Read 2061: Odyssey Three for Free Online Page B

the bright green ribbon and unwrapping the paper.
    Inside was a nicely framed painting. Although Floyd knew little of art, he had seen it before; indeed, who could ever forget it?
    The makeshift raft tossing on the waves was crowded with half-naked castaways, some already moribund, others waving desperately at a ship on the horizon. Beneath it was the caption:
    THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA
    (Theodore Géricault, 1791-1824)
    And underneath that was the message, signed by George and Jerry: ‘Getting there is half the fun.’
    ‘You’re a pair of bastards, and I love you dearly,’ said Floyd, embracing them both. The ATTENTION light on Archie’s keyboard was flashing briskly; it was time to go.
    His friends left in a silence more eloquent than words. For the last time, Heywood Floyd looked around the little room that had been his universe for almost half his life.
    And suddenly he remembered how that poem ended:
    ‘I have been happy: happy now I go.’

2061: Odissey Three
    8

2061: Odissey Three
    Starfleet
    Sir Lawrence Tsung was not a sentimental man, and was far too cosmopolitan to take patriotism seriously - though as an undergraduate he had briefly sported one of the artificial pigtails worn during the Third Cultural Revolution. Yet the planetarium re-enactment of the Tsien disaster moved him deeply, and caused him to focus much of his enormous influence and energy upon space.
    Before long, he was taking weekend trips to the Moon, and had appointed his son Charles (the thirty-two-million-so! one) as Vice-President of Tsung Astrofreight. The new corporation had only two catapult-launched, hydrogen-fuelled ramrockets of less than a thousand tons empty mass; they would soon be obsolete, but they could provide Charles with the experience that, Sir Lawrence was quite certain, would be needed in the decades ahead. For at long last, the Space Age was truly about to begin.
    Little more than half a century had separated the Wright Brothers and the coming of cheap, mass air transportation; it had taken twice as long to meet the far greater challenge of the Solar System.
    Yet when Luis Alvarez and his team had discovered muon-catalysed fusion back in the 1950s, it had seemed no more than a tantalizing laboratory curiosity, of only theoretical interest. Just as the great Lord Rutherford had pooh-poohed the prospects of atomic power, so Alvarez himself doubted that ‘cold nuclear fusion’ would ever be of practical importance. Indeed, it was not until 2040 that the unexpected and accidental manufacture of stable muonium-hydrogen ‘compounds’ had opened up a new chapter of human history - exactly as the discovery of the neutron had initiated the Atomic Age.
    Now small, portable nuclear power plants could be built, with a minimum of shielding. Such enormous investments had already been made in conventional fusion that the world’s electrical utilities were not - at first - affected, but the impact on space travel was immediate; it could be paralleled only by the jet revolution in air transport of a hundred years earlier.
    No longer energy-limited, spacecraft could achieve far greater speeds; flight times in the Solar System could now be measured in weeks rather than months or even years. But the muon drive was still a reaction device - a sophisticated rocket, no different in principle from its chemically fuelled ancestors; it needed a working fluid to give it thrust. And the cheapest, cleanest, and most convenient of all working fluids was - plain water.
    The Pacific Spaceport was not likely to run short of this useful substance. Matters were different at the next port of call - the Moon. Not a trace of water had been discovered by the Surveyor, Apollo, and Luna missions. If the Moon had ever possessed any native water, aeons of meteoric bombardment had boiled and blasted it into space.
    Or so the selenologists believed; yet clues to the contrary had been visible, ever since Galileo had turned his first telescope upon the Moon. Some