That didn’t happen.
The tiny windlasses stayed frozen. Suddenly they were receiving no orders at all, either from the autopilot computer or from the human being that should have been controlling everything.
Solar yacht Diana was no longer under way. The vast sail began to tip….
And then to bend….
And then the ripples in the fabric began to grow into great, irregular billows. And the flimsy material that was the sail reached, and passed, its maximum tolerated stress.
The commodore saw at once that Diana was in trouble. Indeed, the whole fleet did, and radio discipline evaporated in a flash. Ron Olsos was the first to demand a chemical-powered tender to take him off his own ship so that he could help search for Natasha Subramanian in the collapsing ruin that had been the space yacht Diana. He wasn’t the last. Within another hour the race had dissolved into more than a score of vessels of all kinds milling about the crumpled mass that had once been beautiful Diana, doing their best to avoid colliding with one another. The spacecraft that possessed the capability of man-in-space technology suited up as many of their crews as they could and searched.
They searched every fold of the immense crumpled sail—visually when they had to, and with infrared viewers when those were present. These viewers would instantly pick up the tiny signal of a warm human body anywhere in the destroyed sail.
They searched all the space around destroyed Diana, on the chance that somehow Natasha had been flung free through some unknown accident….
Above all, they searched Diana’s tiny cabin.
That didn’t take long. With only herself aboard there was no need for privacy; Diana’s capsule amounted to only a few cubic meters of space, and no possible place to hide.
But she wasn’t there. As far as the searchers could tell, Natasha Subramanian wasn’t anywhere at all.
38
THE HUNT FOR NATASHA SUBRAMANIAN
What the three fourths of the Subramanian family that remained on Earth had resolved to do was carry on with as normal a life as was possible, with the other quarter of the family gallivanting through cislunar space in a contraption of plastic and buckyball carbon. Accordingly, once they had sent Natasha their final good luck message, Ranjit had got on his bike to head for his office. Myra had seen the possibility of a whole hour, maybe two, for her to try to catch up on what her increasing backlog of journals had to say about some of the hotter subjects in the area of AI and prostheses. Such gifts of a few personal hours were not frequent. They came when young Robert was asleep, or when he was at his special school, or when he was, as now, dutifully following the housemaid around, helping her—or, more accurately, “helping” her—with her early-morning tasks of making beds and tidying rooms.
So, with a cooling cup of tea on the table before her—and, of course, with the news programs playing on her room screen in case, however improbably, something unexpected occurred in Natasha’s race—Myra was trying to make sense of some of her journals when she heard the sound of her son’s heartbroken sobbing.
She looked up and saw the maid carrying him into the room. “I don’t know what happened, missus,” the maid said, sounding struck. “We were emptying out the wastebaskets when Robert suddenly sat down and began to cry. Robert never cries, missus!”
Which Myra, of course, knew as well as she did. But there it was. So Myra did what untold billions of other mothers have done, all the way from the australopithecines. She took her son in her arms and rocked him soothingly, murmuring into his ear. It didn’t stop the crying, no, but the tears simmered down to sobs. Myra was asking herself whether this unusual and troubling—but certainly not life-threatening—development warranted calling her husband at his office, when there was a stifled shriek from the maid. Myra looked up.
There on the screen was the image of her daughter’s solar yacht. Apart from the fact that one edge was, ever so slightly, tipped up, it looked exactly as it had an hour earlier. But now there was a red banner underneath the image that said “Accident in lunar race?” And when the audio volume was turned up, there was no question mark in the agitated remarks of the newscaster. Something bad had happened to Diana. Worst of all, Diana’s pilot—which was to say, Myra’s beloved daughter—was not answering distress calls from the commodore, and it seemed that whatever had gone wrong with the solar yacht had somehow abducted its pilot.
Myra Subramanian’s terrible worry was perhaps the most personal distress anyone in the world can feel, but she was not alone. The more the tender vessels dug into the puzzle of what had happened to Diana, the more hopelessly unanswerable the puzzle seemed.
Emergency workers from the commodore’s yacht had long since suited up and reached Diana’s command capsule. They managed to gain entrance, searched it, found no trace of its pilot. But that was not the worst. More detailed examination showed that the register on the capsule’s one air lock showed unequivocally that it had not been opened since Natasha herself had entered, to begin the race. So Natasha was not only missing; she had never even left her command capsule.
All of which, of course, was quite impossible. And also unarguably true.
Also of course, the commodore and his staff had several dozen other problems to try to solve, all at once. There were the six other solar yachts, no longer in an orderly line, now in some danger of colliding with one another as their pilots were distracted by what had happened to the seventh of their group. The order went out to each of them to furl their sails and await pickup. That would leave the craft as six little bullets of matter that would have to be followed and somehow steered into parking orbits that would not threaten other space traffic…but not right away. Those problems could be dealt with in an orderly fashion, when time permitted.
There was nothing orderly, however, in what had become of Natasha Subramanian. Her disappearance, in the circumstances in which it had occurred, was simply impossible. And all of that was very bad for everyone concerned, and then it got worse.
For the next thirty-six hours the whole remaining Subramanian family was gathered in their kitchen, maid and cook as well. When Robert woke up from his nap, the crying spell was over, though he didn’t seem able to tell his parents what it had been about—until they asked him if it had something to do with his sister and he replied, “’Atasha ’appy asleep.”
When dinner arrived, he ate with a good appetite, although no one else did. They didn’t sleep much, either, drowsing in their chairs or stretching out for half an hour or so on the couch under the kitchen’s windows. But none of the adults dared walk away from the news screens for more than a couple of minutes, lest some explanation of what had happened might suddenly be announced.
None was.
Oh, there was news, all right. One worrying bulletin came from the searchers in low earth orbit to say that now they were being escorted by several dozen of those little copper-colored flying things that had given the world its first solid indication that flying saucers, or something like flying saucers, were real. Why were they there? What did they want? Speculation was intense, but no explanation emerged, and so the world’s attention turned to other matters. Attention turned to that spot in the Oort where astronomers had seen something that looked a little like, but wasn’t, a supernova. Now the longer photographic exposures, with more powerful clusters of telescopes hooked together, showed that there was indeed some low-level radiation going on that positively had not been there in earlier studies of the same area. Attention turned to the tugs that were gradually herding all seven of the racing yachts into safe orbits—the six that were unharmed as well as the ball of crumpled fabric that had been Natasha’s Diana. Attention turned to all the world’s capitals and major cities, not one of which lacked a collection of “experts” capable of endlessly discussing what was going on—without ever increasing anyone’s understanding of it.