The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [131]
“T minus two minutes,” said her cabin radio. “Cross-check to confirm readiness.”
One by one the other skippers answered. Natasha recognized every voice—some tense, some almost inhumanly calm—for they were the voices of her friends and rivals. In all of the places where humanity dwelt there were scarcely a score of men and women who owned the skills needed to sail a sun yacht. Every one of them was here, at the starting line like Natasha or aboard the escort vessels, orbiting thirty-six thousand kilometers above Earth’s equator.
“Number One, Gossamer. Ready to go!”
“Number Two, Woomera, all okay.”
“Number Three, Sunbeam. Okay!”
“Number Four, Santa Maria, all systems go.” Natasha smiled. That one was Ron Olsos, of course, whom she liked, though perhaps not as much as he seemed to like her. The Brazilian’s reply had been an ancient echo from the early days of astronautics, typical of Ron’s tendency toward the theatrical.
“Number Five, Lebedev. We’re ready.” That was the Russian, Efremy.
“Number Six, Arachne. Also okay.” Hsi Liang, the young woman from some village north of Chengdu, in the shadow of the Himalayas. And then, at the end of the line, it was Natasha’s turn to say the words that would be heard around the world and in every human outpost:
“Number Seven, Diana. Ready to win!”
And let old Ronaldinho take that, she thought as she turned to make one last check of the tensions in her rigging.
To Natasha, floating weightless in her tiny cabin, Diana’s sail seemed to fill the sky. Well it might. Out there, ready to take her free of Earth’s gravitational bonds, were more than five million square meters of sail, webbed to her command capsule by almost a hundred kilometers of bucky-cord rigging. Those square kilometers of aluminized plastic sail, though only a few millionths of a centimeter thick, would exert enough force—she hoped!—to put her first across the lunar-orbit finish line.
The wall speaker again: “T minus ten seconds. All recording instruments on!”
Eyes still fixed on the vast billow of sail, Natasha touched the switch that turned on all Diana’s cameras and instrument recorders. It was the sail that held her imagination. Something that was at once so huge and so frail was difficult for the mind to grasp. Harder still was to believe that this mirrored wisp could tow her ever faster through space by nothing more than the power of the sunlight it would trap.
“…five, four, three, two, one. Detach!”
Seven diamond-edged computer-controlled knife blades sliced through seven thin tethers at once. Then the yachts were free. Until this moment yachts and servicing vessels had circled the Earth as a single unit, firmly held together. Now the yachts would begin to disperse like dandelion seeds drifting before a breeze.
And the one that first drifted past the orbit of the moon would be the winner.
Aboard Diana nothing among the senses of Natasha’s body registered a change. She had not expected anything would; the only thing that showed that any thrust at all was being exerted was the dial on her instrument board, now registering an acceleration that was almost one one-thousandth of one Earth gravity.
That was, of course, almost ludicrously tiny. Yet it was more than any manned solar-sail vessel had ever managed before, just as Diana’s designers and builders had promised it would be. Such accelerations had never been achieved in any but toy-size rigs, but there it was now. At this rate—she calculated quickly, smiled as the result appeared on her board—she would need only two circuits of Earth to build up enough velocity to leave low earth orbit and head for the moon. And then the full force of the sun’s radiation would be behind her.
The full force of the sun’s radiation…
Natasha’s smile persisted as she thought of all the attempts she had made