Project Solar Sail

by Arther C. Clarke

  At first it was his curiosity that held him. Later it was me. He couldn’t tear himself loose. He never thought of it. He was a sailship crewman, and he was cold sober, and he argued with the frenzy of an evangelist.

  “Then take the general case,” I remember saying. “A world that cannot build a launching laser is a world of animals, yes? And Monks themselves can revert to animals.”

  Yes, he knew that.

  “Then build your own launching laser. If you cannot, then your ship is captained and crewed by animals.”

  At the end I was doing all the talking. All in the whispery Monk tongue, whose sounds are so easily distinguished that even I, warping a human throat to my will, need only whisper. It was a good thing. I seemed to have been eating used razor blades.

  Morris guessed right. He did not interfere. I could tell him nothing, not if I had had the power, not by word or gesture or mental contact. The Monk would read Morris’s mind. But Morris sat quietly drinking his tonic and tonics, waiting for something to happen. While I argued in whispers with the Monk.

  “But the ship!” he whispered. “What of the ship?” His agony was mine; for the ship must be protected . . .

  ###

  At one-fifteen the Monk was halfway across the bottom row of bottles. He slid from the stool, paid for his drinks in one-dollar bills, and drifted to the door and out.

  All he needed was a scythe and hourglass, I thought, watching him go. And what I needed was a long morning’s sleep. And I wasn’t going to get it.

  “Be sure nobody stops him,” I told Morris.

  “Nobody will. But he’ll be followed.”

  “No point. The Garment to Wear Among Strangers is a lot of things. It’s bracing; it helps the Monk hold human shape. It’s a shield and an air filter. And it’s a cloak of invisibility.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll tell you about it if I have time. That’s how he got out here, probably. One of the crewmen divided, and then one stayed and one walked. He had two weeks.”

  Morris stood up and tore off his sport jacket. His shirt was wet through. He said, “What about a stomach pump for you?”

  “No good. Most of the RNA enzyme must be in my blood by now. You’ll be better off if you spend your time getting down everything I can remember about Monks while I can remember anything at all. It’ll be nine or ten hours before everything goes.” Which was a flat-out lie, of course.

  “Okay. Let me get the Dictaphone going again.”

  “It’ll cost you money.”

  Morris suddenly had a hard look. “Oh? How much?”

  I’d thought about that most carefully. “One hundred thousand dollars. And if you’re thinking of arguing me down, remember whose time we’re wasting.”

  “I wasn’t.” He was, but he’d changed his mind.

  “Good. We’ll transfer the money now, while I can still read your mind.”

  “All right.”

  He offered to make room for me in the booth, but I declined. The glass wouldn’t stop me from reading Morris’s soul.

  He came out silent for there was something he was afraid to know. Then: “What about the Monks? What about our sun?”

  “I talked that one around. That’s why I don’t want him molested. He’ll convince others.”

  “Talked him around? How?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” And suddenly I would have given my soul to sleep. “The profession pill put it in his genes; he must protect the ship. It’s in me too. I know how strong it is.”

  “Then—”

  “Don’t be an ass, Morris. The ship’s perfectly safe where it is, in orbit around the moon. A sailship’s only in danger when it’s between stars, far from help.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that that convinced him. It only let him consider the ethics of the situation rationally.”

  “Suppose someone else unconvinces him?”

  “It could happen. That’s why we’d better build the launching laser.” Morris nodded unhappily.

  ###

  The next twelve hours were rough.

  In the first four hours I gave them everything I could remember about the Monk teleport system, Monk technology, Monk family life, Monk ethics, relations between Monks and aliens, details on aliens, directions of various inhabited, and uninhabited worlds . . . everything. Morris and the Secret Service men who had been posing as customers sat around me like boys around a campfire, listening to stories. But Louise made us fresh coffee, then went to sleep in one of the booths. Then I let myself slack off.

  By nine in the morning I was flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, dictating a random useless bit of information every thirty seconds or so. By eleven there was a great black pool of lukewarm coffee inside me, my eyes ached marginally more than the rest of me, and I was producing nothing.

  I was convincing, and I knew it.

  But Morris wouldn’t let it go at that. He believed me. I felt him believing me. But he was going through the routine anyway, because it couldn’t hurt. If I was useless to him, if I knew nothing, there was no point in playing soft. What could he lose?

  He accused me of making everything up. He accused me of faking the pills. He made me sit up, and damn near caught me that way. He used obscure words and phrases from mathematics and Latin and Fan vocabulary. He got nowhere. There wasn’t any way to trick me.

  At two in the afternoon he had someone drive me home.

  Every muscle in me ached; but I had to fight to maintain my exhausted slump. Else my hindbrain would have lifted me onto my toes and poised me against a possible shift in artificial gravity. The strain was double, and it hurt. It had hurt for hours, sitting with my shoulders hunched and my head hanging. But now, if Morris saw me walking like a trampoline performer . . .

  Morris’s man got me to my room and left me.

  ###

  I woke in darkness and sensed someone in my room. Someone who meant me no harm. In fact, Louise. I went back to sleep.

  I woke again at dawn. Louise was in my easy chair, her feet propped on a corner of the bed. Her eyes were open. She said, “Breakfast?”

  I said, “Yah. There isn’t much in the fridge.”

  “I brought things.”

  “All right.” I closed my eyes.

  Five minutes later I decided I was all slept out. I got up and went to see how she was doing.

  There was bacon frying, there was bread already buttered for toasting in the Toast-R-Oven, there was a pan hot for eggs, and the eggs scrambled in a bowl. Louise was filling the percolator.

  “Give that here a minute,” I said. It only had water in it. I held the pot in my hands, closed my eyes and tried to remember . . . Ah.

  I knew I’d done it right even before the heat touched my hands. The pot held hot, fragrant coffee.

  “We were wrong about the first pill,” I told Louise. She was looking at me very curiously. “What happened that second night was this. The Monk had a translator gadget, but he wasn’t too happy with it. It kept screaming in his ear. Screaming English.

  “He could turn off the part that was shouting English at me, and it would still whisper a Monk translation of what I was saying. But first he had to teach me the Monk language. He didn’t have a pill to do that. He didn’t have a generalized language-learning course either, if there is one, which I doubt.

  “He was pretty drunk, but he found something that would serve. The profession it taught me was something like yours. I mean, it’s an old one, and it doesn’t have a one-or-two-word name. But if it did, the word would be prophet.”

  “Prophet,” said Louise. “Prophet?” She was doing a remarkable thing. She was listening with all her concentration, and scrambling eggs at the same time.

  “Or disciple. Maybe apostle comes closer. Anyway, it included the Gift of Tongues, which was what the Monk was after. But it included other talents too.”

  “Like turning cold water into hot coffee?”

  “Miracles, right. I used the same talent to make th
e little pink amnesia pills disappear before they hit my stomach. But an apostle’s major talent is persuasion. Last night I convinced a Monk crewman that blowing up suns is an evil thing.

  “Morris is afraid that someone might convert him back. I don’t think that’s possible. The mind-reading talent that goes with the prophet pill goes deeper than just reading minds. I read souls. The Monk is my apostle. Maybe he’ll convince the whole crew that I’m right.

  “Or he may just curse the hachiroph shisp, the little old nova maker. Which is what I intend to do.”

  “Curse it?”

  “Do you think I’m kidding or something?”

  “Oh, no.” She poured our coffee. “Will that stop it working?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Louise. And I felt the power of her own faith, her faith in me. It gave her the serenity of an idealized nun. When she turned back to serve the eggs, I dropped a pink triangular pill in her coffee.

  She finished setting breakfast and we sat down. Louise said, “Then that’s it. It’s all over.”

  “All over.” I swallowed some orange juice. Wonderful, what fourteen hours’ sleep will do for a man’s appetite. “All over. I can go back to my fourth profession, the only one that counts.”

  She looked up quickly.

  “Bartender. First, last, and foremost, I’m a bartender. You’re going to marry a bartender.”

  “Good,” she said, relaxing.

  In two hours or so the slave sets would be gone from her mind. She would be herself again: free, independent, unable to diet, and somewhat shy.

  But the pink pill would not destroy real memories. Two hours from now, Louise would still know that I loved her; and perhaps she would marry me after all.

  I said, “We’ll have to hire an assistant. And raise our prices. They’ll be fighting their way in when the story gets out.”

  Louise had pursued her own thoughts. “Bill Morris looked awful when I left. You ought to tell him he can stop worrying.”

  “Oh, no. I want him scared. Morris has got to talk the rest of the world into building a launching laser, instead of just throwing bombs at the Monk ship. And we need the launching laser.”

  “Mmm! That’s good coffee. Why do we need a launching laser?”

  “To get to the stars.”

  “That’s Morris’s bag. You’re a bartender, remember? The fourth profession.”

  I shook my head. “You and Morris. You don’t see how big the Monk marketplace is, or how thin the Monks are scattered. How many novas have you seen in your lifetime? Damn few,” I said. “There are damn few trading ships in a godawful lot of sky. There are things out there besides Monks. Things the Monks are afraid of, and probably others they don’t know about.

  “Things so dangerous that the only protection is to be somewhere else, circling some other star, when it happens here! The Monk drive is our lifeline and our immortality. It would be cheap at any price—”

  “Your eyes are glowing,” she breathed. She looked half-hypnotized, and utterly convinced. And I knew that for the rest of my life, I would have to keep a tight rein on my tendency to preach.

  ###

  Larry Niven has made a career of exploring ideas others later hate themselves for missing. He won the Nebula and Hugo awards for his famous novel Ringworld.

  Goodnight, Children

  by Joe Clifford Faust

  They hadn’t seen the dust kicked up by the Sandcrab’s arrival, nor had they heard as the vehicle clamored into the garage. He thought for sure that they would have heard the pumps as the garage repressurized, but their concentration had been so intense that he had greeted his wife and made it all the way to the solarium door without their noticing. He stood and watched them now, beaming proudly.

  Benjamin, who was ten, was displaying a rare moment of patience with his four-year-old sister, Rachel. She was hunched over the eyepiece of the telescope, squinting one eye and then the other. Finally she exclaimed, “I see it!”

  Benjamin gently nudged her aside and looked for himself.

  “Sorry, Rach,” he said softly. “That’s Phobos.”

  “I want to see it,” Rachel protested.

  Benjamin shrugged. “We just have to keep looking. Remember, what we’re looking for is in a diamond shape. You remember the diamond shape?”

  Rachel formed a crude diamond with her fingertips.

  “It’ll be silver. And there’ll be flickering lights,” Benjamin continued. “Red and green.”

  “I don’t see it,” Rachel protested, frustrated.

  “Be patient,” Benjamin said. “Sometimes you have to wait—”

  “Isn’t this a welcome scene!”

  The pajama-clad children turned. They saw him and their faces lit up.

  “Daddy!”

  Benjamin was across the room in one deft leap. Rachel made it in two hops and a kick, and he caught them both in midair, spinning to the floor in the light gravity.

  “You made it home, you made it home!”

  He laughed and exchanged kisses with them. “I promised I would, didn’t I?”

  “Mom told us not to get our hopes up,” Benjamin explained. “She said if the storms got too bad, you’d just have to wait them out.”

  “Phooey,” Rachel said. “I knew he’d be home.”

  “I don’t know. Daddy’s boss is a mean old—”

  “Hold on,” the father said. “You don’t know Mr. Smotherman the way I do. He might seem mean, but he’s actually very nice. Did you know he was just as anxious to get home as I was?”

  They looked at him incredulously.

  “He was. He was sure the buildup wave of plants in the Elysium biosphere would be all right for a few days, so he told us all to go home. Then he looked right at me and said, ‘You’ve got to go all the way to Utopia Ridge, and I’m not about to lose my best terraengineer in the rust. You take ’crab number six. It’s just been serviced, and it’ll get you through the worst this season can throw at you.’ ”

  “Was there a storm?” Benjamin asked.

  Father nodded. “It started to get bad around fourteen hundred, so I stopped at the Viking 2 monument and got some lunch. When things calmed I came on home.”

  “Glad you’re home, Daddy,” Rachel said, hugging him.

  “I’m glad I made it.” He patted his children. “What’s the big scene with the telescope?” he asked, winking at Benjamin.

  “We’re looking for the sailer,” Rachel said.

  “But the next fleet isn’t due in for another couple of months yet.”

  “Not those sailers,” she protested. “The sailer.”

  “The sailer?”

  Rachel put her hands on her hips. “You know. It’s almost Christmas.”

  “That’s right,” he confessed. “I’d forgotten.”

  “You have to read the story,” Benjamin said.

  Father sat up and looked at his son. After last year, he was surprised to hear him ask for it.

  “I don’t know . . . I did read it last year . . .”

  “But it’s been a whole year!” Rachel said.

  “Surely you know it by heart . . .”

  “C’mon, Dad,” Benjamin said, watching the scene with amusement.

  “Get the book,” Rachel said. She jumped off of her father’s lap and bounded out of the solarium, turning the phrase into a song. “Get the book, get the book, get the book . . .”

  They started through the house to the library, following Rachel’s song.

  “She giving you any trouble, son?”

  “Naw,” Benjamin answered. “She’s a pretty good kid.”

  He put his arm around the boy and hugged him. “So are you.”

  “Book. Book. Book. Book. Book.”

  Rachel was bouncing up and down in time to her improvised tune, reaching toward an outsized box on the top shelf of the software case. Father reached up and grabbed it, causing her voice to rise in pitch.

  “Book!” She latched onto her fathe
r’s leg, and he started out of the library with an exaggerated limp. “Read it, read it.”

  “Is the living room ready?” He looked at Benjamin.

  The boy grinned. “I’ll set the holo,” he said, and with a leap, he disappeared.

  Father plucked the little girl from his leg and placed her on his shoulder. “Everything needs to be ready.”

  “Ready,” she echoed.

  When they arrived in the living room, the western hall was a field of static. Benjamin keyed orders into the controller, and the image of a still, quiet river appeared.

  “Nope,” he said.

  More static. The image changed to a desertscape.

  “Nope.”

  A cornfield in late summer.

  “You’re playing, Benjamin.”

  The wall became an image of Currier and Ives. Large flakes of snow were slowly falling on a bare forest, and in the background, in a small clearing, was a small white house with smoke lazily rising from the chimney.

  Rachel applauded. The air in the room became still and cool.

  “You’re sure you don’t want the fireplace?” Benjamin asked.

  “This is fine.” He lifted Rachel off his shoulder and set her on the couch. He put the box in her hands, and she started to work on the latch.

  “Wait,” he told her. “This isn’t like a disk.”

  He sat, and she crawled into his lap. Benjamin joined them after focusing the holo.

  “It’s the book,” Rachel said.

  Father snapped the latch and opened the box. A strange, musty smell rose from inside, stale air left from last year’s reading.

  “This is how we used to store information,” he explained, running his fingers over the hard cloth cover. “We didn’t always have disks. We used paper, which wasn’t susceptible to erasure by magnetic fields. The problem was, paper tended to age. This is made of acid-free paper, which was the best we had, but it’s still getting old. Look.”