The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [134]
So Natasha snapped the elastic bands of the cabin seat around her waist and legs. She hesitated for a moment. It might be interesting, she thought, to look in on some of the news broadcasts, particularly to see if any astronomer had yet made any sense of that peculiar not-a-supernova that had blossomed astonishingly bright in the southern sky and then simply disappeared….
Discipline won out over curiosity. She placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer onto her forehead, set the time for three hours, and relaxed. Very gently, the hypnotic pulses throbbed in the frontal lobes of her brain. Colored spirals of light expanded beneath her closed eyelids, widening outward to infinity.
Then nothing.
What dragged Natasha back from her dreamless sleep was the brazen clamor of the alarm. Instantly she was awake, her eyes scanning the instrument board. Only two hours had passed…but above the accelerometer a red light was flashing.
Thrust was failing. The Diana was losing power.
Training brought discipline. Discipline prevented panic. Nevertheless, Natasha’s heart was in her mouth as she cast off her restraining straps to act. Her first thought was that something had happened to the sail. Perhaps the anti-spin devices had failed and the rigging was twisting itself up. But as she checked the meters that read out the tensions of the shroud lines, what they told her was strange. On one side of the sail the meters were reading normally. On the other the value was dropping slowly before her eyes.
Then understanding came. Natasha grabbed the periscope for a wide-angle scan of the edges of the sail. Yes! There was the trouble…and it could have come from only one cause.
The huge sharp-edged shadow that had begun to slide across the gleaming silver of Diana’s sail told the story. Darkness was spreading over one edge of Natasha’s ship as though a cloud had passed between her and the sun, cutting off light, putting a stop to the tiny pressure that drove the craft.
There were no such clouds in space.
Natasha grinned as she swung the periscope sunward. Optical filters clicked automatically into position to save her from instant blindness, and what she saw was precisely what she had expected to see. It looked as though a giant boy’s kite were sliding across the face of the sun.
Natasha recognized the shape at once. Thirty kilometers astern, South America’s Santa Maria was trying to produce an artificial eclipse for Natasha.
“Ha, Senhor Ronaldinho Olsos,” Natasha whispered, “that’s the oldest trick in the book!”
So it was, and a perfectly legal one, too. Back in the days of ocean racing, skippers had done their best to rob opponents of their wind.
But only the incompetents were caught that way, and incompetent, Natasha de Soyza Subramanian was not. Her tiny computer—the size of a matchbook but the equivalent of a thousand human number-crunching experts—considered the problem for a brief fraction of a moment and quickly spat out course corrections.
Two could play at that game. Grinning, Natasha reached out to disable the autopilot and make the adjustments to the trim in her rigging….
That didn’t happen.
The tiny windlasses stayed frozen. Suddenly they were receiving no orders at all, either from the autopilot computer or from the human being that should have been controlling everything.
Solar yacht Diana was no longer under way. The vast sail began to tip….
And then to bend….
And then the ripples in the fabric began to grow into great, irregular billows. And the flimsy material that was the sail reached, and passed, its maximum tolerated stress.
The commodore saw at once that Diana was in trouble. Indeed, the whole fleet did, and radio discipline evaporated in a flash. Ron Olsos was the first to demand a chemical-powered tender to take him off his own ship so that he could help search for Natasha Subramanian in the collapsing ruin that had been the space yacht Diana. He wasn