‘Look at this, fellows,’ he said, and grinned, waving a piece of paper in front of his colleagues. ‘I’m rich. Ever seen a bank balance like that?’
Dr Williams took the proffered statement, glanced down the columns, and read the balance aloud: ‘Cr, £999,999,897.99.’
‘Nothing very odd about that,’ he continued, above the general amusement. ‘I’d say it means an overdraft of £102, and the computer’s made a slight slip and added eleven nines. That sort of thing was happening all the time just after the banks converted to the decimal system.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Small, ‘but don’t spoil my fun. I’m going to frame this statement. And what would happen if I drew a cheque for a few million, on the strength of this? Could I sue the bank if it bounced?’
‘Not on your life,’ answered Reyner. ‘I’ll take a bet that the banks thought of that years ago, and protected themselves somewhere down in the small print. But, by the way, when did you get that statement?’
‘In the noon delivery. It comes straight to the office, so that my wife doesn’t have a chance of seeing it.’
‘Hmm. That means it was computed early this morning. Certainly after midnight…’
‘What are you driving at? And why all the long faces?’
No one answered him. He had started a new hare, and the hounds were in full cry.
‘Does anyone here know about automated banking systems?’ asked Smith. ‘How are they tied together?’
‘Like everything else these days,’ said Andrews. ‘They’re all in the same network; the computers talk to each other all over the world. It’s a point for you, John. If there was real trouble, that’s one of the first places I’d expect it. Besides the phone system itself, of course.’
‘No one answered the question I had asked before Jim came in,’ complained Reyner. ‘What would this supermind actually do? Would it be friendly—hostile—indifferent? Would it even know that we exist? Or would it consider the electronic signals it’s handling to be the only reality?’
‘I see you’re beginning to believe me,’ said Williams, with a certain grim satisfaction. ‘I can only answer your question by asking another. What does a newborn baby do? It starts looking for food.’ He glanced up at the flickering lights. ‘My God,’ he said slowly, as if a thought had just struck him. ‘There’s only one food it would need—electricity.’
‘This nonsense has gone far enough,’ said Smith. ‘What the devil’s happened to our lunch? We gave our orders twenty minutes ago.’
Everyone ignored him.
‘And then,’ said Reyner, taking up where Williams had left off, ‘it would start looking around, and stretching its limbs. In fact, it would start to play, like any growing baby.’
‘And babies break things,’ said someone softly.
‘It would have enough toys, heaven knows. That Concorde that went over us just now. The automated production lines. The traffic lights in our streets.’
‘Funny you should mention that,’ interjected Small. ‘Something’s happened to the traffic outside—it’s been stopped for the last ten minutes. Looks like a big jam.’
‘I guess there is a fire somewhere. I heard an engine just now.’
‘I’ve heard two—and what sounded like an explosion over toward the industrial estate. Hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘Maisie! What about some candles? We can’t see a thing!’
‘I’ve just remembered—this place has an all-electric kitchen. We’re going to get cold lunch, if we get any lunch at all.’
‘At least we can read the newspaper while we’re waiting. Is that the latest edition you’ve got there, Jim?’
‘Yes. Haven’t had time to look at it yet. Hmm. There do seem to have been a lot of odd accidents this morning—railway signals jammed—water main blown up through failure of relief valve—dozens of complaints about last night’s wrong number…’
He turned the page, and became suddenly silent.
‘What’s the matter?’
Without a word, Small handed over the paper. Only the front page made sense. Throughout the interior, column after column was a mess of printer’s pie, with, here and there, a few incongruous advertisements making islands of sanity in a sea of gibberish. They had obviously been set up as independent blocks, and had escaped the scrambling that had overtaken the text around them.
‘So this is where long-distance typesetting and autodistribution have brought us,’ grumbled Andrews. ‘I’m afraid Fleet Street’s been putting too many eggs in one electronic basket.’
‘So have we all, I’m afraid,’ said Williams solemnly. ‘So have we all.’
‘If I can get a word in edgeways, in time to stop the mob hysteria that seems to be infecting this table,’ said Smith loudly and firmly, ‘I’d like to point out that there’s nothing to worry about—even if John’s ingenious fantasy is correct. We only have to switch off the satellites, and we’ll be back where we were yesterday.’
‘Prefrontal lobotomy,’ muttered Williams. ‘I’d thought of that.’
‘Eh? Oh, yes—cutting out slabs of the brain. That would certainly do the trick. Expensive, of course, and we’d have to go back to sending telegrams to each other. But civilisation would survive.’
From not too far away, there was a short, sharp explosion.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Andrews nervously. ‘Let’s hear what the old BBC’s got to say. The one o’clock news has just started.’
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a transistor radio.
‘…unprecedented number of industrial accidents, as well as the unexplained launching of three salvos of guided missiles from military installations in the United States. Several airports have had to suspend operations owing to the erratic behaviour of their radar, and the banks and stock exchanges have closed because their information-processing systems have become completely unreliable.’ (‘You’re telling me,’ muttered Small, while the others shushed him.) ‘One moment, please—there’s a news flash coming through…. Here it is. We have just been informed that all control over the newly installed communication satellites has been lost. They are no longer responding to commands from the ground. According to…’
The BBC went off the air; even the carrier wave died. Andrews reached for the tuning knob and twisted it around the dial. Over the whole band, the ether was silent.
Presently Reyner said, in a voice not far from hysteria: ‘That prefrontal lobotomy was a good idea, John. Too bad that Baby’s already thought of it.’
Williams rose slowly to his feet.
‘Let’s get back to the lab,’ he said. ‘There must be an answer, somewhere.’
But he knew already that it was far, far too late. For Homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled.
The Wind from the Sun
First published in Boy’s Life, March 1964, as ‘Sunjammer’
Collected in The Wind from the Sun
A yacht race with a difference, in space, using solar sails, and yet, even now this idea is being actively considered as a means of propulsion. The story’s original title was ‘Sunjammer’ but as Poul Anderson had the same idea almost simultaneously, I was obliged to make a quick change of name.
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 s
tarting 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. Until this moment, all had been circling Earth together in a rigidly held formation, but now the yachts would begin to disperse, like dandelion seeds drifting before the breeze. And the winner would be the one that first drifted past the Moon.
Aboard Diana, nothing seemed to be happening. But Merton knew better. Though his body could feel no thrust, the instrument board told him that he was now accelerating at almost one thousandth of a gravity. For a rocket, that figure would have been ludicrous—but this was the first time any solar yacht had ever attained it. Diana’s design was sound; the vast sail was living up to his calculations. At this rate, two circuits of the Earth would build up his speed to escape velocity, and then he could head out for the Moon, with the full force of the Sun behind him.
The full force of the Sun… He smiled wryly, remembering all his attempts to explain solar sailing to those lecture audiences back on Earth. That had been the only way he could raise money, in those early days. He might be Chief Designer of Cosmodyne Corporation, with a whole string of successful spaceships to his credit, but his firm had not been exactly enthusiastic about his hobby.
‘Hold your hands out to the Sun,’ he’d said. ‘What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well—though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it comes to only about a millionth of an ounce.
‘But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important, for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it. We can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the Sun.’
At that point, he would pull out a few square yards of sail material and toss it toward the audience. The silvery film would coil and twist like smoke, then drift slowly to the ceiling in the hot-air currents.
‘You can see how light it is,’ he’d continue. ‘A square mile weighs only a ton, and can collect five pounds of radiation pressure. So it will start moving—and we can let it tow us along, if we attach rigging to it.
‘Of course, its acceleration will be tiny—about a thousandth of a g. That doesn’t seem much, but let’s see what it means.
‘It means that in the first second, we’ll move about a fifth of an inch. I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that. But after a minute, we’ve covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a mile an hour. That’s not bad, for something driven by pure sunlight! After an hour, we’re forty miles from our starting point, and will be moving at eighty miles an hour. Please remember that in space there’s no friction; so once you start anything moving, it will keep going forever. You’ll be surprised when I tell you what our thousandth-of-a-g sailboat will be doing at the end of a day’s run: almost two thousand miles an hour! If it starts from orbit—as it has to, of course—it can reach escape velocity in a couple of days. And all without burning a single drop of fuel!’
Well, he’d convinced them, and in the end he’d even convinced Cosmodyne. Over the last twenty years, a new sport had come into being. It had been called the sport of billionaires, and that was true. But it was beginning to pay for itself in terms of publicity and TV coverage. The prestige of four continents and two worlds was riding on this race, and it had the biggest audience in history.
Diana had made a good start; time to take a look at the opposition. Moving very gently—though there were shock absorbers between the control capsule and the delicate rigging, he was determined to run no risks—Merton stationed himself at the periscope.
There they were, looking like strange silver flowers planted in the dark fields of space. The nearest, South America’s Santa Maria, was only fifty miles away; it bore a close resemblance to a boy’s kite, but a kite more than a mile on a side. Farther away, the University of Astrograd’s Lebedev looked like a Maltese cross; the sails that formed the four arms could apparently be tilted for steering purposes. In contrast, the Federation of Australasia’s Woomera was a simple parachute, four miles in circumference. General Spacecraft’s Arachne, as its name suggested, looked like a spider web, and had been built on the same principles, by robot shuttles spiralling out from a central point. Eurospace Corporation’s Gossamer was an identical design, on a slightly smaller scale. And the Republic of Mars’s Sunbeam was a flat ring, with a half-mile-wide hole in the centre, spinning slowly, so that centrifugal force gave it stiffness. That was an old idea, but no one had ever made it work; and Merton was fairly sure that the colonials would be in trouble when they started to turn.
That would not be for another six hours, when the yachts had moved along the first quarter of their slow and stately twenty-four-hour orbit. Here at the beginning of the race, they were all heading directly away from the Sun—running, as it were, before the solar wind. One had to make the most of this lap, before the boats swung around to the other side of Earth and then started to head back into the Sun.
Time, Merton told himself, for the first check, while he had no navigational worries. With the periscope, he made a careful examination of the sail, concentrating on the points where the rigging was attached to it. The shroud lines—narrow bands of unsilvered plastic film—would have been completely invisible had they not been coated with fluorescent paint. Now they were taut lines of coloured light, dwindling away for hundreds of yards toward that gigantic sail. Each had its own electric windlass, not much bigger than a game fisherman’s reel. The little windlasses were continually turning, playing lines in or out as the autopilot kept the sail trimmed at the correct angle to the Sun.
The play of sunlight on the great flexible mirror was beautiful to watch. The sail was undulating in slow, stately oscillations, sending multiple images of the Sun marching across it, until they faded away at its edges. Such leisurely vibrations were to be expected in this vast and flimsy structure. They were usually quite harmless, but Mer
ton watched them carefully. Sometimes they could build up to the catastrophic undulations known as the ‘wriggles’, which could tear a sail to pieces.
When he was satisfied that everything was shipshape, he swept the periscope around the sky, rechecking the positions of his rivals. It was as he had hoped: the weeding-out process had begun, as the less efficient boats fell astern. But the real test would come when they passed into the shadow of Earth. Then, manoeuvrability would count as much as speed.
It seemed a strange thing to do, what with the race having just started, but he thought it might be a good idea to get some sleep. The two-man crews on the other boats could take it in turns, but Merton had no one to relieve him. He must rely on his own physical resources, like that other solitary seaman, Joshua Slocum, in his tiny Spray. The American skipper had sailed Spray singlehanded around the world; he could never have dreamed that, two centuries later, a man would be sailing singlehanded from Earth to Moon—inspired, at least partly, by his example.
Merton snapped the elastic bands of the cabin seat around his waist and legs, then placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer on his forehead. He set the timer for three hours, and relaxed. Very gently, hypnotically, the electronic pulses throbbed in the frontal lobes of his brain. Coloured spirals of light expanded beneath his closed eyelids, widening outward to infinity. Then nothing…
The brazen clamour of the alarm dragged him back from his dreamless sleep. He was instantly awake, his eyes scanning the instrument panel. Only two hours had passed—but above the accelerometer, a red light was flashing. Thrust was falling; Diana was losing power.
Merton’s first thought was that something had happened to the sail; perhaps the antispin devices had failed, and the rigging had become twisted. Swiftly, he checked the meters that showed the tension of the shroud lines. Strange—on one side of the sail they were reading normally, but on the other the pull was dropping slowly, even as he watched.
A Meeting With Medusa Page 11