The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1956-72 by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf, Science fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 0722124546
Publisher: Sphere Books Ltd
Published: 1973-04-29T23:00:00+00:00

Sunjammer

The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when the Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.

‘T minus two minutes,’ said the cabin radio. ‘Please confirm your readiness.’

One by one, the other skippers answered. Merton recognised all the voices – some tense, some calm – for they were the voices of his friends and rivals. On the four inhabited worlds, there were scarcely twenty men who could sail a Sun yacht; and they were all here, on the starting line or aboard the escort vessels, orbiting twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.

‘Number One – Gossamer – ready to go.’

‘Number Two – Santa Maria – all OK.’

‘Number Three – Sunbeam – OK.’

‘Number Four – Woomera – all systems GO.’

Merton smiled at that last echo from the early, primitive days of astronautics. But it had become part of the tradition of space; and there were times when a man needed to evoke the shades of those who had gone before him to the stars.

‘Number Five – Lebedev – we’re ready.’

‘Number Six – Arachne – OK.’

Now it was his turn, at the end of the line; strange to think that the words he was speaking in this tiny cabin were being heard by at least five billion people.

‘Number Seven – Diana – ready to start.’

‘One through Seven acknowledged,’ answered that impersonal voice from the judge’s launch. ‘Now T minus one minute.’

Merton scarcely heard it. For the last time, he was checking the tension in the rigging. The needles of all the dynamometers were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the Sun.

To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill the sky. As well it might – for out there were fifty million square feet of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. All the canvas of all the tea clippers that had once raced like clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the Sun. Yet it was little more substantial than a soap bubble; that two square miles of aluminised plastic was only a few millionths of an inch thick.

‘T minus ten seconds. All recording cameras ON.’

Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the mind to grasp. And it was harder still to realise that this fragile mirror could tow him free of Earth merely by the power of the sunlight it would trap.

‘… five, four, three, two, one, cut!’

Seven knife blades sliced through seven thin lines tethering the yachts to the mother ships that had assembled and serviced them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.