Going Interstellar (collection)

So let me tell you about the Great Regatta of 2237, because the press had it wrong, as usual, and when was the last time the self-appointed pundits ever knew anything except what other self-appointed pundits were thinking?

The public had grown increasingly weary of races on Earth’s oceans. After all, the oceans were so …well …limiting. Lift your gaze, the reasoning went, and there’s a whole universe up there, and it’s a lot bigger than an ocean. Okay, we couldn’t reach most of it, couldn’t even visit Alpha Centauri during one lifetime, let alone make the return flight. But we could reach just about any place in the solar system, and even if the distances weren’t measured in parsecs, they stirred the imagination the way mere miles and fathoms no longer could.

There were six ships entered in the race. Five were sleek, bullet-shaped vessels, powered by fission or fusion—and then there was the Argo, the only ship in the Regatta that made its way through the void by the use of solar sails.

The course was mapped out by the most sophisticated computers: they would start from orbit—four of the ships had been built in space and would die having never touched down on a planetary surface—and each ship would have to pass within a thousand miles of four buoys that would register their passage. The designers didn’t want to chance losing a ship due to a gas giant’s gravity, so while they put one buoy in orbit around Mars, the other three would be in position not around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, but rather their moons: Ganymede, Titan, and Umbriel.

May 1 was a special day in many cultures—not for the reasons it once was, at least not in most countries—and it was decided that the race would begin at exactly twelve o’clock noon, Greenwich Mean Time, on that date.

The ships could choose any course they wanted, which was meaningful since their goals were in constant motion. Once the race began, they were not permitted to communicate with each other, even to warn of dangers such as ion storms or meteor showers. And finally, if a ship touched down on any solid surface—planet, moon, asteroid, anything—for any reason, it would be disqualified.

It was the Argo that caught the public’s fancy, partially because solar sails seemed somehow romantic, conjuring up visions of the sailing ships of yore, and partially because of the captain. His name—and no one except the public believed it could possibly be his real one—was FarTrekker Jones, with the capital T right in the middle of it, and they couldn’t have been more taken by a name if he’d chosen Odysseus or Horatio Hornblower.

He shared the Argo with two others, a co-pilot and a navigator—he didn’t trust navigational computers, though of course the ship had one—and the three of them were a hard-bitten lot. No one knew what had driven them to space (I almost said “driven them to sea”), and they weren’t much for giving interviews—but the people loved them anyway, and if no one knew anything much about them, why, that just lent a little romantic mystery to the race.

They lined the six ships up in orbit, each about five miles from the next, and suddenly they were off and running, or probably I should say off and flying. The Silver Streak jumped out to a quick lead, followed by the Galaxy Roamer. The Argo wasn’t exactly left at the gate—for one thing, they didn’t have a starting gate—but it was soon bringing up the rear.

They reached Mars in fourteen to sixteen days, depending on which ship you were rooting for. The Galaxy Roamer was now in the lead by seven hours, with the Silver Streak and McGinty’s Marvel five minutes apart in second place, and the Argo still bringing up the rear.

The first five ships followed a predetermined route to get to Ganymede, which was their next checkpoint. It was a reasonable route, and a safe route. They had to go through the Asteroid Belt, of course, but bad stories and worse videos to the contrary, most of the asteroids are so far apart that actually seeing two or three while traversing the Belt breaks the monotony (and monotonous it is, for Jupiter is a lot farther from Mars than Earth is).

But not all the Belt is like that. Some of it is what you might call densely populated, not by people but by asteroids, and in fact there are a few places where there are so many and they are moving so swiftly, that they can be damned dangerous. Moreover, there’s a lot of rubble out there, rocks the size of bricks, or footballs if you prefer, that are so small and so fast that a ship’s sensors will miss half of them, but any one of them, if it hits the right spot at the right angle, can put a ship out of commission …and I mean permanently.