Solar Sailer

by Stephan Besik

  Bob looked at his glass. “I still have connections with a small research project at the University. They try to follow us old guys. There are a couple people who did a full physical workup on me with the idea that they might be able to tell how long we’ve got. They said at the rate we’re going, we’ll probably make 500 years. They said it was more likely we’d die of an accident or some other unnatural cause than we would from any kind of disease or aging. The bad news is that our particular problem isn’t any closer to being solved. I’m not sure anyone’s even working on it anymore.”

  Al shook his head. “Wow. Two hundred fifty behind us and another two hundred fifty to go. And for a while there it looked like Mother Nature’s global retribution would take us out before we hit a hundred. Another two fifty living as an old man, though. Not exactly the best of all possible worlds.”

  Bob sighed. “No, not the best of all worlds.” He smiled ironically. “I heard a long time ago that the Chinese had a special curse- ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I guess someone’s cursed us. Not only have we lived in interesting times, we’ve lived a long time in them and as old men. I think we should update the curse somehow.” He took another sip of beer. “Maybe the next two fifty won’t be quite as bad. Hope springs eternal. I think hope will be around even longer than us.”

  Al looked at his watch and took a long drink of his second beer. “I’ve got to get going. This was a good talk. I’ll think about what you’ve said. Maybe you’re right. Maybe what I need is a challenge. New horizons, that sort of thing. Maybe the party will just be a party instead of a farewell. What do you think we owe?”

  Bob waved it off. “Forget it. I’ll take care of it. Just remember to invite me to the party, farewell or no. Okay?”

  “Yeah. We should get together more often no matter what. And…thanks for everything.”

  **

  It was rather ironic that he was leaving almost two years to the day since he and Al had their first talk. There had been a number of other conversations over the next six months. It turned out that their first conversation had been good for Bob. It had started him thinking, and then he had started to do some research.

  The thinking brought him to the conclusion that he didn’t want to be like Al, seriously considering ending it all. He didn’t feel that his options were really exhausted. There were things he still wanted to do, things he still wanted to see. He didn’t have Al’s people problem. He had always been a bit of a loner. Meg had been his one true friend and love. Even Al was peripheral to his needs; that had been pretty clear when he had gone eight years without even getting in touch. And Al had called him. Having survived this long without Meg, Bob figured he could keep it up a while longer.

  He thought about Al. He couldn’t really tell whether their talks were good or bad for him. It didn’t matter any longer; Al finally had his party, and it was a farewell. Bob got to meet both generations of his kids. Even Al’s ex-wife was there. There had been a few tears; perhaps fewer than Bob had expected. At the end, Al had given him a big hug and thanked him for all the good times. He thanked him again for the last few months as well. Bob wasn’t sure he deserved that. Nothing he said had changed Al’s mind. It had just taken a little longer for Al to go. Maybe that was really all that could have been expected.

  It was a little silly that Bob had to hold back tears that wanted to come as he thought about Al. He had made it out the door at the farewell party but that time he hadn’t been able to stop them for a while. It was easier now; the deed was done and the pain had faded. All he could hope for was that sometime in the distant future he could join up with Meg and Al again when his own time was up. The doctors had said five hundred years, assuming his luck held out. Not really likely considering he was almost certainly raising the odds against himself. Of course it wouldn’t matter much if the afterlife didn’t exist. When you were gone, you were gone.

  He would never have given Al’s particular way of leaving a second thought if Meg was still around, or if the planet still needed him. When Al came to see him he actually considered the idea for a while. Al’s argument never really stuck, though. It didn’t take long for Bob to come to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense for him personally. Al’s way out seemed all too permanent and pretty scary unless you believed in some kind of afterlife. Bob wasn’t religious; he’d seen too many bad things during the bad years. If there was a God, he was perfectly happy to let humans go to hell in their own way. Not likely there was help from that direction.

  Before Al showed up he hadn’t really spent any time thinking about space travel. Oh, he had kept up with headlines and such, but really understanding hadn’t been a priority. His years on Earth had been filled with the struggle to get the planet back on course, and with his days with his wife. Now those things were memories, some good and some bad. It had been an exciting life until recently.

  After a fair amount of consideration he realized that he needed some kind of change. If nothing else, it was clear that he was bored. After decades of excitement, and decades of love, things had certainly gotten dull. In that first conversation with Al, the subject of space travel had been as much about pulling Al out of his funk as it was a real thought.

  The idea of space travel had arisen almost as soon as Bob realized he needed a change. The idea turned into a dream, and then into an objective. He had seen much of the Earth, and with the possible exception of the oceans there weren’t many frontiers left. In space, however, there didn’t seem to be any limits. In the Solar System alone a man could spend centuries and never see it all. According to the docs, he had centuries to burn.

  His interest in space travel had been pretty superficial when the thought arose. He really knew almost nothing about it, except that for a while humanity had almost lost it. During the worst of the climate crisis, all the resources went to saving planet Earth and its people.

  He had always been a quick study, though, and space turned about to be a very interesting subject. It took him a year, but at the end of the year he was a bit of an expert on space and space travel.

  Once the planet had breathing room again, a lot of the best minds began to refocus on space travel. There was the feeling that a backup plan was needed, not only to have a way out in case of another major climate shift, but in case any of a number of possible catastrophes occurred, natural or manmade. There was also the itch to see what was out there. The unmanned probes of the old days had found all sorts of unique oddities on the satellites of the outer planets. Relatively little was known about the big planets and things beyond. Maybe it was time for mankind to go and see for itself.

  Space travel had survived, and while it hadn’t moved quickly during the bad years it still progressed. The solar sailers had supplied small permanent colonies on the Moon during the early years of the global crisis, and research stations in the atmosphere of Venus were established. More sunlight at the distance of Venus from the sun meant much more power, making the trip easier than the relatively long haul to Mars. All that power made building easier. There were also some commercial possibilities in the atmosphere of the second planet that made the investment worth the risk.

  Things stayed that way, with a few colonies on the Moon and research stations in the atmosphere of Venus for some years. As things got easier on Earth and the challenges were met, there were explorers who turned their eyes back toward Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and the outer planets.

  That was when the next big leap occurred- the lightways. It started with a massive station “following” Earth in its orbit around the Sun. For the most part it was a huge array of solar panels and a big set of lasers. The panels provided power to the lasers, which pushed gigawatts of power into the distant reaches of the solar system in a tight beam of monochromatic light. A solar ship caught the light in its sails, converted it back into electricity and created a big plasma push through its electric engines. The first lightway did dramatic things to the cost of travel to Mars , the Asteroid Belt, and even the
moons of Jupiter, reducing fuel costs in the same way that the solar sailers on the Luna run cut costs to the Moon.

  After his year-long study he had made his own decision. He started to apply for jobs in outer space. It turned out that there were slots that made sense for him everywhere from Venus all the way out to the Kuiper belt. People with his experience in large-scale construction and environmental development were rare, and his problem became one of picking the places he wanted to see rather than whether someone would take him. No one cared what he looked like as long as he could do the job. He did have to complete six months of training in vacuum and low-gravity living and survival. That had not been as hard as he had anticipated. Even at his apparent age of seventy he was in better health than he had been before the treatments and his mind was still sharp. After his training he was ready to go.

  **

  A medical crewmember stopped at his cocoon. Bob suppressed the embarrassment he felt at the situation. Here he was lying naked, waiting for an attractive young lady (she looked young, anyhow) to give him the pill that would put him to sleep. Of course at the moment every other passenger was naked in his or her cocoon too. Not like he was the only one feeling embarrassed.

  The pretty lady wasn’t wearing much, either. Her uniform was a rather tiny little bikini-like thing, just enough coverage to provide a place for her crew insignia and a little modesty. Much more would have been more annoyance than meaningful. After all, she was going too. His recollection was that the crew monitored things for a few hours, and then handed the flight over to the ship’s AIs. In a few hours, she would be naked in a cocoon too. His hormones still worked, and the thought of this little lady lying naked on her personal bed actually got things rather stirred up. Nowadays that didn’t happen to him very often.

  Once he was down she would close up the cocoon and the cold sleep cycle would start. It was about a week to get to the nearest lightway station along Earth’s orbit and a three-month trip to Callisto, the outermost of the large Galilean satellites of Jupiter. It was a lot more efficient to put everyone in cold sleep than to maintain a waking environment for the passengers and crew.

  Even the (human) crew would be down unless there was a dire emergency. The ship’s Artificial Intelligences would be running the show for nearly all of the trip. For the human crew there wasn’t going to be much to do. Why sit around with nothing but games and simulations to occupy the mind?

  Once he reached Callisto, he had choices to make. The four Galilean satellites of Jupiter each had opportunities for an engineering specialist, as did Titan and some of the other satellites of Saturn. His tentative plan was to spend time on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and then make a decision about next steps. He could come back to the inner Solar System to see what was happening on Venus, go asteroid mining in the Belt, stay where he was near Jupiter or Saturn, or head further out from the Sun. Most of the inhabited spots around Uranus and Neptune, as well as locations in the Kuiper Belt, were small research stations at the moment. He didn’t think he would want to go out that far, but who knew? Maybe something important would happen out there that would make the year-long trip worthwhile.

  “Are you ready, sir?” she asked.

  Bob nodded. “Ready to go.” She handed him a little cup with the magic pill and a small glass of water. He took the pill and washed it down. “Have a good trip, sir.”

  He smiled and lay back. “See you on the other side.”

  Thank you for reading Stephan’s book.

  Watch for his next one-

  Damage Report

  A colony ship of a starfaring people discovers a planet bearing the remains of an extinct civilization. The ruins of a technological culture are only a thousand years old and are the best chance of the star people to understand why only their species has survived out of hundreds of predecessors spanning a half million years of time and hundreds of light years of space around their home world. The evidence is that technological cultures destroy themselves. Will the demise of such a recent civilization help them understand the failures of so many other species, and how they can continue their own survival?

  The second of the two-story anthology is Long Lance. Most of the Northern Hemisphere has been destroyed by a “small” nuclear action against Russian aggression that went global. A team of American aviators is assigned to assassinate the Russian marshal who gave the order for a nuclear attack on America and the nations of Europe. Only the U.S. Navy has resources remaining that can reach across the globe to complete the mission after so much of the nation and the world has been destroyed.