilators murmured, the deck quivered slightly. He felt the roughness of his overalls on his skin, which had become damp and sharp-smelling. He stared at the meters on the pilot panel, and they stared back like troll eyes, and still the silence waxed.

  Bailey broke it. “Yes. Unless you have some other plan, we do expect you to remove that stuff to a safe distance, under terms of your company’s franchise for terrestrial operations. What’s the problem, anyway? According to your rated thrust, you should be able to get the sailship’s cargo section far enough away in fourteen or fifteen hours.”

  “The hell you say,” Storrs barked. “We can’t use full power on such a load. Too much inertia. We’d rip our hull open. Anyway, we’ve got to uncouple the sail first, to get proper trim—at least two hours’ work.” Desperately: “You’re giving us no safety margin. If the flare happens sooner than you claim, the explosion will destroy us. And you’ll still have space contamination. Plus a lot of ship fragments.”

  “Also people fragments,” Golescu added. “We got a legal right to refuse an impossible job, don’t we?”

  “But not an improbable one,” West said. His gaze went to Earth. “I did want to see Blighty again.”

  “You will,” Storrs said. “We’re not going to commit suicide for the benefit of a lot of Earthlings.”

  “Like me, Sam?” West asked softly.

  Bailey came back on: “You are not expected to act without due precautions. You can safety tow at the end of a cable several miles long, can’t you?”

  “Know how much mass that adds?” Storrs snapped. “But never mind. The fact is, our class of ship isn’t designed for cable tows. We hook on directly by geegee. A cable would tear us apart, just like hauling under max thrust.”

  After a moment, assuming briskness like a garment, Bailey said: “We’ll do what we can. Alert the International Rescue Service. Commandeer whatever else we can find that may be of help. I can’t make any promises,
with so little time to go through channels. But I’ll do whatever is humanly possible.”

  “Amoebically possible, you mean,” Storrs said. He managed to keep it under his breath. Shaking himself, he answered aloud: “We’ll get started now. When we’ve made rendezvous with 128, we’ll call you on the short-range ’caster. Stand by for that. Over and out.”

  He didn’t wait for a response, but snapped off transmission as if the switch were Evan Bailey’s neck.

  2

  “Righto.” West heaved his bulk out of the navigator’s chair and started aft.

  “What’re you doing?’ the Englishman asked when he returned with sandwiches.

  “Trying to figure if we can’t boil off some of the liquid as we tow, so gradually that it won’t affect space too much, so fast that we’ll shed noticeable mass. But hell and sulfur! I don’t have the thrust parameter. Not knowing what sort of tugs we’ll have available . . . How about hitching that Bailey character to the load and cracking a whip over him? A big wire whip hooked up to five hundred volts AC.”

  West achieved a smile. “What’d he push against?”

  “Hmmm, yeah, that’s right. Okay, we’ll get extra reaction by cutting Bailey into small pieces—very, very small pieces—and pitching him aft.”

  West’s look moved out to Earth. The half-disk was becoming a crescent as Merlin approached the spaceward side, but it was also rapidly growing. He traced bands that were clouds, white in a summer sky, the mirror sheen of ocean and the blurred greenish-brown coast of Europe.