"Buck who?" But then I couldn't keep a straight face. Morris raised his eyes to Heaven. No doubt it was there that he found the strength to go on.
"The noted astronomer was Jerome Finney. Of course he, hadn't said anything about Earth. Newspapers always get that kind of thing garbled. He'd said that an object of artificial, extraterrestrial origin had entered the solar system.
"What had happened was that several months earlier, Jodrell Bank had found a new star in Sagittarius. That's the direction of the galactic core. Yes, Frazer?"
We were back to last names because I wasn't a science fiction fan. I said, "That's right. The Monks came from the galactic hub." I remembered the blazing night sky of Center. My Monk customer couldn't possibly have seen it in his lifetime. He must have been shown the vision through an education pill, for patriotic reasons, like kids are taught what the Star Spangled Banner looks like.
"All right. The astronomers were studying a nearby nova, so they caught the intruder a little sooner. It showed a strange spectrum, radically different from a nova and much more constant. It got even stranger. The light was growing brighter at the same time the spectral lines were shifting toward the red.
"It was months before anyone identified the spectrum.
"Then one Jerome Finney finally caught wise. He showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came."
"Oh!" I got it then. "That would mean a light-sail!"
"Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew."
"No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read the Sunday supplements."
Morris was exasperated. "But you knew enough to call the laser cannon a launching laser!"
"I just now realized why it's called that."
Morris stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, "I forgot. You got it out of the Monk language course."
"I guess so."
He got back to business. "The newspapers gave poor Finney a terrible time. You didn't see the political cartoons either? Too bad. But when the Monk ship got closer it started sending signals. It was an interstellar sailing ship, riding the sunlight on a reflecting sail, and it was coming here."
"Signals. With dots and dashes? You could do that just by tacking the sail."
"You must have read about it."
"Why? It's so obvious."
Morris looked unaccountably ruffled. Whatever his reasons, he let it pass. "The sail is a few molecules thick and nearly five hundred miles across when it's extended. On light pressure alone they can build up to interstellar velocities, but it takes them a long time. The acceleration isn't high.
"It took them two years to slow down to solar system velocities. They must have done a lot of braking before our telescopes found them, but even so they were going far too fast when they passed Earth's orbit. They had to go inside Mercury's orbit and come up the other side of the sun's gravity well, backing all the way, before they could get near Earth."
I said, "Sure. Interstellar speeds have to be above half the speed of light, or you can't trade competitively."
"What?"
"There are ways to get the extra edge. You don't have to depend on sunlight, not if you're launching from a civilized system. Every civilized system has a moon-based launching laser. By the time the sun is too far away to give the ship a decent push, the beam from the laser cannon is spreading just enough to give the sail a hefty acceleration without vaporizing anything."
"Naturally," said Morris, but he seemed confused.
"So that if you're heading for a strange system, you'd naturally spend most of the trip decelerating. You can't count on a strange system having a launching laser. If you know your destination is civilized, that's a different matter."
Morris nodded.
"The lovely thing about the laser cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there's a civilized world right there to fix it. You go
"The noted astronomer was Jerome Finney. Of course he, hadn't said anything about Earth. Newspapers always get that kind of thing garbled. He'd said that an object of artificial, extraterrestrial origin had entered the solar system.
"What had happened was that several months earlier, Jodrell Bank had found a new star in Sagittarius. That's the direction of the galactic core. Yes, Frazer?"
We were back to last names because I wasn't a science fiction fan. I said, "That's right. The Monks came from the galactic hub." I remembered the blazing night sky of Center. My Monk customer couldn't possibly have seen it in his lifetime. He must have been shown the vision through an education pill, for patriotic reasons, like kids are taught what the Star Spangled Banner looks like.
"All right. The astronomers were studying a nearby nova, so they caught the intruder a little sooner. It showed a strange spectrum, radically different from a nova and much more constant. It got even stranger. The light was growing brighter at the same time the spectral lines were shifting toward the red.
"It was months before anyone identified the spectrum.
"Then one Jerome Finney finally caught wise. He showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came."
"Oh!" I got it then. "That would mean a light-sail!"
"Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew."
"No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read the Sunday supplements."
Morris was exasperated. "But you knew enough to call the laser cannon a launching laser!"
"I just now realized why it's called that."
Morris stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, "I forgot. You got it out of the Monk language course."
"I guess so."
He got back to business. "The newspapers gave poor Finney a terrible time. You didn't see the political cartoons either? Too bad. But when the Monk ship got closer it started sending signals. It was an interstellar sailing ship, riding the sunlight on a reflecting sail, and it was coming here."
"Signals. With dots and dashes? You could do that just by tacking the sail."
"You must have read about it."
"Why? It's so obvious."
Morris looked unaccountably ruffled. Whatever his reasons, he let it pass. "The sail is a few molecules thick and nearly five hundred miles across when it's extended. On light pressure alone they can build up to interstellar velocities, but it takes them a long time. The acceleration isn't high.
"It took them two years to slow down to solar system velocities. They must have done a lot of braking before our telescopes found them, but even so they were going far too fast when they passed Earth's orbit. They had to go inside Mercury's orbit and come up the other side of the sun's gravity well, backing all the way, before they could get near Earth."
I said, "Sure. Interstellar speeds have to be above half the speed of light, or you can't trade competitively."
"What?"
"There are ways to get the extra edge. You don't have to depend on sunlight, not if you're launching from a civilized system. Every civilized system has a moon-based launching laser. By the time the sun is too far away to give the ship a decent push, the beam from the laser cannon is spreading just enough to give the sail a hefty acceleration without vaporizing anything."
"Naturally," said Morris, but he seemed confused.
"So that if you're heading for a strange system, you'd naturally spend most of the trip decelerating. You can't count on a strange system having a launching laser. If you know your destination is civilized, that's a different matter."
Morris nodded.
"The lovely thing about the laser cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there's a civilized world right there to fix it. You go
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