It was sunny on the shores of Lake Tripoli, but Ingrid couldn't tell. Her body-moulded capsule insulated her against the heat of the sun - and the cold of space. Cocooned and calm, she waited. In 2 minutes and 44... 43... 42 seconds she would trade places almost instantaneously with a target in space, an energy convergence 93 million kilometres away. It had been done before, once by computer simulation, once with a tin can, and once with a duck. But if this technique had any hope of fuelling an ark ship to save the human race, they had to go now with a human trial. From the thousands of would-be Armstrongs who volunteered, Ingrid had been selected. This was her mission.

Beyond the launch dome, three-hundred scientists, technicians, designers, controllers and mission specialists from one-hundred countries hummed once more through final checks. Server-clusters, harnessing the power of half the world's remaining computers, idled through the trickle of background data, itching to process the burst of telemetry to come. They would have to wait. The dome's electronegative field denied even the grainy capsule confirmation image that had chronicled Major Gagarin's voyage two-hundred years before. But Professor Garrick didn't care. From that moment, six years ago, when he had first crunched the numbers for his solar accelerator back in his Washington State hideaway, he knew that this would work. This was his mission.

Out past the control centre, beyond the demilitarised zone, politicians and dignitaries from the one-hundred countries rehearsed their contributions. Hardware, software, personnel, power and enough francium scraped together to make this global enterprise viable. Years
vacillating had left Earth at a point of no return. Nobody really believed that this solar jump-ship would work, but Professor Garrick had presented his numbers well, and his international colleagues had backed him up. Plus time was up. There was nothing left to lose. It was King Abdul who had finally laid aside differences, rallied the leaders and raised enough money to launch the astonishingly expensive project to build an ark-shuttle. This was his mission.

Way out across the South European Atolls, Naomi sat alone amid the two-hundred thousand people squinting at the sun across a mirror-sea that caressed the sandy shores of Madrid. She was tired. She had shared her ten years with a decade of devastation that had escalated the peoples of Earth through misery, fear and death. Those who had made it to civic strongholds had been forced to make peace with each other and to take what charity they could. And charity had been stretched further by the astronomical sums needed to fund this lifeboat scheme. Cynics had decried the waste, of course, but few had had the strength to oppose military-backed politicians and equation-backed scientists. So now the world waited. Naomi sat, dreaming her dream of an arcadia for which she had no frame of reference. This was her mission.

Ingrid's moment came - and went. Hundreds of beaches across the Mediterranean Archipelago groaned beneath the weight of expectation. Thousands of imaginations chased Ingrid's capsule up the trellis of solar winds towards its entangled patch of space two-thirds of the way to the sun. Millions of breaths hung helpless as Earth's remaining population monitored its last gasp. Like the rest of them, Naomi saw nothing.

In their floating fortress, the kings and politicians asked questions of people who had no answers. The capsule had disappeared as planned; but expectations of its return were disappointed by this delay of 30… 40… 50 seconds. In the minutes that passed, advisors re-worked whispered speeches with their political masters. Amid this atmosphere of veiled ignorance, King Abdul demanded a comm-link.

The control room buzzed. Computers extracted permutations from the 1.8 seconds of telemetry data gathered between the opening of the electronegative field and the disappearance of Ingrid and her capsule. Sky-scopes scanned the arc of probabilities before moving out to the zone of possibilities. Infra-red detectors, searching for the slightest suggestion of an explosion, fought through the background radiation of an expanding sun that suddenly rushed in to bleach Professor Garrick's dream.
"Dr Tsunoko?" The Professor looked across the international control room to his navigation expert.
"Were you using kilometres or miles?"