Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "Already happened," Carr told him. "We aren't screaming because we're talking locally, over a glassfiber line. Everyone else who can be affected has already found out I said, can we warn people?"

  "Well, when you put it that way, no. Not warn, because the e-mag pulse has already passed. By this time, it should be halfway to Mars, or beyond it, even. Of course, there are always… but then, I can't think of anyone who would be…"

  "Be what?" Sulie looked alert.

  "You see, the electromagnetics are at extremely high frequency, gamma rays and x-rays. Ionizing radiation. We're protected by the atmosphere, as well as by our distance from the sun. Anyone under a pressure dome or inside ship's hull, again at this distance, is also likely to be shielded by the structure itself—at least partly, if not completely—without the need for special insulation. But if someone was above the atmosphere and happened to be, well, naked—" He gulped.

  Carr turned, exposing more thigh, and reached over to the desk behind her, picking up a notepad. The physical device was all pretend-pantomime generated by the virtual reality software, of course. She could just as easily make notes in the air with her finger and the system would capture and interpret them.

  As she wrote, head down, Sulie asked casually, "How much do you know about modern spacesuit design?"

  "Not much. I'm into hot plasma, not cold structurals."

  "All right, I have contacts. I'll let them know. Is that it, then? Just ionizing radiation and the e-mag interference?"

  "Well, for now. I mean, that's just the first wave."

  "What's the second?"

  "Look—" Po gulped and wiped his forehead; the wire glove actually skittered across the brow of his helmet. "This is going to take some explaining. Perhaps we should meet somewhere and plan our strategy."

  "Fair enough," Sulie agreed. "I've got office hours in twenty minutes anyway. Why don't you come there?"

  "Okay—"

  "In the meantime I'll call Dean Withers and see if he'll do any more for a full doctorate and a pretty girl than he will for a lowly male teaching assistant, such as yourself… By the way, have you thought about contacting Dr. Freede?"

  "He's on the other side of the interference wave."

  "Not any more, he isn't," she said. "It'll have cleared in eight minutes, tops, at lightspeed."

  "Well, I'll try him then.... But I have a feeling that, right now, Freede's going to be too busy to chat with us."

  Chapter 16

  The Marvelous Solar Kite

  Wink…

  Wink…

  Wink…

  Wink…

  Photon Power, Inc., McKeesport, Pennjersey, March 21, 12:51p.m. EST

  One of the vanes must have preserved a wrinkle as it automatically unfolded after launching. It had not pulled out taut, and the uneven surface was now misdirecting a band of raw sunlight.

  That was the only explanation that Brian Holdstrup, who was sitting on the ground 480,000 kilometers away, could think of to account for the persistent flash that was obscuring the left field of his video monitor. His basis for this notion was the blinking's period—it coincided with the rotation rate of the twenty-two staggered vanes radiating from the hub of the lightsail Virginia Reel IV. And that fragile fiberglass bead housed the camera and image analyzer which governed video navigation, as well as the radio telemetry system and antenna, the rigging rollers, and the microcomputer that controlled them.

  How serious the defect would be, in terms of his winning, depended on several factors: the undimmed energy of the flash, the quality of the lens filters protecting the main camera's imaging chip, and the length of the race. If the energy increased, the filters weakened, or the race time were extended by the interplay of his opponents' tactics, then the chip—or at least its left visual field—would tend to cloud up and deprive Holdstrup of half his view. He decided he could manage somehow in that eventuality. He would have to, because there was physically no way for him to reach Reel and smooth out that vane. And any fixes he might try from the ground, such as twitching or jerking on the vanes, would seriously decrease the sail's overall efficiency.

  Virginia Reel IV had been the third lightsailer free-dropped out beyond the Moon's orbit by the reaction tugboat which Mitsubishi's race committee had chartered to launch the contestants. In the past five days, during the "creep phase," with everyone jockeying for position before they crossed the official starting line, Holdstrup had worked on that advantage. He was now pushing his sail into a neck-and-neck duel for first-across, and he wouldn't jeopardize his lead just to squelch an annoying flash.

  Holdstrup steered his sail by shortening or lengthening key vanes arrayed around the group. This changed their angular momentum and so altered the rate of rotation of the blade structure as a whole, just like an ice skater pulling her arms in during a spin. The rate of change provided more or less tension against the axis of a small aluminum flywheel that was aligned fore and aft in the hub. So these conflicting gyroscopic orientations, blade structure against flywheel, changed the angle of the sail relative to the incidental sunlight.

  With this novel steering method, Holdstrup's design gained in maneuverability and responsiveness over older autogyrating designs. He could make course corrections much more quickly and simply, while the established configurations had to feather each vane around its longitudinal axis in order to change the angle of reflection.

  All of the calculations to determine the appropriate vane length and rotation rate were under control of the onboard computer, of course. Holdstrup just sampled the program's current objectives, watched his video screen and compared it to his groundside computer's three-dimensional star maps, and issued new directives to advance Reel in her jockeying duel. He did not, Heaven forbid, try to sail with one hand constantly on the tiller.

  If cutting and packing the vanes of his autogyrating design required the care of a brain surgeon and the patience of a Buddhist monk, then flying it continuously required the attention span of a bristlecone pine. With a pressure measured at just over half a kilogram per square kilometer, sunlight could not exert much force on the aluminized Mylar vanes. With an average acceleration of less than ten millimeters per second squared, the lightsailers did not move very fast over the distances involved.

  So the early stages of the sport were played out in slow motion. Holdstrup just sampled video-navigational readings and made course corrections at specified times, usually once every three hours at this phase.

  Although the lightsailers started out slow, they made up for lost time at the finish line—or, in the case of the big, cargo-hauling sunjammers, at the end of the run. Unlike a rocket, which burned its fuel and acquired all its speed at the beginning of a voyage, then coasted until it was time to decelerate, the solar sail was under continuous acceleration. Ten millimeters per second per second. Over hours and days, that quickly built up a respectable velocity, then kept on building until it was time to swing the sail around some massive body and use the pressure of sunlight to begin killing speed.

  So the cargo sunjammers sailed complex, twisting courses around the solar system, bound on one side by their inertia and on the other by the steady pressure of half a kilogram per square kilometer.

  Still, Brian Holdstrup understood that he and his sophisticated sail designs were doing the equivalent of gilding the plaster cherubs on a dying technology. Mitsubishi might sponsor the annual Mars'n'Back race out of corporate pride, but its heavy engine division was already working feverishly on rocket designs that would put sailors like himself out of business.

  One day, he knew, long-range rockets would supplant the sunjammers—whose technologies were advanced by kite races like this—on the automated Saturn and Uranus runs. That was as certain as, two hundred years ago, steamboats eventually supplanted sailing craft in transporting commercial cargo on Earth's oceans. But before the rockets became practical for more than relays to the Moon and the Lagrange points, or following extended orbits out to Mars, they would first ha
ve to overcome the inherent limitations of fuel weight.

  Any reaction mass that a rocket used, whether the engines pushed it out with a chemical burn or heated it by passing across a fission pile, still had to be heavy enough to provide force from the acceleration. And that accelerative mass was freeloading, non-cargo bulk which the engines had to boost from the word go until it finally was burned and passed sternward—a net loss in the thrust equation. The heavier the particles, the less of them the ship's tanks would have to take along. The lighter, the more. But the ship still had to carry their weight in the first place.

  Of all the rocket designs, only the fusion rams were exempt from this traveling penalty—and they only worked efficiently when they were diving into the solar wind. When they had to pace the wind on an outbound voyage, they suffered marked losses in efficiency.

  Someday the engine designers would discover the ultimate accelerative particle: an imaginary one that had no mass in repose but grew heavier as it picked up speed. Only then could they hope to boost a rocket fast enough, long enough, to beat a sunjammer over the incredible distances to the outer planets.

  Until then, however, rockets were in the same position as the earliest steamboats. Those vessels, driven by clumsy paddlewheels and burning vast amounts of low-energy wood or coal, had to hug the world's coastlines to find calm water and resupply themselves with fuel. Otherwise they had to use sails to supplement their inherent limitations. Only when those steamers discovered the greater efficiency of the screw propeller and the lower density, simpler feeding, and more orderly logistics of refined oil could they venture out regularly to cross the oceans.

  Long-range rockets, in Holdstrup's view, were only waiting for the discovery of a particle equivalent to fuel oil. Then he would hang up his antistatic paddles and heat gun and retire to an island in the Caymans.

  But, in the meantime, there was that persistent vane flash…

  Holdstrup studied the pattern of wink-winking, trying to think if there was some way he could, in the future, fold his sail material more loosely into the launch housing. It had to be loose enough to discourage hard-edged wrinkles, yet still tight enough to meet race specs for the free-drop pod.

  The flash's periodicity was hypnotizing him....

  Holdstrup shook his head, trying to wake himself up—and the screen disappeared. That is, the star image vanished in a blaze of static. It rebuilt itself slowly, then whited out again.

  Brian tried swiveling the camera, but he could see no improvement. The image slowly came back a second time, and now Holdstrup noticed that the static was coming on in the same interval as the winking. So it had some connection with the pinwheeling of his blade system. Perhaps the antenna had somehow gotten itself tangled and was now caught in, or obscured by, one of the metallized vanes.

  After the third blast of static, Brian had discarded that particular theory. The image was now showing another lightsailer looming up in his field of view. The outline was the same rhomboid he had been maneuvering against for the past three days. On the latest tack he thought he had moved ahead of that vessel, but here it was in his forward-looking camera. So, either the rhomboid had stolen a march on him somehow, or Virginia Reel IV had turned on its own length.

  Holdstrup tried various maneuvers and finally, frantically began shortening sail to increase his vessel's spin and maximize the vectoring he could apply to her present course.

  Nothing helped. Inexorably, with each fade-in after a signal fade-out, the rhomboid grew larger in his monitor screen. Then it began rippling and flashing, one edge crumpling inward where Reel's whirling blades cut into it. That would constitute a foul—touching or obstructing another craft—and it would generate the first successful protest against Holdstrup in ten years. That would be the end of the race for him.

  As Brian watched in helpless dismay, the camera lens rode right into that blinking, flashing horror and then mercifully went black. The screen juggled itself for a moment, then flashed a message from the computer overseeing his groundside operations: it had lost all telemetry from Virginia Reel IV.

  Not that it mattered a damn at this late date.

  257.125 km/s

  257.189 km/s

  257.262 km/s

  257.351 km/s

  Titan Developments, Inc., Manhattan, GNYC, March 21, 12:52 p.m. EST

  The computer screen in front of Einar Floding clicked off the speed increases with the regularity of a metronome beat. The president of the corporation which held a controlling interest in the Titan Cartel was not at all embarrassed to admit that a communications network valued at half a million after-tax dollars every quarter was dedicated to that little cascade of numbers. One of the cybertechs from the lower floors had once explained the sum to him: rental on a radar dish in lunar orbit, per diems for keeping open a six-relay line-of-sight laser beam from the dish down to New York, and proration on the one-time cost of the microcomputer and custom software that massaged the signal, calculated the speed, and displayed the results on his desk.

  Floding kept it there for gloating purposes. It was a constant criticism of that circle of vice presidents who had told him solar sails would be too clumsy to handle, too antiquated to be reliable, too slow to carry their product efficiently.

  By God, as soon as this first transfer cycle was completed, Floding was going to scrap the radar dish and have them install him a telescope. Let it keep an eye on the disk-shaped sail of Ouroboros—damned funny name that was; one of the scientist-types had picked it—next time the ship looped out past Saturn. By then the sunjammer would probably be going a good five hundred klicks, maybe even more. The same tech who'd explained the laser link-up had told him that a telescope would pick up the bright reflection off the sail easily, even among the outer planets. So it would show him the money both coming and going.

  The secret of running an automated sunjammer from the orbit of Saturn was you never slowed it down. That way, its speed grew continuously, pushed by solar photons and its own inertia on the outbound leg, pulled by gravity and steered by reflected photons on the inbound leg. You ran a perpetual loop, anchored at one end by the mass of Saturn, at the other by the Earth-Moon system. And at each end the Cartel's specially built tugboats rushed out to match velocity with the passing sail, take off its attached cargo pods, and hook on new ones bound for the other end.

  Ouroboros' maiden voyage had started thirteen months ago, fresh out of the packing crates at Saturn's own orbital speed of only nine-point-six-four kilometers per second. At that end of the loop, out where it was half-dark most of the day and automated machines did all of the real work, the tugs had given her the only push she'd ever need. They also attached three spherical tanks, each with a hundred-meter radius, each containing four-point-two million cubic meters of methane gas fresh from the Titan cramships, centrifugally refined and packed in its naturally liquid, low-temperature state. That cluster of tankage represented seven and a half billion cubic meters of product in a gaseous state. Or 260 billion cubic feet, using the old measure.

  Everyone, Floding's vice presidents included, had said you couldn't take that much methane out in one gulp. Not in one hull. Not with a rocket.

  So he hadn't. Floding had used a lightsailer instead. And that was a blessing in disguise, serendipity, an old man's luck, because it turned out the sail area shaded the tanks from direct sunlight all the way down to Earth. They stayed at an ambient temperature of about 75° Kelvin—a hot day on Pluto and almost low enough to freeze the product solid. That was doubly beneficial because, not only did the tanks not leak en route, they wouldn't expand appreciably during transfer and handling at the Earth end of the orbit. Or not for dozens of hours after being detached, which was plenty of time to get them under sunshades and begin decanting to atmospheric shuttles.

  Einar Floding had brought home a lake of pure methane equal to the current annual additions to the nation's proved reserves by all the exploration and drilling companies combined. In one shipment. And in another—h
e checked his watch—two minutes' time, his tugboat was due to hook on and snatch this treasure from Ouroboros' cometary orbit, park it in a slot twelve hundred kilometers over the Earth, and dispense it with a kingly hand, feeding the chemical refineries and plastics plants of the world for a year or more.

  And by that time—sooner, if the sunjammer kept building speed this way—he would have another tank cluster in hand. Then another and another.

  The Titan Cartel, and Einar Floding himself personally, were going to be as rich as Croesus.

  Scissor

  Scissor

  Scissor

  Scissor

  CSS Flycatcher, Inside the Moon's Orbit, March 21, 18:53 UT

  The guy wires attached to the outside rim of Ouroboros' sail whipped past Tod Becher's control bubble. The wires were moving relative to his position because the sail was spinning. That was how such an inherently wobbly structure as a plain disk of aluminized Mylar wider than the State of Nevada and thinner than a high-detergent soap bubble could maintain its stability. But the effect was eerie.

  Some double-damned optical illusion made it seem as if each wire and the one below it were sheering together as they came around. As if they were trying to cut his bubble in half and let Becher's breatheable out.

  It took all of his courage, then, to keep edging the tugboat in closer, behind the deployed wires, to align her grapples with the coupling that attached the cargo string to the lightsail and its control module. If he goofed in matching velocities, then Flycatcher would collide with those scissoring cables and collapse the sail. The resulting jumble would probably trap the tugboat and him, sending the whole mess hurtling off past the orbit of Saturn at point-oh-eight percent of lightspeed.

  Then Consolidated Space Services, which owned the tugboat, was going to be very mad. The Titan Cartel, which owned both CSS and Ouroboros, was going to be even madder. And Mrs. Becher and all the little Bechers who depended on Tod were going to be very sad. Not to mention that the Cartel would probably deduct the cost of the sail and the tugboat from the family's insurance money.