Project Solar Sail

by Arther C. Clarke

  I was still asking that question when we lined up for the beginning of the final Stage. Yellow jersey or no yellow jersey, I hadn’t slept well last night. I dreamed of the swoop toward the finishing line, with its massed cameras and waiting crowds. There would be hordes of space tugs, filled with spectators, and video crews from every station on Earth or moon. And who would they be homing in on, to carry off and interview until he could be interviewed no more?

  In the middle of the night I had awakened and wandered off to where the rows of bikes were sitting under twenty-four-hour guard. The rules here were very simple. I could go to my bike, and do what I liked with it, but I could not touch, or even get too close to, the bike of another competitor. The history of the rule was something I could only guess at. It made psychological sense. No competitor wanted anybody else touching his beloved bike. We suffered the organizers to fill our fuel tanks, because we had no choice, but we hovered over and watched every move they made, to make sure they did not damage so much as a square millimeter of paint.

  The bike shed was quiet when I got there. A couple of competitors were inside their bikes, fiddling with nozzles, or changing the position of juice bottles or viewfinders or computers. It was all just nerves coming to the fore. The changes they were making would not improve their time by a tenth of a second. Ernie Muldoon was inside his bike, too, also fiddling with bits and pieces. He stopped when he saw me, and nodded.

  “Can’t sleep either?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not easy. Plenty of time for sleep tomorrow night, when the Tour’s over.”

  “Nobody wants to sleep when it’s over. We’ll all be partying, winners and losers.”

  “Wish it were tomorrow now.”

  He nodded. “I know that feeling. Good luck, Trace.”

  “Same to you, Ernie.”

  I meant it. And he meant it. But as I sat at the starting line, my feet already in the pedal stirrups, I knew what that well-wishing meant. Neither of us wanted anything bad to happen to the other; all we wanted was to win. That was the ache inside. I looked around my bike for the last time. The radiation shielding was all in position. As we had surmised the day before yesterday, the weather had changed. There was a big spike of solar activity sluicing through the inner system, and a slug of radiation was on its way. It would hit us close to the halfway point of the final Stage, then would diminish again when the Tour was over. The maximum radiation level was nowhere near as high as it had been in the Tour two years ago, but it was enough to make us all carry a hefty load of shielding. The prospect of hauling that along for twenty-six thousand kilometers was not one I was looking forward to.

  The electronic beep sounded in my helmet. We were off. A hundred and six riders—we had lost thirty-four along the way to injuries and disqualification—began to pedal madly. After half a minute of frenzied, apparently unproductive activity, the line slowly moved away from the starting port. The airlock had been opened ten minutes before. We were heading out into hard vacuum, and the long, solitary ride to the finish. No one was allowed to send us any information during the Stage, or to respond to anything other than an emergency call from a competitor.

  The optimal trajectory for this Stage had been talked about a good deal when the competitors held their evening bull sessions. There were two paths that had similar projected energy budgets. The choice between them depended on the type of race that a competitor wanted to ride. If he was very confident that he would have a strong final sprint deceleration, then trajectory one was optimal. It was slightly better overall. But if a rider was at all suspicious of his staying power at the end, trajectory two was safer.

  The two trajectories diverged early in the Stage, and roughly two-thirds of the riders opted for the second and more conservative path. I and maybe thirty others, praying that our legs and lungs would stand it, went for the tougher and faster route.

  Muldoon did neither of these things. I knew the carapace of his red-and-black bike as well as I knew my own, and I was baffled to see him diverging from everyone else, on another path entirely. I had looked at that trajectory myself—we all had. And we had ruled it out. It wasn’t a disastrous choice, but it offered neither the speed of the one I was on nor the security of the path most riders had chosen.

  Muldoon must know all that. So where was he going?

  I had plenty of time to puzzle in the next twenty-four hours, and not much else to occupy my attention. Before we reached midpoint, where I reversed my drive’s direction, all the other riders in my group had diminished to dots in my viewfinder. They were out of it, far behind. I had decided that after today’s Stage, I would take a year to rest and relax, but I wouldn’t relax now. I pushed harder than I had ever pushed. As the hours wore on I became more aware of the radiation shielding, the stone that I was perpetually pushing uphill. A necessary stone. Outside my bike was a sleet of deadly solar particles.

  Even though the group of competitors who had ridden my trajectory were just dots in the distance behind me, I didn’t feel at all relaxed. On the Tour, you never relax until the final Stage is ridden, the medals have been awarded, and the overall winner has performed the first step-out at the Grand Dance.

  At the twenty-third hour I looked off with my little telescope in another direction. If anyone in the slow, conservative group had by some miracle managed to ride that trajectory faster than anyone had ever ridden it, he ought to be visible now in the region that I was scanning. I looked and saw nothing, nothing but vacuum and hard, unwinking stars.

  The final docking area was at last in sight, a hundred kilometers ahead of me. I could begin to pick up little dots of ships, hovering close to the dock. And unless I was very careful, I was going to shoot right through them and past them. I had to shed velocity. That meant I had to pedal harder than ever to slow my bike to the legal docking speed.

  I bent for one last effort. As I did so, I caught sight of something in my rear viewfinder.

  A solitary bike. Red and black—Muldoon. But going far too fast. He was certainly going to overtake me, but he was equally certainly going to be unable to stop by the time he reached the dock. He would smash on through, and either be disqualified or given such a whopping time penalty he would drop to third or fourth place.

  I felt sorry for him. He had done the almost impossible, and ridden that inefficient alternate trajectory to within a few seconds of catching me. But it was all wasted if he couldn’t dock; and at the speed he was going, that would be just impossible.

  Then I had to stop thinking of him, and start thinking of myself. I put my head down and drove the cranks around, gradually increasing the rate. The change in deceleration was too small for me to feel, but I knew it was there. The ions were pushing me back, easing my speed. I was vaguely aware of Muldoon’s bike moving silently past mine—still going at an impossible pace.

  And so was I. It was the mass of all the shielding, like a millstone around my bike. The inertia of that hundred extra kilos of shielding material wanted to keep going, dragging me and the bike with it. I had to slow down.

  I pedaled harder. Harder. The docking area was ahead. Harder! I was still too fast. I directed the bike to the line instinctively, all my mind and will focused on my pumping legs.

  Stage line. Docking guide. Docking. Docked!

  I heard the ping! in my helmet that told of a docking within the legal speed limit. I felt a moment of tremendous satisfaction. All over. I’ve won the Tour! Then I rested my head on my handlebars and sat for a minute, waiting for my heart to stop smashing out of my rib cage.

  Finally I lifted my head. I found I was looking at Muldoon’s red-and-black racing bike, sitting quietly in a docking berth next to mine. He was slumped over the handlebars, not moving. He looked dead. The marker above his bike showed he had made a legal docking. Impossible!

  His bike looked different, but I was not sure how. I unlocked my harness, cracked the bike seals, and forced myself outside onto the dock. As usual my legs were jello. I wobbled my way along
to Muldoon’s bike. I knocked urgently on the outside.

  “Muldoon! Are you all right?” I was croaking, dry-throated. I didn’t seem to have enough moisture left in my body for one spit.

  I hammered again. For a few seconds there was no response at all. Then the cropped head slowly lifted, and I was staring down into a puffy pair of eyes. Muldoon didn’t seem to recognize me. Finally he nodded, and reached to unlock his harness. When the bike opened, I helped him out. He was too far gone to stand.

  “I’m all right, Trace,” he said. “I’m all right.” He sounded terrible, anything but all right.

  I took another look at his bike. Now I knew why it looked different. “Muldoon, you’ve lost your shielding. We have to get you to a doctor.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to. I didn’t get an overdose. I didn’t lose that shielding. I shed it on purpose.”

  “But the radiation levels—”

  “Are down. You saw the forecasts for yourself—the storm was supposed to peak during the Stage and then run way down. I spent most of last night fixing the bike so I could get rid of the shielding when the solar flux died away enough. That happened six hours ago.”

  I suddenly realized how he had managed that tremendous deceleration at the end of the race. Without an extra hundred kilos of shielding dragging him along, it was easy. I could have done the same thing.

  And then I felt sick. Any one of us could have done what Muldoon had done—if we’d just been smart enough. The rules let you jettison anything you didn’t want; empty juice bottles, or radiation shielding. The only requirement is that you don’t interfere with any other rider. Muldoon had thrown a lot of stuff away, but by choosing a trajectory where no one else was riding, he had made sure he could not be disqualified for interference.

  “You did it again,” I said. “How far ahead of me were you when you docked?”

  He shrugged. “Two seconds, three seconds. I’m not sure. I may not have done it, Trace. I needed three seconds. You may still have won it.”

  But I was looking at his face. There was a look of deep, secret joy there that not even old stoneface Muldoon could hide. He had won. And I had lost. Again.

  I knew. He knew. And he knew I knew.

  “It’s my last time, Trace,” he said quietly. “This one means more than you can imagine to me. I’ll not win any more. Maimonides is quite right, the Tour’s a young man’s game. But you’ve got lots of time, years and years.”

  I had been wrong about the moisture in my body. There was plenty, enough for it to trickle down my cheeks. “Damn it, I don’t want it in years and years, Ernie, I want it now.”

  “I know you do. And that’s why I’m sure you’ll get it then.” He sighed. “It took me eight tries before I won, Trace. Eight tries! I thought I’d never do it! You’re still only on your third Tour.” Ernie Muldoon reached out his arm and draped it around my shoulders. “Come on now, lad. Win or lose, the Tour’s over for this year. Give a poor old man a hand, and let’s the two of us go and talk to them damned media types together.”

  I was going to say no, because I couldn’t possibly face the cameras with tears in my eyes. But then I looked at his face, and knew I was wrong. I could face them crying. Ernie Muldoon was still my model. Anything he could do, I could do.

  ###

  Charles Sheffield is Chief Scientist of Earth Satellite Corporation and serves on its Board of Directors. He is past-President of the American Astronautical Society, past-President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

  In addition to ninety papers on orbit computation, earth resources, large-scale computer systems, and general relativity, Dr. Sheffield’s published works include the best-selling volumes on space remote sensing, Earthwatch and Man on Earth, the reference volume Space Careers, nine science fiction novels, seventy short stories, and four story collections.

  I might add that one of Charles’s novels, The Web Between the Worlds, dealt with a wonderful and dramatic idea that was also conveyed, in the same year, in a little book called Fountains of Paradise by yours truly. The idea, of course, was the “skyhook” space elevator, which might work very well indeed with solar sails.

  Lightsail

  by Scott E. Green

  Sails unfold,

  into space,

  continent wide

  wings of

  high tech lace.

  Spun so fine

  to snare

  the pulse of light

  hold the photon

  a nanosecond pause

  fling it back

  into the sun.

  Moving a spacecraft

  softly

  gracefully

  above the wells of gravity.

  ###

  Scott E. Green has been active as a poet in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. His work has appeared in leading commercial and small press magazines. Recently, Greenwood Press/Praeger Books published his reference work on genre poetry, Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror Poetry. A Resource Guide. He also wrote the essay on poetry for the New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Professor James Gunn.

  Rescue at L-5

  by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

  Encased in the vast organic solar-sail creature, Ramis watched through the monitors, studying his course. Earth seemed like an oil painting below him, reaching out to swallow him in its oceans.

  But the sail creature’s orbit approached no closer than two Earth radii at its nearest point, then swooped back out again toward L-5. Leaving the planet behind, they climbed toward the Orbitech 1 colony.

  Ramis shifted his position in the cramped cyst as the sail creature tacked the solar wind. He had no room to move, no place to stretch. After sitting for a week, it began to frustrate him to tears. He took paranoid care not to bump or damage the seven sail-creature embryos at his feet.

  The boy snapped open the faceplate of his spacesuit and filled his lungs with humid air. Ramis didn’t want to leave the helmet open long; hard radiation still penetrated even the sail creature’s tough exoskeleton—but the fresh oxygen in the cavity drove back the claustrophobic dankness for a while. The air smelled wet from the thick wall kelp growing unchecked inside the cyst. On the rescue mission he had brought several kelp nodules, enough to start a forest growing along the walls of Orbitech 1, and it gave him food to eat for the journey.

  Ramis groped around the spongy cyst until he found the joystick controls for the external video camera. Swiveling the camera, he focused on the bright pinpoint of the L-5 colony waxing closer and closer. A week ago the starving colony had been invisible against the stars. Now under high magnification he could just make out the two counter-rotating wheels of Orbitech 1. Also at L-5, the Soviet station revolved slowly into view on the fringe of the gravity well.

  After the war, time was growing short for them—for him, for everybody.

  “Calling Orbitech 1!” Ramis squinted at the screen in front of him. Why weren’t they answering? “Orbitech 1, come in please.”

  Ramis muttered under his breath. He had been talking to himself too much in the past few days. “How am I supposed to rescue you if you won’t answer?” He snapped the helmet shut.

  Maybe his radio’s gain was too weak. Maybe he had used the batteries too much over the past few days, discussing his orbit with people on the Filipino colony, the Aguinaldo—his home—just to quell his loneliness and isolation. As he swung close to Earth, he had scanned the radio bands. Briefly he caught a burst of political rhetoric, but it faded into static before he could make sense of it.

  To keep himself occupied, he squinted at the cross hairs on the video screen. The camera angle constantly changed to account for the Orbitech colony’s motion. By centering the image in the cross hairs, the sail creature would tack ahead and arrive at the right position
to intercept the colony in its orbit. He was off course by only a fraction of a radian, but with thousands of kilometers left to travel, he would miss Orbitech 1 with room to spare.

  Time to steer again. Ramis withdrew a small knife, then looked at the cross hairs, judging the angle from inside the cyst. With the point of the blade he poked the creature’s sensitive internal membrane.

  The cyst tightened. Ramis felt a tension, a ripple, as the sail’s reflexes turned it away from the knife’s prick. The lumbering movement seemed to take years, but the L-5 colony finally drifted to the center of the cross hairs again.

  Once more, he tried counting stars, then making up rhymes, reciting the Biblical passages he had had to memorize during catechism years before. Anything to make him forget about the boredom for a while, or to forget about his incredibly slim chances of ever returning to the Aguinaldo. If he could only stretch his legs.

  Ramis remembered coming by accident upon the Aguinaldo’s president, Yoli Magsaysay, four months before. The leader stood staring out a greenhouse window, mesmerized by the image of Earth—from here the planet shone blue and beautiful, looking unscarred from its last war. In the harsh shadows, Magsaysay appeared thin, with mottled brown skin and flecks of gray and white peppering his bushy hair. He moved painfully on joints calcified from years in low gravity.

  Unaware of Ramis, Magsaysay muttered to himself. “We’ve always been able to find plenty of reasons for war, no matter how many problems we eliminate. A terrorist explodes an atomic weapon, and the finger pointing escalates—”

  Ramis startled the leader. “But they just can’t leave us here to starve! How are we supposed to survive without the supply ships?”

  Magsaysay turned back to Earth. “They have no choice. The war did not destroy them, but it caused enough damage that they cannot possibly send any more ships up here. It will be ten or more years before they can rebuild. They must conquer their own problems before they can come back for us.