The Sails of Tau Ceti Read Online Free PDF Page B

earlier in the evening.
    “Hello, Dard. Drink?”
    “We’ve been looking all over for you two. Why aren’t you on the net? Never mind, I see why.”
    “Ben and I wanted to talk. We’ve a lot of catching up before I head back to Phobos tomorrow.”
    “Not tomorrow and probably not for the rest of the week.”
    “What’s happened?”
    “Sadibayan received an emergency flash from Earth. Two hours ago the light sail lit up like a Christmas tree.”
    “Lit up?”
    “Began emitting blue-white light with a black body radiation curve equivalent to 5000°K. It is also emitting charged protons at relativistic velocity.”
    “Huh?”
    “So far as we can tell,” Pierce continued, “someone is ionizing hydrogen atoms and then using a very strong electrical charge to repel them away from the sail.”
    “Why would they want to do that?”
    “To slow down, of course. They are sweeping up the interstellar gas in their path and using it to retard their velocity. They’ve turned the sail into an electrostatic brake!”
    “They?” Ben asked.
    Pierce did not appear to hear the question. “We were wrong about the size, too. The sail is a hell of a lot bigger than one thousand kilometers.” It was probably furled until quite recently.”
    “Furled?”
    “Folded up! A fully deployed light sail would produce a strong parasitic drag on a 250 yearlong voyage. Better to stow it until you need it to decelerate. Less of a problem with wear and tear, too.”
    “You speak as though there’s a crew aboard,” Tory said. Despite the warm fog the scotch had laid over her mind, the implications of Pierce’s statements were beginning to sink in.
    “We think there is. Come on; let’s get you a sober pill. We have plans to make. This changes everything.”
    #
    There were only three people left in the conference room when Pierce returned with Tory and Ben Tallen. Tory walked with a rolling gait as she sought her place at the table. It had been nearly a century since the invention of Quiksober , yet the spatial disorientation that was the wonder drug’s primary side effect had never been completely tamed.
    She switched on her implant and let it run through its self-test sequence. When she was certain it was operational, she asked, “All right, what do we know?”
    Tory’s intention had been to request the file reference for the new data so that she could access it. Boris Hunsacker misunderstood her request, or possibly the data had yet to be input into the computer. He called for the lights to be dimmed and the holocube to be activated.
    The familiar starfield was much as it had been. Tau Ceti blazed bright from within its shell of gas. The light sail, which had formerly reflected an anemic version of Sol’s spectrum, now blazed forth like a new nova. The former dim yellow spot was now the blue-white hue of a mercury vapor lamp.
    “Brightened some, hasn’t it?”
    “An understatement, Miss Bronson,” Sadibayan replied dryly. “When it first happened, Luna thought it had exploded.”
    “Did it blaze up all at once?”
    Hunsacker nodded. “The time from onset to maximum was only three milliseconds. That is the primary reason we suspect an electrostatic braking device. If friction were the cause, the temperature would not have shot up so precipitously. We also wouldn’t be seeing relativistic protons.”
    “Friction?”
    “One of the Luna astronomers postulated that the sail had run into a gas bubble surrounding a comet nucleus out in the Oort cloud,” Hunsacker explained.
    The subminister shook his head. “Anything dense enough to make it glow like that would have ripped it apart.”
    “Can we detect any deceleration yet?”
    “No way to tell, damn it. We could judge its speed well enough when it was reflecting sunlight. It is a simple matter to measure Doppler shift from a known spectrum. Now that it is emitting light on its own, we’ve lost even that clue.”
    “So we don’t know how fast it is slowing?”
    “Not