“There’s England,” West said.
Storrs’s features softened a trifle. “Kind of tough, huh? Passing this close to your wife and not getting a chance to see her.”
West picked up the tray. “I’ll take Andy his lunch,” he said.
Passing through the tiny saloon, West heard the plink of Golescu’s guitar. Words bounced after:
“George Washington was a transporteer, he was, he was.
George Washington was a transporteer, he was, he was.
He paddled across the Delaware
To find the buck he‘d shot-put there . . .”
He entered the workshop just forward of the bulkhead that sealed off the nuclear generator. A man was always supposed to stand by here under acceleration, in case of trouble. But Merlin had yet to develop any collywobbles, and Golescu was sitting by. His chair was tilted back against the big lathe, his feet on the rungs and his instrument on his lap. He was a squat, dark young man with squirrel-bright eyes.
“Hi,” he said. “Also yum.”
West set the tray down and poured two cups of coffee. “By the bye,” he said, “I’m not too well up on American folklore, but wasn’t it the Potomac that Washington threw the dollar over?”
“Don’t ask me. My parents came to Ceres direct from Craiova.”
West shook his head. “D’you know, I can’t help pitying children who’ve never felt wind or rain.”
“Everything I heard about weather makes it sound more dismal,” Golescu said through a mouthful. “Me, I feel sorry for kids that never get to ride a scooter with the whole universe shining around them.”
He chewed for a while, then blurted, “Hey, what is this problem of ours, Ed? There’s no hazard in jettisoning boil-off cargo, not to anybody except the insurance carrier. Is there? It’s not like when 43’s sail rotation went crazy. I still get nightmares about that one! Why can’t we just valve off the isowhatsit, adjust the sail to whatever new track is right, and get back inside Merlin’s rad screen field long before the sun burps?”
“Space contamination,” West said. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t get it. Eight hundred long tons of gas aren’t going to make any dent in all that hard vacuum.”
“The devil they aren’t. You’d still need instruments to detect the difference, but—well, let’s figure it out.” West extracted paper, pencil, and a calculator from a workbench drawer. “At a distance of six thousand miles from sea level, Earth has an angular diameter of, um, call it forty-three-and-a-half degrees. Adding in the surrounding volume of space that concerns us, we can say about fifty-seven-and-a-half. If we jettison, nearly all the gas will arrive there; the molecules have an Earthward component of velocity. Between the upper atmosphere limit and, say a fifteen-hundred-mile radius from the surface, the concentration of matter will go from about ten molecules per cubic centimeter, if I remember the figure rightly, to . . . good Lord, I have trouble believing this myself! Over fifteen thousand per cc!”
“And so? That’s not going to cause any friction worth mentioning.”
“We’d actually do better to let the ship blow up,” West mumbled, still bent over his work. “In that case the gas will scatter every which way, and maybe only two percent or so will come near Earth. That’s still intolerable, though.”
“Hell, it’ll dissipate again.”
“Not for a month, I’ll bet. Remember the trapping effect of a planetary magnetic field. But even a few hours of that kind of contamination means the biggest economic disaster since the Nucleus failed.”
“How come?”
“The equipment in orbit, man! There’re hundreds of assorted devices near Earth these days. Photocells, for instance, directly exposed to space. Monitoring instruments. How d’you think solar meteorologists get their data? One of the primary sources is a set of ultraclean metal surfaces with characteristic responses to various radiations—automatic spectrometers sending continuous information to the computers Earthside on the relative output of UV, X-rays, the whole band of solar emissions. Then there are fine optics. What do you imagine bombardment by so many metallic-complex molecules, and adsorption, are going to do to the work function of these metals? How about the weather satellites, or communications cybernets, or search-and-rescue? Arms control sats?”
Golescu put down his coffee cup with great care and jammed hands into pockets. A muscle jumped at the corner of his jaw. “I get you,” he said.
You know, it occurred to West, the economic repercussions might even be such that my own government will have to put a surtax on everyone who has any money left, simply to feed the unemployed. Mary could lose the house yet. He discovered that his appetite was gone.
3
You don’t scramble into a full suit of space armor, no matter what the hurry. You wriggle and grunt your way in. Helping Storrs secure a knee joint, Golescu remarked, “And to think, when I was a kid, I figured it would’ve been real romantic being one of King Arthur’s knights.”
“Shut up and keep going,” Storrs answered.
Maybe I am, though, in a way, Golescu’s mind continued. Or at least it’s a line to feed the ladies. That dragon outside is fixing to spew some mighty hot fire.
The intercom speaker in the locker room resounded with West’s voice from the bridge: “Merlin calling International Space Control. Come in, Control.”
“Bailey here,” said the speaker.
“West speaking, now in command,” said the Englishman. “We’re near rendezvous with 128. I haven’t picked up anything else on the radar. You do have tugs here, don’t you?”
This close to Earth, there was no longer much noticeable time lag. “I’m sorry, no,” Bailey said. It was hard to tell whether his tone was curt or merely defensive. “Unfeasible.”
“But three or four to help us—”
“How will you attach more than one hauler by geegee to a load so small? If we had a ship so big it could take the container aboard, there would be no problem. Its radiation screen would protect the cargo. But we don’t.”
Silence extended itself. Golescu could imagine West, alone before the pilot board, his sad eyes resting on the stars and unreachable Earth, methodically trying to think his way out of the trap.
“Build a frame around the gasbag, you Oedipal clotbrain!” Storrs snarled.
“Sam, please,” West begged. To Bailey: “Forgive us. We are rather overwrought here, you understand. Er . . . what about it, though? A skeleton of girders around the bag, giving a large effective surface to which several tugs could grapple.”
“How long would it take to build?” the man on the ground countered. “You know how ticklish and specialized a job construction in orbit is. The sun would flare hours before any such project could be finished.” Something like eagerness came into his speech. “The Rescue Service is prepared to take you aboard one of its own units. You need only detach the sail and other excess mass, hook onto the cargo section, and operate your ship by remote control from ours. Quite safe.”
“ ’Fraid not.” West said. “Herdships don’t include equipment for unforeseeable cases either. All we could do by remote control is turn the Emetts on and off. Which is insufficient. We’ll need a pilot on deck.” He sighed. “Bring your ship around, though. Only one of us has to be on board.”
Bailey’s tone was somber. “I agree.”
Storrs swallowed something and clanged his faceplate shut.
“Very well, then,” West said tiredly. “We’ll proceed as best we can. Dispatch that ship of yours. Maintain contact. Let us know if you come up with any better ideas.”
“Certainly. Good luck, Merlin. Out.”
Golescu said “How long till rendezvous, Ed?”
“About ten minutes,” West answered. “Better run off your suit checks fast.”
“A checked suit . . . in space?” Golescu closed his own faceplate.
By the time he and Storrs had verified that everything was in order and had clumped their way t
o the air lock, deceleration was ended. They stood unspeaking while the chamber exhausted for them. The outer door opened, a cup that brimmed with stars.
4
Golescu touched the controls of his geegee unit and went forth. Suddenly he was no longer encased in clumsiness, he flitted free as an Earthdweller can only be in dreams. Merlin dwindled to a toy torpedo. Blackness surrounded him, lit by twelve thousand visible suns.
He did not look at his own sun. It could have struck him blind before it struck him dead. And Luna was occulted from here. But Earth lay enormous to one side, a dark ball with one dazzling thin edge and a rim of refracted light. There was not much poetry in his makeup, but he found it hard to pull his gaze from the planet.
Storrs’s broadcast voice sounded in his receiver. “We’re clear, Ed. Stay where you are till we finish.”
“Righto,” said West. “Your velocity relative to target is . . .” He reeled off the figures.
There was scant need. As Golescu swung about, the sailship which had been at his back, loomed like another Earth.
He had snapped down his glare filter. The stars vanished; he could now have stared Sol in the eye. The disk of the sail reflected with nearly the same brilliance. Protected, he saw it as a great white moon, growing as he sped across the few miles between. The suit radar controlled a series of beeps to inform him of vectors and distance. It made a dry, crickety music for his flight. Not exactly the Ride of the Valkyries, he thought—scarier. He found himself whistling soundlessly, the words running defiant through his head.
“Chuck Lindbergh was a transporteer, he was, he was,
Chuck Lindbergh was a transporteer, he was, he was.
His lonesome song was in the news:
The Spirit of St. Louis Blues.
Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!”
“Hey, Ed,” Storrs called.
“Yes?” West replied.
“I’ve been considering. The way this job has developed, it’s most likely an impossible one.”
“We must try.”
“Sure, sure. But listen. It won’t do us any good to watch telescopically for the commencement of that flare. The highest energy protons don’t travel at much under the speed of light. And there’s that whopping probable error in the time prediction. One hour in advance let’s cast off, and to hell with those precious satellites.”
“Sorry, old chap, no. Merlin’s going to stay coupled and hauling till the end of the run . . . or her. I’ll pilot. We can dispense with the engine watch. You and Andy wait aboard the rescue ship.”
“Stow that,” Golescu said. “What kind of guts do you think we have?”
“You’re both young men,” West said dully.
“And you’re a married man. And I got a reputation to keep up.”
“Ease off on the heroics, you two,” Storrs said. “If it comes to that, maybe we can cut cards. Meanwhile, every mile we can drag that canned stink spaceward will help some, I suppose—so let’s get on with it.”
The sail now nearly bisected the sky, four-and-a-half miles across. The foam-filled members that stiffened it were like Brobdingnagian spokes with its slow rotation. That disk massed close to two tons, and yet it was ghostly thin, a micron’s breadth of aluminized polymer.
While the pressure of sunlight in Earth’s neighborhood is only some eighty microdynes per square centimeter, this adds up unbelievably when dimensions stretch out into miles. The sunjammers were slow, their shortest passage measured in months, but that vast steady wind never ended for them; it weakened as they drove starward, but so did solar gravity, and in exact proportion. They cost money to build, out in free space, yet far less than a powered ship; for they required no engines, no crews, no fuel, simply a metal coating sputtered onto a sheet of carbon compounds, a configuration of sensors and automata, and a means to signal their whereabouts and their occasional needs. Those needs rarely amounted to more than repair of some mechanical malfunction. Otherwise little happened on the long blind voyages. Micrometeorites eroded the sails, which must eventually be replaced; cosmic rays sleeted through the carrier sections, unheeded by unalive cargoes—
So they weren’t designed to prevent solar flares from blowing them to hell and gone, Golescu thought.
First time it’s ever happened, he reminded himself. Probably the last time too. Unique event. I’m privileged to be on hand for it. What’m I offered, ladies and gentlemen, for my share of this privilege ?
He noticed, with a slight surprise, that he wasn’t afraid. Well, nothing very dreadful was going to take place for several hours yet. Except a lot of hard work. Dreadful enough. I shoulda tried for scoopship pilot. Still, you got to make your money somehow, and the pay here is good, to compensate for having nothing to spend it on. A few more cruises, and I’ll have me that stake to go prospecting. Now there’s the life!
Passing near the middle of the disk, he noticed the hub in which the sunjammer kept its transmitter and its navigational sensors. Then he had slipped around behind. The monstrous moon turned black for him. He raised his filter and saw it become dim blue with reflected starlight.
Carefully, he moved with Storrs toward the opposite hub. It was linked by a universal joint to a large, dully gleaming cylinder which held the motors. Those drew their power—they didn’t need much—from solar batteries in the sunward hub, and used it to control rotation and precession of the sail according to instructions from the pilot computer. For the sunjammer must tack from orbit to orbit, across the ever-radial energy wind. Gravitation helped only on a trip from the outer to the inner system; and even then the reduction vector was a continuously changing thing.
Golescu felt the slight jar as his boots made contact with the precessor hull. They clung, and he rested weightless. The motors beneath had been turned off on radio command from Merlin. He stood for a moment letting his eyes complete their adjustment to the wan illumination.
Storrs landed beside him. “Come on,” said the impatient voice. “Get the lead out of your rectifier. We’ll need every bit of two hours to unhitch the cargo section as is.”
“Yes, sure.” Golescu began unstrapping the collapsible tool rack from his shoulders. He and his companion were hung about with equipment like a robot family’s Christmas tree.
“I haven’t worked on one of this type very often,” he admitted. “You’d better be straw boss.” He grinned. “I’ll be the straw.”
Storrs made a sour noise.
The gas carriers were a pretty special model at that. Their cargoes must be shaded by the sail, lest temperature go above critical, the liquefied material boil, and the containers rupture. The standard form of sunjammer used a curved sail controlled by shroud lines, which pulled rather than pushed the load. Such an arrangement permitted a considerably larger light-catching area and proportionate freight capacity. The drawback was that maintenance crews on a standard vessel had to begin with erecting a shield between them and the reflector . . . if they didn’t want to be fricasseed in their spacesuits.
West called: “Ed speaking. I had to drop behind. The sail was screening me off from you. Everything in order?”
“Just fine,” Golescu said. “Apart from having an itch on my back that I can’t scratch, and more work ahead of me than I’d dare load on any machine, and a prospect of getting blown to nanosmithereens, and no women in sight, and hell’s own need for beer, I can’t complain. Or, rather, I can, but it wouldn’t do much good.”
“Don’t you ever stop chattering, Andy?” Storrs grumbled.
“Let him be, Sam,” West advised. “We each need some outlet.”
Storrs grumbled. “Doesn’t the consignee want his stuff? This load is worth eight million dollars FOB.”
“I just told you, Andy, the really important job is keeping those satellites functional.” West’s tone became thoughtful. “Y’know, if we do succeed, there ought to be rather a nice bonus for us.”
Golescu snorted. “That’s about as likely as the Milky Way curdling. Belt
line ain’t gonna be happy. Sure, they’ll have gained goodwill Earthside. But they’ll have lost a sunjammer and a shipment. Somebody’ll have to make the loss good. If it’s an insurance company, as I suppose . . . well, imagine what the premiums are going to go up to!”
Golescu’s frame was now also in place. He flitted “up” to install a battery of floodlamps, “down” again to plug them in. Light glared, harsh and undiffused, on the spot where the work must be done.
That was the heavy U-joint connecting precessor with cargo section. The latter was also illuminated in part. Hitherto it had appeared only as a circle of blackness. Now, beyond the framework that held it in place, ponderously counter-rotating, the translucent bag glimmered a deep, angry red.
It was not very large to contain so much hell . . . or so much money, Golescu reflected. Space-cold and liquefied under high pressure, the isonitrate occupied a sphere only some ten yards in diameter. Its substance, even the metal atoms, had been reaped from the atmosphere of Jupiter—a chill great brilliance shining in Gemini, two firefly moons visible beside it, treasure house and grave of more asterites than Golescu cared to think about. They were brave men, too, who manned the orbital station where the Jovian organic complexes were processed. An accident there would not be quite like a nuclear warhead going off, but the difference was academic.
Yet Earth needed those energy-crammed molecules, as the starting point for scores of chemical syntheses. It was wealth such as this that kept billions from starving. And Earth was willing to pay.
Golescu unclipped his tools and hung them near at hand. A sense came to him of his own muscles, but not merely in arms but in legs and belly and neck, constantly interplaying with centrifugal and Coriolis forces to hold him in balance on this free-falling shell. That led him to notice how the breath went in and out of his nostrils, tasting of recycler chemicals, and how his heart pumped the blood slowly around the intricate circuit of veins and arteries, and how that made an incessant tiny throb in his ears. He was getting hungry again, and had not lied about wanting a beer . . . ah, cool tickling over his tongue, yes, that was why the asterites must sell to Earth, they hadn’t yet succeeded in brewing decent beer themselves.
Project Solar Sail Page 8
