“Wait a bit,” West hailed them. “Just got a signal from the Rescue Service ship. Want me to relay to you?”
“Might as well,” Golescu said. “For the laughs.”
A new voice, accented English: “ ’Allo, Merlin. International Space Control Commission Rescue Service cutter Rajasthan, commanding officer Villegas speaking. Come in, Merlin.” Golescu searched for the newcomer, but it must still be only a spark, lost among the stars.
“Acknowledging,” said West shortly, and identified himself.
“We ’ave your position and path, Merlin. Do you plan to maintain same for t’e present? Yes? T’en we will adopt t’e same orbit, with thirty-kilometer lag. Unless we can do something to ’elp.”
“Tell him to send over anybody he’s got along who has sailship experience,” Storrs said. “With an extra man or two, we’ll finish sooner.”
West passed the idea on. Villegas hemmed for a moment before answering, “I am most sorry, but we ’ave no such persons with us. You should ’ave asked for t’em before.”
“We assumed you weren’t infinitely dunderheaded,” Storrs bit off. “Our mistake.”
“Don’t blow your gaskets, Sam,” Golescu counseled. “Sunjammers are oddball craft. Earth hasn’t got any. How could they know?”
The byplay had not been relayed. Villegas was saying: “No use to send any of my engineers, yes? T’ey ’ave not t’e special skills. By t’e time t’e men you want could arrive yours will ’ave finished uncoupling and you will be under acceleration, I trust.”
“Well, you’ll take mine aboard first,” West said. “We only need a pilot here for that maneuver.”
“I never thought of Ed as the hero type,” Golescu remarked. He squatted to fit a wrench around a bolthead. “Shall we oblige him?”
“What a dilemma,” Storrs said acridly. “If I do, I’m a coward. If I don’t, and we cut cards, I might end up risking my neck for Mother Earth.”
“Come off that shtick, Sam. The war’s over, or hadn’t you heard? Besides, we may reach jettisoning distance before the flare pops. It’s just as likely to be later than prediction as earlier. Or . . . you know, in armor, with a strong metal shield around him, a man might even survive the explosion. There’s no air to carry blast. When Merlin breaks apart, he could be tossed into space in one piece.”
“Sure. Into four thousand roentgens per hour. That means nine minutes for a lethal dose. The other ship isn’t going to find him in any nine minutes, chum.”
“Hmm . . . true. Damn! What we need is a pocket size rad screen generator. Or something very thick to hide behind—”
Golescu’s words cut off. He stared before him, into the icy light of Jupiter, until its after-image danced through his vision. All the stars danced.
“What’s eating you now?” Storrs growled. “Get to work.”
Golescu’s yell nearly shattered his own eardrums. Its echoes were still flying around in his helmet when West cried, “What is it? I say, what happened? I’m coming, be there in a few minutes, hang on, boys!”
“No . . . wait . . . hold everything,” Golescu stammered. “Not so fast. We’re okay. Better than okay.”
Storrs closed gauntlet fingers on the other man’s shoulderpieces and shook him. “What’s the matter, you clown?”
“Don’t you see?” Golescu howled. “We can save the whole shooting match!”
5
Words flew between sunjammer and herdship. The decision was quickly reached; a spaceman who could not make up his mind from a standing start was unlikely to clutter his profession very long. West called Rajasthan. “. . . Send us every hand you can possibly spare,” he concluded. “I’ll raise Bailey and have him rush us more crews from your service’s fleet in orbit. But they can hardly arrive for a few hours yet, and we’ve got to make what progress we can meanwhile.”
“Craziest thing I ever heard of,” Storrs panted. “It ought to work, but—why didn’t anybody think of it on Earth?”
“Same reason you and Ed didn’t, I guess,” Golescu said. “It’s so crude and obvious, only a low-wattage brain like mine would see it. At least see it quick-like. I suppose somebody would’ve hit on it eventually.”
“That would have been too late.” Storrs’ gaze traveled across the awesome blue plain that wheeled before him, curtaining off half the universe. “May be too late already. Hell’s kettles, what a huge job!”
6
“Don’t remind me. I got troubles of my own. Ready? Okay, let’s stop rotation.”
Storrs opened the shield over the manual controls, made several adjustments, replaced the cover, and used the handle of a small crescent wrench to push a deeply recessed button. At once he leaped back, off the cylinder. Golescu went simultaneously.
They were none too soon. Gears meshed, flywheels began to spin, the motor and cargo sections took up the angular momentum that was being removed from the sail. At the same time, the disk was precessed to face the sun directly.
So great a mass could not be stopped fast. Storrs and Golescu flitted clear, out into the fierce light. Their thermostatic units began to labor, converting heat into electricity and storing it in the suit capacitors. That energy would be needed; the men were going to be at work for quite a spell.
“You know,” Storrs said, “you weren’t right about saving everything. The sail will be lost.”
“So?” Golescu returned. “The kit is what matters. A couple of million bucks’ worth of caboodle is cheap for salvaging the rest.”
West contacted them: “I’m having a bit of a tussle with Bailey. Let me cut you into the circuit.”
“Ridiculous arrangement,” Bailey’s tinny voice said. “The whole concept is fantastic. Eight hours—less than that—to handle sixteen square miles of material?”
“One micron thick,” West pointed out. “A hundred square yards masses only about a pound. It’s not like building a frame for tugs to grapple. This job is elementary. Any spacehand with a geegee unit on his suit can do it.”
“I forbid this lunacy. You’re ordered to carry on with standard procedures.”
An inarticulate sound vibrated in Storrs’ throat. Golescu said bad words. West spoke with complete calm:
“You can’t forbid it, or issue any order except for us to do our best. Please read the texts you’ve been citing to me. If Beltline is responsible for this operation, Beltline’s agents have to have authority to decide how it will be carried out. And our decision is to go for broke. Without your cooperation, we are bound to fail. And what excuse will you offer then? I respectfully suggest, Mr. Bailey, that you get cracking.”
Stillness hummed, except for the noise of the crowding, flashing stars. Earth rolled tremendous against an ultimate dark. The sail began to bend at the edges as centrifugal force waned. Had it not faced the sun head on, it could have buckled into a hopeless tangle. As matters stood, when rotation ended it would approximate a section of a sphere.
Bailey’s gulp gurgled in earplugs. “You win.”
7
The work had been brutal. They sat in the saloon with untasted mugs of coffee, staring emptily at the bulkheads, while West rode the controls.
Outside, Lucifer ran free. Coughed from the sun, ions with energies in the millions of electron volts flooded all space. Down on Earth, tourists in the Antarctic lodges crowded into the observation domes to watch the winter sky come alive with vast flapping curtains of aurora. Elsewhere, men who had heard the news huddled near their television screens, waiting for word. Reception was poor. The nuclear generators of ships beyond the atmosphere poured power into screen fields deflecting that murderous torrent from their hulls. The engineers’ eyes never left the gauges.
Merlin throbbed. Now and then, as she moved to keep the load at the end of her grapnel on an even keel, her members groaned with stress. That was the only token granted the men in the saloon. They dared not interrupt the pilot with questions.
“It’s got to work,” Storrs said stupidly, for the dozenth
time. He rubbed his chin. The bristles of beard made an audible scratching.
“Sure it will,” Golescu said. “My idea, wasn’t it?” The cockiness had left his voice.
“Well,” Storrs said, “If it doesn’t—if that cargo explodes—we’ll never know.” He laid his fist on the table and regarded the knobby knuckles. “I’d like to know, though. How I’d laugh at those fat Earthlings.”
Golescu reached for his coffee. It had gone cold. “They aren’t that bad. And if you’ve got to be such a hot-bottomed patriot, don’t forget that trouble on Earth would affect the Republic. We need them, same as they need us.”
After a pause, he asked, “Scared?”
Storrs spat in the ashcatcher. “No. Tired and angry. This means one thing to Ed. Economic breakdown on Earth would hurt him directly. But you and me—”
“Oh, fork all those fancy moral issues,” Golescu said. “This is what we get paid for.”
The sun’s arrows rushed on through vacuum. Where they encountered Merlin’s screen, they swerved, with a spiteful gout of X-radiation that her internal shielding drank up. Where they struck at the cargo section—
They hit a barrier of plastic and aluminum: the sail, cut into fifteen-meter squares that were layered within a welded framework. The shielding factor came to about fifty grams per square centimeter. Light metals and hydrogen-rich carbon compounds are highly effective stoppers of stripped small atoms like the hydrogen and helium ions which make up nearly the whole of flare emission.
But the whole clumsy ensemble of shield, cargo section, and herdship must be kept facing directly into the blast. And gravitation kept trying to swing it into orbit, which brought gyroscopic forces into play. Control was exercised at the end of a long arm; the mass had considerable turning moment, difficult to control.
“If we ride this one out,” Golescu said, “we really will get that bonus Ed was faunching for.”
“Uh-huh.” Storrs raised dark-rimmed eyes. “Andy, you’re a good oscar and I hope we can ship out together again, but right now I’ve got some thinking to do. Keep quiet, huh?”
“Okay,” Golescu said. “Though thinking’s the last thing I want to do.”
He prowled aft to have a look at the engine-room meters. Not that he could improve matters much if anything was going awry, in his present condition.
His bleared vision focused on the bank of indicators. Everything operating smoothly—good ship. Wait a second! The external radiation count—
“Yi-yi-yip!” he screamed. “She’s going down! The flare’s dying!” And he did a war dance around the workshop and up the length of the corridor beyond.
Slowly, slowly, the storm faded. Until at last West said from the intercom, “It’s over with. We’re alive, boys.”
Storrs began to dance, too.
After a while West reported, “Earth called in. Congratulations and so forth. They’ll send a tug at once for this cargo, and hold it in the moon’s shadow while they unload. We’re invited groundside for a celebration.” Wistfulness tinged his voice. “D’you think the company would mind if we accepted?”
“They’d better not.” Storrs said.
“We need a checkout anyway, after putting the ship to so much stress,” Golescu added. “And they’ll have to compute a new orbit for the rest of our mission. We’re bound to have a few days’ layover.” Exhaustion dropped from him. “Fleshpots, here I come!”
He snatched up his guitar and bellowed forth:
“Ol’ Einstein was a transporteer, he was, he was.
Ol’ Einstein was a transporteer, he was, he was.
His racing car used too much gas;
It shrank the time but it raised the mass.
Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!”
Now he had a story to embroider for the girls in Pallas town.
###
Poul Anderson was born in 1926 in the U.S. but of Scandinavian parents, hence the first name. After being raised in various places and conditions of life, he received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, but went into writing instead. Among his better-known books are Brain Wave, The Broken Sword, The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and The Boat of a Million Years. He has long lived in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Karen, who also occasionally writes. Their daughter, Astrid, is married to their colleague, the up-and-coming, award-winning author, Greg Bear.
Speaking of awards, Poul has won nearly every one to be had. He, too, hauled an old chestnut out to donate it to this anthology. It’s nice to see that good old stories, like good old writers, live on and on.
A Rebel Technology Comes Alive
By Chauncey Uphoff and Jonathan V. Post
Since the days of Sputnik, we have grown used to a notion that would have seemed bizarre to our ancestors—that you need big government to explore a new frontier. In fact, since Homo erectus left Africa, several million years ago, human beings have been inveterate explorers. And generally, whenever we sought out new territory, new opportunities, it was in small groups, unconstrained by bureaucracies and red tape.
To be sure, governments have taken part. Latin America was subdued under the flag of the kings of Spain. British troops expanded an empire. Even in the Wild West, with its spirit of rugged individualism, who could downplay the importance of the telegraph and railroads—both stimulated by federal support?
Still, it was individuals and families and small enterprises that did most of the work, creating wealth and new opportunities on a new frontier. Governments provided infrastructure and other help. But it was people, endeavoring to improve their circumstances, who actually dug the mines and built the homes and ran the factories.
The same must hold, eventually, for the newest frontier—the solar system. There’s plenty for governments to do, such as establishing the means to haul heavy masses out of Earth’s deep gravity into low orbit, and helping set rules so we treat the hew territories well.1 But there must also be room for individuals, small groups, entrepreneurs. And without tax dollars to count on, these people will have to find a way to move about in space that’s safe, effective . . . and cheap!
Ideally you should be able to use local fuel available at the frontier itself, as did the wood-burning steam locomotive that civilized the American West. When trains ran out of fuel, operators had only to stop and cut more wood. But an even more elegant example would be the sailing ships of those days, which tapped another renewable resource, the wind.
Eventually, we will have to do this in space—we will have to make use of what we find there, instead of relying solely on what we bring along. In other words, our descendants will want to loosen the chains that bind them too tightly to Old Earth.
Pioneers will need pioneer technology, like the Kentucky rifle and the Conestoga wagon. Perhaps that’s one reason solar sails bother some bureaucrats so much. Like the horse that could graze along the way, like trading sloops and clipper ships, certain transportation systems just inherently lend themselves to freedom of action, letting people cut the apron strings and go forth on their own.
Not all space industry officials are scared by this, of course. Indeed, many of them share the same dream. Just as wind ships opened up the New World to commerce, lightsails may someday make regular runs from Earth to Mars or Venus, resupply a power-intensive industry near the sun, or haul cargo back from the asteroid belt. The need for fuel limits most other forms of deep-space transportation. In a very real sense, the development of the solar sail is a fundamental investment in the future of civilization.
The concept of light pressure has been around for some time. Kepler correctly suggested it as an explanation for why comet tails point away from the sun. The dust particles from comets are terrific little solar sails themselves; they are so small that they have a very large area to mass ratio, which makes them very susceptible to light pressure.
Even so, it proved very difficult to measure the light pressure in laboratories, because the gas molecules in the best vac
uum chambers swamped the force of light. Its pressure wasn’t unambiguously measured until 1897 by Lebedev, and independently in 1903 by Nichols and Hull.
As described elsewhere, it was two Russians, Tsander and Tsiolkovsky,2 who thought up the first modern concept of solar sailing. But their notions went into hibernation until independent discovery of the concept by Carl A. Wiley in his article called “Clipper Ships of Space,” published under the pseudonym Russell Saunders in the May 1951 issue of Astounding Magazine.
Later on, Richard Garwin, James Fletcher, and Jerome Wright oversaw the reawakening of solar sailing in the mid-1970s for possible use on a mission for Halley’s comet. Dr. Louis Friedman’s book Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel gives a firsthand account of the exciting times of the Halley Rendezvous Project. Although eventually canceled, that endeavor nevertheless spawned private efforts leading to the Engineering Development Mission of the World Space Foundation.
The Pasadena Project
In a freshly painted workroom in Pasadena sits what is probably the first solar sail fabricator, a strange-looking contraption with big rollers at each end of a long table. Strips of aluminized Mylar are wound around the rollers. Although well-designed and well-built, it isn’t a bit fancy. Its objective is to seam and fold plastic film into large square sheets. The machine was developed and tested by staff of the World Space Foundation, headed by Robert L. Staehle, to construct the world’s first solar sail.
Project Solar Sail Page 9
