Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

daughter.
    It wasn’t long before the issue of Siobhan’s safety came up once more.
    “You really mustn’t worry,” Siobhan told her daughter. “I’m surrounded by extremely competent people who know exactly what to do to keep me alive and well. Why, I’ll probably be safer on the Moon than in London.”
    “I doubt that very much,” Perdita said, her voice mildly scolding. “You’re not John Glenn, Mother.”
    “No, but I don’t need to be.” Siobhan suppressed a stab of fond irritation.
And I’m only forty-five!
But, she reflected guiltily, when she was twenty or so, wasn’t this just the way she had treated her own mother?
    “And then there are solar flares,” Perdita said. “I’ve been reading up.”
    “So has most of the human race since June, I would think,” Siobhan said dryly.
    “Astronauts are outside the Earth’s air and magnetic field. So they aren’t shielded as they would be on the ground.”
    Siobhan waved her phone around to show Perdita the cabin. Big enough to hold eight but empty save for herself, it had hefty walls whose thickness was revealed by the depth of the window sockets. “See?” She thumped the wall. “Five centimeters of aluminum and water.”
    “That won’t help if a big one hits,” Perdita pointed out. “In 1972 a massive flare erupted only months after
Apollo 16
returned from the Moon. If the astronauts had been caught on the lunar surface—”
    “But they weren’t,” Siobhan said. “And there was no such thing as solar weather forecasting back then. If there was any risk, they wouldn’t let me fly.”
    Perdita grunted. “But the sun is restless now, Mum. It’s only four months since June 9, and still nobody knows what caused it. Who’s to say if the forecasters have any idea what’s going on anymore?”
    “Well,” Siobhan said a bit testily, “that’s what I’m going to the Moon to find out. And I really had better get on with some work, dear . . .” With expressions of love, and after sending regards to her own mother, Siobhan closed down the call. It was a mild relief to break the connection.
    Of course, she suspected that Perdita’s real problem with her mission wasn’t safety at all. It was jealousy. Perdita couldn’t stand it that her mother was here, not
her.
With a sense of guilty triumph, Siobhan peered out of the window at the looming Moon.
    Siobhan was a child of the 1990s. The first human landings on the Moon had been finished two decades before she was born. She had always looked on the relics of the
Apollo
missions, the grainy footage of fresh-faced astronauts with their flags and stiff pressure suits and impossibly primitive technology, as a symptom of the madness of the vanished Cold War years, up there with the UFO craze and missile silos under Kansas cornfields.
    When at the opening of the century a return to the Moon had been floated on both sides of the Atlantic, Siobhan had again been distinctly unimpressed. Even as a science student it had seemed to her a jobs-for-the-boys project dominated by aviators and engineers, a bid for power and wealth by the military-industrial complex, with science goals a fig-leaf justification at best, just as manned space travel always had been.
    But the rediscovery of space exploration had captured the imagination of a new generation—including her own, she admitted—and had progressed faster than anybody had dreamed.
    A new fleet of
Apollo
-like space vehicles was flying by 2012. Though venerable
Soyuz
craft still toiled to and from the International Space Station, the brave, flawed space shuttles were retired. Meanwhile a flotilla of exploratory rovers and sample-return missions had been dispatched to the Moon and to Mars, as well as more ambitious unmanned missions farther afield, such as an extraordinary swords-into-plowshares venture, yet to be fulfilled, to use an antiquated weapons system called the Extirpator to map the whole solar system. Siobhan knew the science return from these