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07:58:24.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The wide angle X-ray/ultraviolet scanner on Dragon Slayer detected a moderately strong pulsed emission in the east pole mountains. It had not been there when that same area had been scanned a few seconds ago. Automatic feature extractors singled out the region and a search-and-identify priority was assigned to the narrow angle scanner, which locked onto the blinking light source in a millisecond and began to record and analyze the pulses in detail.

An occasional pulse of high temperature thermal radiation at the east pole was not unexpected. Fairly often, a chunk of meteoric material would be pulled in by the star’s gravity, and as it would approach the star, the extreme gravitational and magnetic fields of the star would rip the rock apart and transform it into a blob of ionized plasma. The hot gas would fall at near relativistic speeds down along the magnetic field lines to impact on the surface in a brilliant explosion of heat and light.

However, these pulses coming from the star were not the fiery blasts from infalling meteors. The regularity of the pulsations triggered a higher priority circuit that kept the narrow angle scanner on the pulsations until they quit several milliseconds later. Low-level judgment circuits evaluated the significance of the periodicity and assigned it a moderately high priority. The narrow angle scanner would return to that site often in its constantly varying scanning routine, but there was nothing there of interest to the humans.

07:58:24.3 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“Let’s try again,” Swift-Killer said. Keeping the dark detector in front of one of her eyes, she went back to the apparatus. This time she held the valve herself with a set of manipulators, while a set of tendrils felt off the knots in the tally string.

Much later Swift-Killer called a halt. The second message had been beamed up to the Inner Eye, and still there was no response.

“If only we could be sure that our weak light could be seen at that distance,” Swift-Killer complained bitterly.

“You could climb to the top of that peak over there,” North-Wind said with mild sarcasm. “Cliff-Watcher and I will be glad to beam a message up to you and you could check on the reception.”

For once, Swift-Killer was silent. She could think of nothing else to do but to try again.

They were nearing the end of the third message when a loud crash came vibrating through the crust. Swift-Killer didn’t move. The highly developed sonic direction-finding apparatus in her tread had told her exactly what had happened.

“The glancer has fallen,” she said. Her eyes, which had been concentrating on the work of monitoring the fall of the drops of pod juice onto the end of the flare, continued their gaze while Swift-Killer slowly turned the valve off, closing it tightly to prevent leaks. She pouched the vial, and then finally turned her attention to the base of the nearby cliff where the glittering shards of the broken glancer lay in a shattered heap.

Swift-Killer flowed over to the base of the cliff, forming a manipulator as she went. She felt through the sparkling pieces, but found none that were anywhere near the size of the original mirror.

“At least we got some of the messages off,” Cliff-Watcher said consolingly.

“Yes, but there are still more, and we ought to repeat them as often as we can to make sure they are received,” Swift-Killer said. “We must find a way to keep sending without using the glancer.”

“Perhaps we can find a suitable chunk of crust around here,” North-Wind suggested.

“I’m afraid not,” Swift-Killer said. “I have been looking at the various types of crust as we passed by different formations, and all the material in these mountains seems to consist of fuzzy crust. I have not seen anything around here that had anywhere near as shiny a cleavage surface as a glancer. We will have to think of something else.”

Swift-Killer tried many things. However, there was no way that she could get a beam formed and directed upwards to the Inner Eye. She had even tried leaning the expander up against the cliff at an angle (being careful this time to back it up with chunks of crust), but the light from the flare came in at such an angle that the light reflected from the expander was sprayed out in a distorted beam that rapidly dissipated into the sky. She knew where the focus spot of the expander was, but it was an unreachable point way up in the sky, at least a dozen times higher than she could reach, and almost as high as the cliff itself. Then she had an idea.

“If we put the expander flat on the crust, pointing up at the Eyes,” she said, “then the focus spot will be up around the top of this cliff. If we climbed up there with the flares we could make the light near the focus and the beam from the expander would go straight up to the Eyes.”

Being a trooper, North-Wind said nothing, but Cliff-Watcher exploded. “You can’t be serious. That cliff must be twice as high as you are wide. It will take you a dozen turns to climb that high, even if you can find a route, and we are out of food! We will be nothing but bags of skin if we ever make it!”

“You are not going,” Swift-Killer said. “You will stay here. I will need to have you move the expander to different positions along the face of the cliff until we get the focus spot so it is just above the edge of the cliff where we can reach it.”

Swift-Killer went to the broken glancer, picked up one of the larger shards and pouched it.

“Let’s go, North-Wind,” she said, and took off toward the far end of the cliff, with the obedient trooper close on the tread of his Commander.

07:58:24.4 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

A fraction of a second later, the pulsed emission started again, and this time the narrow-angle scanner caught it early in its emission period. The semiautomatic search-and-identify circuits kept the scanner focused on the pulsations, while the feature extractor in the frequency analysis circuits activated a correlation program. A strong match was then found between the pulsation pattern of the emissions and the rectangular picture pattern that Abdul had chosen in his attempts at communication with Dragon’s Egg. If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised.

The new correlation was enough to trigger an action circuit. As a result—a millisecond later—humans were called into the loop.

PERIODIC X-UV EMISSION—EAST POLE

Seiko glanced up at the computer message across the top of her screen. She was floating too far away from the console to reach any of the keys, so she used audibles, even if they were slower.

“Display!” she commanded, and instantly a replay of the narrow-angle X-ray/ultraviolet scanner was on her screen. She watched the regular blinking of the spot in the middle of the east pole mountains, then glanced up to see that the computer had slowed it down considerably for her.

1/100,000 REAL TIME

Seiko watched it for a few seconds. The pulsations stopped abruptly. There seemed to be no sense to them.

“Analysis!” she commanded.

The picture on the screen stayed, while the computer overprinted result after result of its analysis.

POSITION 0.1 DEG W LONG, 2.0 DEG N LAT
SPECTRUM MODIFIED THERMAL, 15,000 K
MODULATION SIMILAR TO DRAGON'S EGG COMM PICTURE
NO IDENTIFIABLE NATURAL SOURCE

Seiko scanned down the list and stiffened in shock. She expertly twisted her body in a midair position-reversal maneuver, caught hold of the edge of the console and pulled herself up to it. Her fingers flew over the keys. Within a few seconds, Swift-Killer’s second message was building up on her screen.

“Abdul!” she called to the next console, where Abdul Nkomi Farouk was laboriously working out a new message. “They are answering!”

07:58:28 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Cliff-Watcher had been right. The path that finally took them to the top of the cliff was tortuous and hard. Both Swift-Killer and North-Wind were hungry long before they reached the top, and this time it was the real hunger of someone who had been working at hard labor for a dozen turns. Swift-Killer still had plenty of reserves, but she was beginning to worry about North-Wind, for he was not as robust as she was. However, being a trooper, he never complained.

As Swift-Killer approached the edge of the cliff, she pulled the glancer shard from a pouch. “I’m sure I could never get one of my eyes to look down over the edge to see where Cliff-Watcher is, but as long as it thinks it is looking out at the horizon, I shouldn’t have any trouble,” she explained to North-Wind. Forming a strong manipulator with a deep root embedded in her tread muscles, she extended the shard out over the edge of the cliff.

She clustered her eyes in a line; with a little adjustment, she could see the deep red top of Cliff-Watcher waiting patiently next to the expander.

“I must really be getting hungry,” Swift-Killer thought. “Here I am gazing full on the topside of a handsome young male and I am not even interested.”

Swift-Killer turned to North-Wind and said, “We will have to move down this way.” She led the way down the cliff until they were at the point above the waiting Cliff-Watcher. Cliff-Watcher had never thought that his hatchling name had amounted to much, and now here he was spending what seemed to be his last dozen turns on Egg, doing nothing but watching a cliff.

Swift-Killer tried both long-talk and short-talk, and soon found that there was no trouble in communicating with Cliff-Watcher if he just kept a portion of his tread leaning up against the face of the cliff.

Cliff-Watcher had already arranged the expander; it was as close to the base of the cliff as he could get it. North-Wind formed a heavy manipulator like that of Swift-Killer and slowly stretched it out over the edge, a small flare held at the end.

Swift-Killer removed one of the vials of pod juice from a pouch, and gripping it carefully, extended that, too. She constantly reminded herself to hold tightly to the vial; if it fell, the expander would be shattered in as many shreds as the glancer. Slowly she formed a muscular pseudopod that slithered out on top of the hefty manipulator. The fine tip of the pseudopod curled its way around the valve. The valve slowly turned and a tiny stream of liquid hit the end of the flare. They both flinched from the unaccustomed blue-white light, but soon a steady beam shot forth into the sky. Swift-Killer evaluated it carefully. Fortunately the winds were high that turn, and there were many dust particles in the air. Swift-Killer could see the strong beam as it went upwards, only to come to a bright point at some unimaginable distance overhead. Swift-Killer turned off the valve and they both slowly withdrew their manipulators back over the edge and relaxed.

“We are too far away from the focus spot,” Swift-Killer said. “We will have to move down the cliff.”

North-Wind had never been able to figure out exactly what Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher were talking about when they mentioned things like focus spots, but he decided to let Swift-Killer do the thinking. After all, she was the commander. He silently followed her along the edge of the cliff until they came to another convenient portion of the ledge where they could both get a good tread grip. Swift-Killer again stuck her little glancer over the edge and watched as Cliff-Watcher pouched the expander, hauled it to the new position underneath Swift-Killer’s waving manipulator, then repositioned it carefully on the crust and moved back.

This time, when the light blazed from the top of the cliff, the beam that came out from the expander did not refocus. Swift-Killer thought that it was still slightly converging as she lost sight of it high in the sky, but it was good enough.

“We will continue our message,” she said as she pulled the tally strings from a pouch. North-Wind shuffled the crust in resignation, retracted the short flare they had been using for testing purposes and replaced it with a longer one.

“At least I won’t have to climb for a while,” he said tiredly to himself, and settled down to hold the heavy manipulator as still as he possibly could.

Soon a disciplined pulsation of light was beaming its way up to the Eyes, continuing the message that had been interrupted a dozen turns ago when the glancer had fallen from the face of the cliff. Swift-Killer did not pause long when she came to the end. Since they were on their body reserves, it didn’t help much to rest anymore; except for an occasional change of flare or pod juice vial, the two troopers doggedly kept at their task.

Their job finally finished, Swift-Killer and North-Wind started their way back down the path to the base of the cliff. By mutual consent, they left everything but their clan totems in a pile at the top of the cliff.

A dozen turns later, a weary Cliff-Watcher saw two very thin cheela slowly making their way around the end of the cliff. Swift-Killer was in front, breaking a path for the exhausted trooper.

“Another tread length,” she would urge, and gently nudge the sides of his treads with her trailing edge to keep him rippling. Slowly the two came up to Cliff-Watcher.

“I cannot go any further,” North-Wind said. “Leave me here.”

“No,” said Swift-Killer. “We are all going together.” She turned her attention to Cliff-Watcher. “I know you are tired too, but we must get to the base camp where there is a cache of food waiting. You get behind North-Wind and keep him moving while I break path.” Cliff-Watcher was too tired to argue and moved in behind his friend North-Wind. Together the three began to move off and down the sloping valley.

Cliff-Watcher, who had been checking the dark detector periodically, had just repouched it after looking to see if there had been any reply to their hard sent messages. There was nothing. He turned some of his eyes up to the specks of light above him and wondered at their silence. As he looked, a rapidly falling streak of bright light appeared to the side of the Eyes, high in the sky. The falling object became elongated and grew brighter and brighter. Cliff-Watcher stirred, and the other two raised their eyes, then tried to draw them under their protective flaps. There was no time. In an instant the whole sky was aflame with an explosion of light and heat that seared their top-sides and left three skinny blobs of scorched, blinded flesh that wriggled away from each other in their attempts to escape the pain.

Swift-Killer had never hurt so. Her last thought was that Bright had decided to punish her for having the temerity to attempt to talk to God. The automatic protective mechanisms in her body, activated by the lack of body reserves and the shock from the topside burns, suddenly took over. The animal reflexes were turned off, and for the first time in untold generations, a cheela went to sleep.

07:58:37 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Abdul came flying over to Seiko’s console. He halted his headlong dive with a practiced swing around one of the support stanchions and hung motionless just over Seiko’s head.

“What reply?” he said.

“There is someone down there who is sending back pictures with the same format that you used,” Seiko replied, “but they are coming from the east pole, they use thermal ultraviolet radiation instead of laser light, and they are coming very fast. Look—here is the first picture.”

“It is a picture of Dragon Slayer and the six Tidal Compensators above Dragon’s Egg,” Abdul said. “But the star seems to be badly distorted into the shape of a pancake. It must be their star, however, because they have drawn in the mound formation. But what is that long narrow wedge with its base near us and its point over the formation?”

“It is a pointer,” Seiko said. “If you look at the second and third pictures, you will see that they are almost identical, except that the position of our ship slowly shifts toward the west, while the wedge symbol gets shorter.”

Seiko’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and soon the first picture was joined by a second and a portion of a third.

“You are right,” Abdul said. “It looks as if they want us to move to a position over their formation. I know why, too. The visibility through the atmosphere is poor in that direction. It would be much better if we were directly overhead.”

Abdul suddenly realized something else that Seiko had said. “How fast was the message being sent?” he asked.

“The computer had to slow it down,” Seiko said. “I estimate a pulse every four microseconds.”

Abdul went back to his console and soon had a trace of the pulses from the first picture lined up on the screen. He leaned forward and looked more closely at the interval between the pulses.

“They are very irregular in spacing and amplitude,” he said. “Almost as if they were handmade. You would think that a being that could make an ultraviolet laser could make a decent modulator.”

“The radiation is from a thermal source,” Seiko retorted.

Abdul paused as her reply sank in. “They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of American Indian smoke signals!” he said. “And each one of those crude pulses is made in four microseconds—Great Allah! That means that those beings must live something like a million times faster than we do! And I have been sending the laser pulses at a rate of about once per second. To them that is like a million seconds between pulses.”

Seiko quickly did the calculation for him. “As if it were about a week between pulses.”

Abdul had another horrible thought. “How long has it been since they started to reply?” he asked.

Seiko’s hands flicked on the keyboard, and the first picture reappeared with the time of reception in the upper corner. “The first picture arrived almost a minute ago,” she replied, “and if the ratio is a million to one, that is like two years ago.”

“They have probably gotten tired of waiting for an answer and have gone home,” Abdul said. “We had better get busy—and fast!” He hesitated a second, then lifted the cover on a panel on the side of the console and flicked the emergency alarm switch.

“You explain the situation to Pierre and the others,” he said over the whoop of the alarm signal, “and get Pierre to start moving the Dragon Slayer over the mound formation. I will try to get some sort of reply back as fast as I can.”

Seiko fixed up her screen with all the pictures displayed so she would be ready when the rest of the crew came boiling into the main deck to see what the emergency was. Within a few seconds Abdul had swiveled the laser radar to illuminate the east pole directly below them, while its operational frequency had been pushed up to the short ultraviolet. Because he had nothing better immediately at hand, Abdul had the computer play back the pictures that had been sent up from the surface. While they were pulsing down at a megahertz rate, he quickly pulled in the first picture that he had beamed down, showing the Dragon Slayer and the six tidal compensators above Dragon’s Egg. He added an arrow that curved over to a position above the mound formations, and had the computer send that down to the east pole. He then swiveled the laser back toward the strange starlike formation, and had it repeat the message twice, alternating between ultraviolet and light output. Since they had seen his first messages they should be able to detect it one way or the other. This time Abdul hoped that nobody would die of boredom waiting for the next pulse.

07:58:40 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The nearly empty seared sacks lay on the crust, quietly sleeping. Ancient plant genes, activated by the almost complete lack of food reserves, began their strange work. The animal enzymes were neutralized, and new enzymes were generated that attacked the very muscles that supported the skin, turning the striated flesh into a floating cloud of long fibers. The skin itself was thinned until it was almost transparent. Other plant enzymes took over and used the liquid material and long fibers to fashion large super-strength crystals. This was not the brittle crystallium that the animal body had previously used for manipulators—this was dragon crystal. At the center of the now flaccid tread, a tendril forced its way into the crust. In its core was a sharp cone of crystal. Exuding acids that ate their way into the crust, the spike slowly penetrated deeper and deeper into the hot, neutron-rich crust. Hairlike threads spread out between the crustal fibers and nutrients began to flow in from the threads and up the tap root. Meanwhile, smaller spikes of crystal, thick at the base and finely rounded at the tip, began to form in a starlike pattern at the head of the tap root. The strong dragon crystal structure overcame the frightful pull of Egg, and jutted out at a low angle to the surface. The dozen spikes spread out like a thorny crown. They grew longer and longer, and the flaccid skin, long since cured of its burns, was lifted up into the air. As the spikes grew longer, even their great crystalline strength was no longer adequate to resist Egg’s pull, so strong tension fibers formed that went from attachment knobs just below the growing tip of each spike to a stubby post that stuck up from the base of the spikes. Slowly the twelve-spiked cantilever canopy raised itself off the crust until the skin was drawn tightly to it.

The topside portion of the skin, hanging in a smooth dark red concave arc between the ends of the spikes, found that its shape shielded it from the glowing yellow surface crust, and it stared straight up into the cold sky. With its spike buried deep in the hot, neutron-rich crust, and its thinned upper surface area well coupled to a cold heat-sink, the heat-engine-plant that used to be Swift-Killer began to make food. It was oblivious to the fact that nearby were two other dragon plants, the first crop since before recorded cheela history. For many, many turns the dragon plants grew and prospered. They were massive, and slow-growing, and had to replace a lot of food reserves, so they took their time.

After waiting in vain for the three climbers to return, the troop was finally taken over by the senior squad leader, who mustered out those who wanted to stay in this Bright-forsaken region, and moved the remainder of the troop back to the borders of Bright’s Empire, where he then had the unpleasant duty of reporting the deaths of Swift-Killer, North-Wind, and Cliff-Watcher to their clans.

Time went on and Bright’s Empire grew and expanded its borders. Since the fort of Swift’s Climb existed, it was easy for the border to expand all the way to the foothills of the east pole mountains. However, no one really liked to climb unless they had to, especially in the hard direction, so there were no visitors in the mountain paths, and the dragon plants grew undisturbed.

One turn there was a sharp quake as the massive overburden that the east pole mountains put upon Egg readjusted itself. A poorly formed joint in one of the three dragon plants failed. The spike fell instantly in the strong pull of Egg, tearing the skin and dumping the vital fluids onto the surface. For a while the dragon plant struggled to survive, but finally it gave up. After a dozen, dozen turns, there was nothing left but shiny spikes of dragon crystal, a few shreds of dried skin, a clan totem, and the double button of a squad leader.

For a long while nothing happened. Then the dragon crystal spikes sparkled as a slowly pulsating beam of pure blue light shone down from the tiny center speck of the seven points of light in the sky. The pulsations went on for some time, bathing the mountains in a blue glow, but there were no eyes to see them. They finally stopped.

Time continued on. The barbarians were driven further and further from Bright’s Empire, and grew smaller in number. The large volcano in the north became more active, and billows of smoke crowded against the east pole. The unbalance in the heat radiated from the star into the dark skies became so great that huge wind storms grew, and were strong enough occasionally to push smoke into the east pole region. The sky grew cloudy, the bottoms of the smoky clouds turned yellow with the heat reflected from the glowing surface. The heat engine that ran between the taproot in the crust and the skyward facing concave dish of skin in the dragon plants began to fail. With food reserves high, and growing efficiencies low, the plant forming genes began to lose their potency, and other enzyme mechanisms were triggered. Slowly the dragon crystal was dissolved, to reappear as firm muscle under a thick skin. The little photosensitive bud cups at the tips of the crystal spikes reformed their flaps, and new little eyes, still dormant, grew under those flaps.

Swift-Killer woke up.

She felt very strange, as if she had not moved a muscle in a long time. Fortunately, she was feeling no pain from her burned topside and eyes.

“My eyes! I cannot see! How will I ever get down out of these mountains without eyes?”

She then realized that she had all of her eyes tucked tightly underneath their flaps. She cautiously pushed out one after the other.

“I can see light,” she said, “but everything is all blurry.”

She tried to form a pseudopod to wipe off her eyes, and found that she was as weak and clumsy as a hatchling. She soon had the fluid wiped off her eyes, but it was a full turn before she could really see clearly.

She knew that she must have been badly hurt by the blast of fire from the sky, but now she felt perfectly fine, except for her muscular weakness, her clumsy coordination and blurred vision. What amazed her was that she was no longer hungry.

Being a good troop commander, her first thought had been for her troopers, and she had looked around for North-Wind and Cliff-Watcher, but could not see them. She was too weak to travel, so she concentrated on exercises until she felt ready to cope with the hazards of downhill travel in the vicious pull of Egg.

After a tum she felt much better and started to examine her surroundings. As far as she could remember, she was still in the same valley where they had been when the flame struck, but she had not remembered the giant plant to one side, or the fabulous collection of dragon crystal lying on the crust on the other side. She might have ignored a plant, even if it were as big around as herself, but she would never have ignored a veritable treasure of shining dragon crystal. At the very least, she would have marked the spot and arranged to have a crew climb back up to retrieve it. She went over to the glittering spikes and picked them up, one after the other.

“Strange,” she thought to herself, “these are amazingly shiny, as if they were brand new, or fresh cast. All the natural dragon crystals are weathered by the constant scrubbing of wind-blown dust.”

She picked up another spike that had a shred of something sticking to it. She pulled the shred off the spike and suddenly dropped it in a horrified reflex action.

“North-Wind!” she whispered in horror, her eyes tracing out the faded but unmistakable three-pointed scar pattern that had been North-Wind’s memento from their last fight with the barbarians.

Any doubts that North-Wind had died and that his body had decayed away were gone when she found his squad leader button and clan totem half buried in the fuzzy crust. She pouched them and looked around in bewilderment. But what were North-Wind’s remains doing mixed up with fresh dragon crystal?

She looked over at the huge plant nearby. She then began to get the connection between the twelve spikes arching into the sky and the twelve spikes of dragon crystal spread out on the crust. She wandered over to the plant and circled all around it, looking at it closely. It looked somehow familiar, yet it was just a giant version of many types of plants all over Egg. On one side she saw a little lump in the thin skin. Just over it was a tiny pucker.

“A plant with a carrying pouch?” she said to herself. Carefully—for she did not want to meet the same fate that had apparently met North-Wind when the heavy plant had fallen on him—she reached a slender tendril under the plant and forced the tip into the pucker.

“It’s a pouch!” she exclaimed in wonder. Reaching further in, she grasped an object, and slowly withdrew it through the constricting orifice. It was the totem of Cliff-Watcher’s clan!

Swift-Killer could not believe what her eyes were seeing. But soon she had identified other pouches and had removed a short knife and a dark detector from them. She was finally convinced that somehow, in some way, this giant plant in front of her was really Cliff-Watcher.

“And if Cliff-Watcher is a living plant, then perhaps those slivers of dragon crystal over there used to be North-Wind,” she said to herself, “and…” She continued as the logic drove her on to the inescapable conclusion, “…I must have been one of these giant plants too! With large dragon crystal spikes in me!”

At this thought, she remembered that she had been annoyed by a hard lump tumbling around in her body. She had paid it no attention, since it did not hurt and she had plenty of other things to worry about at the time, but now she concentrated, and soon the lump was ejected from an elimination orifice. Overcoming her natural distaste, Swift-Killer wiped it off. It was a shiny knob of dragon crystal.

Swift-Killer looked at it with awe, and pouched it to use as evidence when the time came to make someone believe her fantastic story.

Meanwhile, she had a problem. Although North-Wind was dead, and she had his totem to take back to his clan, Cliff-Watcher was very much alive, and she didn’t feel she should leave him.

Swift-Killer finally decided to wait. She had plenty of reserve energy (she must have built that up when she was a plant), and it would be important for her sanity to have someone else to corroborate her story.

The skies stayed cloudy, and soon the trigger that had revived Swift-Killer was activated in Cliff-Watcher. Swift-Killer watched in amazement as, turn after turn, the slender spikes grew shorter and shorter, and the thin skin began to thicken and become muscular once again.

She was stroking Cliff-Watcher on the topside when he woke up. She treated him gently, and slowly coaxed his eyes out as she reassured him that he was going to be fine despite his blurry vision, and weak and clumsy state. After a few turns, they both felt well enough to travel and started down the mountain, carrying the crystallized remains of North-Wind with them.

When they came to the highest base camp, Swift-Killer sought out the food cache. It was there and had not been disturbed by mountain animals, but the meat and pods were hard as crust. This puzzled Swift-Killer, since a well-wrapped piece of dried meat should be expected to be hard, but not rock hard, even after a great of turns.

It was the same at each cache, although some had been broken into by animals long ago. Finally they reached the pass on the upper foothills where they could look down into the distance and see the trooper fort. As they came over the rise, both Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher stopped in shock. The fort was gone.

“Bright’s Heaven!” exclaimed Cliff-Watcher.

“No,” Swift-Killer said a moment later, “that is not Bright’s Heaven. It looks almost as big, but the arrangement is all wrong.”

“You are right,” Cliff-Watcher said. “But where did it come from?”

“I think that you and I were plants for longer than we thought,” Swift-Killer said. “There are going to be some very surprised people when we glide into that town.”

“Provided they even remember us,” Cliff-Watcher said pessimistically as he followed Swift-Killer down the hill.

Commander Swift-Killer led the way into town. When they passed the fields of crops, they both looked over the harvesters loaded down with pods, but didn’t see anyone either one of them knew.

As they approached the town, the four-button insignia jutting out of Swift-Killer’s breast got them the proper respect from the passers-by; but at the same time, the obvious youthful appearance of the troop commander resulted in strange whispers as they passed. For the first time, Swift-Killer was beginning to feel unsure of herself.

She paused on the outskirts of the town and said quietly to Cliff-Watcher, “I think we are going to have a difficult enough time convincing people that we are who we are, without antagonizing them. I think we had better just survey the whole town before I go and announce who I am.” Cliff-Watcher could only agree, and kept looking for a familiar profile, but found none.

They stopped at a military food station at the outskirts of town, and quietly relaxed and ate their fill. They took their time and listened to the conversations between the couriers as they came and went on Combined Clan business. They had expected to hear that there was a new Leader of the Combined Clans, but were surprised to learn that the name of the town they were in was Swift’s Climb.

Cliff-Watcher inquired of the keeper of the food station about the name. After the keeper got over the oddness of his slang, he told them a capsule history of the naming of the town.

“Almost three dozen greats of turns ago, this place was a barren plain,” the station keeper said, “when an expedition came to the east pole to try to talk to the Eyes of Bright. The expedition was led by a troop commander named Swift-Masher, or something like that, and he climbed up into those hills to talk to God’s Eyes and never came back. His troop stayed around for a few greats of turns, then finally they gave up. By that time some of them were old enough to muster out and they stayed here, while the rest of the troop went back to the border. Since then the border has come here to Swift’s Climb, and it is really a booming place, I tell you.”

“Where can we find some of the old troopers?” asked Cliff-Watcher.

“Where else?” the station keeper asked. “In the meat bins. Or if they kept healthy and were lucky, they are having the time of their lives tending hatchlings in the hatching pens.”

Swift-Killer was initially pleased to hear that the town had been named after her exploit, but if the average cheela in the town knew as much about her as the station keeper, she was glad that she had kept her mouth shut and had let the four buttons of a Troop Commander speak for her. They asked the way to the hatching pens and headed off in that direction, hoping to see somebody—anybody—who might know them.

The road to the hatching pens went past the face of a low cliff. As they approached the cliff, Swift-Killer noticed a bright blinking light coming from the top. A cheela was up there in front of some apparatus, and a bright blue-white beam was blinking its way across the crust to the distant horizon.

Ever curious, Swift-Killer said, “Let’s go by way of the top of that rise. I want to see what is making that beam of light.”

Cliff-Watcher shuffled his tread in annoyance, saying that he had had enough climbing for a whole lifetime, but his curiosity got the better of him too, and they slowly worked their way up to the top of the cliff, where they approached a soldier.

Swift-Killer was bewildered to see the insignia of rank on the soldier operating the apparatus. Instead of a Trooper’s button, she had a horizontal bar. Swift-Killer couldn’t say anything without getting herself in trouble, since a troop commander should address a trooper by her proper rank, so she again decided to let her four buttons speak for her. Looking vaguely interested, she wandered up to the trooper as if she were a visiting inspector.

The trooper heard the military tread as Swift-Killer approached; when Swift-Killer came within hailing distance, she quickly signed off her message and came to alert.

“Troop Signaler Yellow-Crust, Commander,” she said, “Do you have a message to send?”

“No, no,” Swift-Killer assured her. “But after you have finished, could you please show us your apparatus?”

Yellow-Crust thought it strange that a troop commander would be interested in such a thing as a swift-sender, but perhaps she was an inspector out looking for trouble. If so, she would find nothing wrong with her equipment!

In a short while Yellow-Crust was through with her messages and showed the two visitors how the swift-sender worked. Yellow-Crust decided that she would give them the full drill.

Parroting her training officer, Yellow-Crust began: “The swift-sender is the troop’s method of maintaining contact with Headquarters and other troops. The most important element in the swift-sender is the expander, which must always be kept clean.” Yellow-Crust opened the side of the box to reveal a very shiny and very clean expander. Both Cliff-Watcher and Swift-Killer were awed by the size and surface finish on the strongly curved reflector.

“We sure could have used one of those up in the mountains,” Cliff-Watcher whispered.

“We never could have carried it up those hills,” retorted Swift-Killer.

Yellow-Crust, ignoring the whispers, continued: “The light-juice vial is to be filled and pressurized before each message, and the signaling valve is to be checked for rapid action under pressure.”

Yellow-Crust closed the door, filled a container on the outside with fluid, then placed a close-fitting plunger on top and added a weight. She then reached to the other side, and rapidly flicked a small lever. Short bursts of light flickered out over the crust.

Yellow-Crust went on, “The flare should be renewed every shift, and the holder for it should be adjusted to give maximum beam brightness without focusing in the far field.” With these words, Yellow-Crust extended a tendril and moved a small lever back and forth and Swift-Killer could see the beam diverge and focus in the distance. Yellow-Crust, with a trained twist of her tendril, left the beam with parallel sides shooting off to the distance.

Yellow-Crust’s t’trum dropped the training officer twang as she said, “There is more about message protocol, Commander. Would you like to have me recite that?”

“No! No, thank you,” Swift-Killer said. “Very clean and well working machine you have there trooper.” She started to move away.

“At Alert!” boomed a commanding tread through the crust.

Yellow-Crust froze at alert, and Swift-Killer almost followed, but instead slowly returned to the swift-sender to await the arrival of a squad of well-armed troopers, led by none other than the local troop commander.

It was obvious that the troop commander was flustered with Swift-Killer’s four buttons. Having expected to take action against meddling visitors that bothered his communication link, he found himself eye-to-eye with a stranger of equal rank.

Equal rank or not, he was the troop commander of this town and still in command. “Who are you, Commander?” he asked. “I was not informed of any visitors.”

“Don’t you recognize me, Red-Sky?” Swift-Killer asked.

“No!” Troop Commander Red-Sky replied.

“You and I came from the same clan, and you joined my Troop shortly before we went on the expedition to the east pole mountains,” Swift-Killer said, immensely relieved that the one cheela with real authority in this town was someone that she was sure she could convince. Swift-Killer formed a pseudopod, and reached into a pouch that had not been opened since she had left the clan to join the troopers. She pulled out her clan totem and held it out to Red-Sky.

Red-Sky shuffled nervously. He took the totem and examined it carefully. Then, still holding on to it, he circled around Swift-Killer, examining her very closely. The visitor was one of the largest cheela he had seen since his early youth.

“Do you remember this scar?” she said, thrusting out a portion of one side. “You gave it to me when I was teaching you short-sword drill in my training camp.”

“You’re dead!” Red-Sky said, trying to command order back into his bewildered mind.

“No, I am not,” Swift-Killer said, taking advantage of Red-Sky’s hesitation. “And I want your help in getting a message back to Trooper Headquarters in Bright’s Heaven.”

Faced with the physical reality of the huge Swift-Killer body that he had known in his youth, and convinced by the clan totem and four buttons of authority on her breast, Red-Sky finally overcame his bewilderment at seeing Swift-Killer in a youthful body, when he himself was almost ready to be an Old One tending hatchlings. He dismissed his armed guard. After arranging for Swift-Killer to send messages to the Central Region Troop Headquarters, the Inner Eye Institute, the Leader of the Combined Clans, and her own clan family, he took them both down to the trooper camp, where finally Cliff-Watcher was able to drop his burden of dragon crystal.

08:05:15 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Seiko’s announcement came as no real surprise to Pierre. He had suspected the time differential from the surprising rapidity with which the mounds had risen. There was no question in his mind that the job of communication with another race took priority over any other scientific mission, and without hesitation he went to the propulsion console and initiated the move from the east pole to the mound formations ninety degrees around Dragon’s Egg. Because of the mass of the tidal compensators, and the necessity that they all move together to keep the tides from harming the fragile human flesh inside the Dragon Slayer, the move had to be done slowly. As soon as the new position was set into the propulsion command subsystem, he pushed himself from the console chair and floated over to join the group hanging in the air around Seiko and Abdul.

“We should be shifted to the new position in half-an-hour,” he reported as he joined them.

Without looking up from her screen, Seiko said, “At a million to one, that will take the equivalent of sixty years.”

Pierre had already made the calculation himself, but there was no way that he could make the move any faster, the herder probe propulsion systems for the tidal compensators were not made for speed. He gave a quiet shrug, which looked odd on a body that was floating in midair.

“We have a more serious problem,” he said, addressing the whole crew. “After we get there, what are we going to say?”

Seiko spoke up, her eyes still on the screen. “There is no way that we can carry on a two-way conversation with a million-to-one time difference. By the time we can think of anything intelligent to say, the person down there who asked the question would have died.”

“It’s not that bad,” Pierre said. “Of course we don’t know how long they live, but if they last seventy of their type years, then…” He paused to think and Seiko finished for him.

“There are pi times ten million seconds in a year, times 70 years is 2200 million seconds, which is 2200 sec or about 37 minutes of our time.”

“Well, that isn’t so bad,” Jean said. “At least we can talk with a person for long enough to get to know him.”

“He is going to get awfully tired devoting his entire life to a casual conversation with you,” Seiko retorted.

Pierre took charge. “We are going to have to come up with material for our side of the conversation, and we are probably going to need more than one communication link going at a time. Abdul, how many communication links can we set up?”

Without turning from the console, Abdul replied, “We have been using the laser radar mapper as a communication link, but it isn’t designed for that job. It has a pulsed modulator and can’t handle high bit rates. The microwave sounder is also available, and I think its modulator can handle up to 100 megahertz. The laser communicator would be ideal, since it can handle a few gigahertz modulation, which at a million to one, would be like the bandwidth of a telephone line; you could send slow facsimile pictures through it, but nothing like a television picture. Unfortunately, the laser communication antennas were never designed to point at the surface of Dragon’s Egg; they are on the main body and one or the other is always pointed out at St. George.”

“We will have to make do with the laser radar mapper and the microwave sounder until we can get one of the laser communicator dishes reoriented,” Pierre said. He turned in midair and surveyed the faces hanging in the air around him until he found the one he wanted.

“Amalita,” he said, “put on your suit and get one of those laser communicators dishes pointing at Dragon’s Egg. Meanwhile, I will be contacting St. George and tell them we are going to cut off one of the laser communication links with them.”

A voice broke in from the communications console around on the other side of the central core.

“We have been monitoring, Dragon Slayer.” The speaker was Commander Swenson. “Continue your course of action.”

Amalita pushed off to the suit room. As she went, she called over her shoulder. “I am sure I can mount the communication dish on the laser mapper mount,” she said. “I can’t guarantee the boresight accuracy, but they should be fairly close.”

Pierre turned to Jean. “I want you to go through the ship’s library for anything that is designed for initial contact with other species. Look in the fiction HoloMem for science fiction stories if you have to, but I think that somewhere in the ship’s encyclopedia you might find something on communication languages.”

“Meanwhile, we will have to have something to send while Jean is searching the data banks. I will put my children’s books into a computer file for Abdul to put on the communication links. I’ll start with the most elementary books first, then build up to the more adult ones.”

“But they all presume some sort of prior knowledge,” Cesar protested. “Even your A-B-C books assume the reader knows what an apple is.”

“They will work if we send all the art work with it,” Pierre said, going around to the console on the other side of the main deck. “Don’t forget, they are going to have lots and lots of time to figure out what each page means while they wait for the next one to print out slowly on their equivalent of a facsimile machine.”

Cesar left to check out Amalita’s suit before she exited. Abdul had finished sending the crude pictures, and was monitoring the story file that Pierre was building up in the computer.

Suddenly Seiko announced, “They are replying again. This time it is to the west of the east pole mountains.”

Moving rapidly, Abdul read off the coordinates that the computer had flashed at the top of Seiko’s screen and keyed them into his communication console. Almost instantly the laser radar was repositioned to beam down to that point, and the messages continued to trickle slowly down to the surface.

08:18:03 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Swift-Killer’s messages back to Bright’s Heaven caused surprise and shock. Having once been almost forgotten, as is the case when one does not have an immediate family, but merely is one of the members of a large, far-flung clan, Swift-Killer’s strange story made her known throughout the nation. However, the most exciting news for Swift-Killer was the reply from the Inner Eye Institute. Their first message back to Swift-Killer told her that about eight greats of turns ago, the slow messages from the Inner Eye had stopped. Then about four greats ago, they had started again, only this time they were much faster. The pictures had been sent with pulsations of light that could be seen by everyone, without having to have a dark detector or be one of Bright’s Afflicted. There then followed a copy of the first picture.

Swift-Killer let Cliff-Watcher read the message string from the Institute for himself, then they both worked on translating the linear string of dashes and blips following the message into the fringed tally string arrangement needed to make a picture. They laid it carefully out on the crust and Swift-Killer flowed onto it.

“Our message got through, Cliff-Watcher,” Swift-Killer said in a soft whisper. “That climb was not in vain.”

“How can you tell?” Cliff-Watcher asked.

Rather than reply, Swift-Killer flowed off the tally fringe and let Cliff-Watcher sense the pattern of knots in the strings.

“It is like the first one that we sent,” Cliff-Watcher said. “It shows Bright’s Eyes over the east pole and a needle pointing to a position over the Holy Temple, except the needle is a funny skinny one, with a chevron at the tip.”

“That must be their symbol to indicate direction,” Swift-Killer decided. “It is too thin to support itself, and has odd, unnecessary, sticklike, angular projections. Such strange creatures! Their symbols are as sticklike and angular as they are.”

“This message must mean that they understand us and will move to a position over Bright’s Heaven,” Cliff-Watcher said.

“I hope it means that,” Swift-Killer said. She turned some of her eyes up to the seven points of light in the sky. “I don’t see that they have moved yet.”

Cliff-Watcher repeated Swift-Killer’s glance with his practiced astrologer’s eye. After a moment’s pause he reported, “I think they have moved. Let me get some astrologer sticks.”

They hunted down the local contingent of astrologers. After a turn of observations, it was concluded that the Eyes of Bright had definitely shifted position. From a viewing point in the town of Swift’s Climb, one of the far-away stars in the sky used to go behind the Inner Eye once every turn. Now the point of light grazed the top of the Inner Eye. The Inner Eye was moving!

With two-way communication established, Swift-Killer’s strong inquisitive drive took her over completely. She would have to find out more about these strange, slow-living, sticklike creatures, and their magical power that let them float in the sky, impervious to the all-powerful pull of Egg. She had many questions to ask, and her busy mind started working on ways to ask those questions in a fast way that could be done with simple pictures. But first, she had a lot of negotiating to do. She went back out to the swift-sender to send some messages to the Commander of the Eastern Border and the Inner Eye Institute.

Within a half-dozen turns, Swift-Killer had changed professions. The Commander of the Eastern Border was relieved when Commander Swift-Killer asked to be mustered out. He had been wondering what he was going to do with a trooper commander who had tallied more than enough turns to have been mustered out long ago, yet according to reports looked as youthful as the youngest recruit. Besides, he didn’t have a troop for her to command. He was so relieved, in fact, that he readily agreed to let Swift-Killer have the use of a swift-sender.

The Inner Eye Institute also had no hesitation in accepting Swift-Killer’s proposal that she join the Institute. If it had not been for her brave climb into the mountains, they would still be gathering pictures at a rate of one dash every few turns. In fact, since Swift-Killer was closer to Bright’s Eyes from her place near the east pole, it was decided to have the first replies come from there, and Swift-Killer would be in charge of sending them.

Within less than a dozen turns, Swift-Killer had her own swift-sender set up in the compound of the local astrologers, and was beaming out picture after picture into a glancer set at an angle in the crust, to bounce up into the sky toward the Eyes of Bright. She was overjoyed when after two dozen turns she noticed that the Inner Eye started slowly blinking back at her. She could see it with her own eyes! She was at last in communication with another race of beings—and she was Keeper of the Sender.

08:18:33 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Amalita Shakhashiri Drake slipped neatly into her spacesuit, her long, lithe, ballet-trained body making the usually clumsy procedure look like a dance. She carefully read through the check list, even though she knew it by heart. She should, for she had been supervising emergency suiting drills for the past two years while St. George had slowly made its way across the 1/30 light-year distance that separated Sol from Dragon’s Egg. The neutron star now lay 400 kilometers outside the hull of their tiny science flitter, Dragon Slayer.

She was in a hurry to get the laser communication dish repositioned, but the crew of Dragon Slayer were too few in number to afford any mistakes. So Amalita waited patiently until someone came to give her a final checkout.

Ship’s doctor Cesar Ramirez Wong came flying headlong into the upper room, performed a neat somersault, and absorbed his momentum on the ceiling with a carefully programmed flexing of his knees. He rebounded slightly and soon was hanging upside-down in front of her. She noticed idly that the tidal compensators were not working perfectly on the upper deck, for he was slowly drifting up to the ceiling as he read off the check list.

“…main and emergency air tanks—full. Time to put on your helmet and check air and cooling,” he said.

Amalita was ahead of him and her muffled voice spoke from behind the visor. “Helmet on—air and cooling fine.”

He glanced back at the checklist. “Magni-stiction boots…” Amalita flicked a switch on her chest console that rearranged the pseudo-random pattern of the magnetic monopoles in the soles of her boots so that they matched up with the hexagonal pattern of monopoles built into the inner plates and hull of Dragon Slayer.

Electromagnetic boots would have been simpler if Dragon Slayer could have been built out of steel, but since the neutron star and the tidal compensators outside had significant magnetic moments, the engineers had had to come up with a substitute. Amalita’s boots clanged onto the floor, each foot twisted 30 degrees to the outside as the boots conformed to the hexagonal pattern in the plate. She looked down at her feet and thought idly, “What a sloppy third position. My ballet instructor would never have let me get away with anything that poor.” She flicked off the magni-stiction boots, then slowly rose into the air as Cesar droned on through the check list.

“You are checked out,” Cesar said as he floated over to the lock controls. “Out you go. Try to move that communication dish to the swivel mount as fast as you can. Don’t forget that if those neutron star creatures are really living a million times faster than we are, fifteen minutes to us is like thirty years to them.”

Amalita opened the hatch to the air-lock and went in, dogging the door behind her. She signaled to Cesar through the port and felt her suit stiffen as the pressure dropped. The outer hatch swung in, and Amalita held onto her safety line as she cautiously looked out. Although she had been outside St. George a dozen times on repair jobs in the long journey out to Dragon’s Egg, this was the first time she had been outside Dragon Slayer, and she knew the scenery was going to be very confusing. Anything in space that causes confusion is a prime source of accidents, and she had not lived this long by taking chances in out-ship jobs.

Amalita looked out of the air-lock set in the middle of Dragon Slayer. Since the ship was inertially stabilized, the stars remained fixed in the sky. However—flashing in front of the port five times a second was the bright white globe of Dragon’s Egg. At 400 kilometers distance, the 20-kilometer-diameter neutron star was about five times bigger than Sol at Earth and took up an appreciable part of the sky.

“If only we were orbiting around it at a faster rate, so that it would blur out into a ring,” she thought. “At five times a second it is right in the visual flicker band and is going to be a real annoyance.”

She moved to the portal and put her head out. With her view enlarged, she now saw the complete ring of tidal compensators encircling the ship. They revolved about their common center at five times a second while simultaneously orbiting about Dragon’s Egg. Because there were six of them, they seemed almost fused together into a solid ring.

Amalita paused to get accustomed to the sight. There was a bright white globe of light circling about the middle of Dragon Slayer, and at right angles to that a ring of glowing red that twirled about the ship like a wedding ring spinning on a table. The spins of the two matched so that the plane of the ring was always perpendicular to the direction to the neutron star.

“How are you doing?” Cesar’s voice came through the suit communication link.

“Fine,” Amalita said. “I’m just waiting here to get used to the whirling scenery. It reminds me of the time back in the Lunar Ballet Academy when I tried to break the Guinness Book of Records mark for the most number of fouettés in a row. After twirling around on one foot for over one hundred turns, I missed my kick, lost my spotting point, and the vertigo got to me—I don’t think things were whirling around as much then as they are now.”

Amalita looked up at the top of Dragon Slayer to the large central turret containing the solar mirror, laser radar, microwave sounder, and other star-oriented instruments. The turret was rotating five times a second, keeping the instruments pointed at Dragon’s Egg. “You haven’t turned off the turret,” she complained. “I can’t work on it while it is spinning around.”

Cesar replied, “Since you first have to remove a laser communication dish from its mount on the hull, and won’t be ready to install it on the turret for several minutes, I thought we should wait to de-spin the turret. Once we stop it, we will have to cut off communication to the neutron star beings. Abdul is now making up a simple message to let them know that we will only stop for a short while, so they don’t think we have given up and gone away.”

Amalita looked around the equator of Dragon Slayer until she could see one of the laser communication dishes. She fixed her eyes on it, then stabilized her personal up and down. She told her eyes to ignore the bright objects whirling through her peripheral vision; activating her magni-stiction boots, she stepped out onto the hull.

As Amalita stood up, she could feel the play of pulsating residual gravitational forces through her body. In addition to the pulsating fields, there were slight variations in the overall compensation, since the spacecraft was slowly shifting its orbital position from the east pole to a position over the mound formation on the star’s surface. Sometimes she was pulled outward with a fraction of a gee, and sometimes pushed inwards.

Amalita made her way carefully to the nearest laser communication dish. She detached the coaxial cable that brought the modulating voltages from inside Dragon Slayer, then the power line to the laser, and finally she started working on the mounting bolts. It was a well-designed system, with the bolts staying captive in the frame, so there was no chance of having them float away in free-fall. She held onto one strut of the bulky piece of apparatus and plodded her way carefully back over the curve of Dragon Slayer’s hull.

“Start de-spinning the science turret, Doc,” she called through her suit radio. “I’m clear of the control jets.”

As she moved over the curving hull, she could see the spinning turret slowly come to a stop while the control jets flashed on Dragon Slayer’s hull to throw off the excess momentum.

As she approached the stationary turret she glanced upwards along the three-meter length and found the laser radar. The radar dish was tucked under the huge mirror that brought a one-meter diameter image of Dragon’s Egg directly into the star image table.

She was getting far from the air-lock, so she fastened a secondary safety line to a ring at the base of the turret. She then stepped carefully off the spherical hull of Dragon Slayer onto the cylindrical turret. She allowed herself a few seconds to readjust her personal up and down; then, still holding the bulky laser communication dish, she ascended. As she climbed further and further from the center of Dragon Slayer, the accuracy of the tidal compensation fields became poorer. Halfway up the turret she found that the play of gravitational fields over her body became too strong to ignore. She felt as if her suit were haunted by tiny elves that pushed and pulled at various sections of her anatomy. The overall tidal compensation was also off, and the laser communication dish began to pull ahead as it gained weight while they made their way up the column.

The increased weight was not much, but it was significant enough so that Amalita stopped at each step to move her safety lines from ring to ring behind her. She finally reached the laser radar and looped the lanyard attached to the communication dish to a nearby ring and let the ring support the burden. She fastened another lanyard from her belt to the laser radar.

Firmly anchored to the column with magni-stiction boots and a pair of short safety lines, she started to remove the laser radar. Fortunately the laser power supply line and the modulator coaxial cable connectors were the same for the two laser systems. All they had to do was switch the cable on the inside from the pulsed modulator used in the laser radar to the video modulator in the laser communication console. Unfortunately, the bolt patterns for the two laser systems were incompatible and she could tighten only one bolt. However, she had been prepared for that problem and had brought some quick-setting vacuum epoxy to fasten the laser communication dish onto the laser radar mount.

“What I need is four hands,” Amalita said as she reached into a pouch for the epoxy. The twin tube had been designed for use with her clumsy gloves and even had a tear-off top. But in her hurry to get the job over, Amalita made a mistake.

The mistake was a very innocent one for someone who had been living in free fall for many years. All she did was to park the laser radar in space alongside her while she opened the epoxy. While she was busy with the glue, the laser radar slowly floated outward, gaining speed. When it reached the end of its lanyard, it jerked cruelly at Amalita’s middle. She found herself pulled off the turret. There was a quick second of panic, then Amalita came to the end of her two safety lines and rebounded. She felt a rip as the weaker joint in the equipment ring holding the laser radar came out of her safety belt, while the two stronger personal safety loops held. She looked down to see the laser radar module head outward away from the ship. It gathered speed rapidly in the strong attractive gravitational fields from the dense masses in the tidal compensator. She lost sight of the module as it whipped out to join the whirling ring of ultra-dense asteroids.

“We have trouble, Dragon Slayer,” she said into her suit microphone. “I lost the laser radar module to tidal forces.”

Amalita pulled herself hand-over-hand back up the safety lines to the turret and proceeded to bolt and glue the communication dish to the empty mount and then hook up the power and modulation cables.

She quickly climbed down off the turret and signaled to Cesar to start up the turret again. She watched, staying out of the way of the control jets, until the huge cylinder was again spinning around at five revolutions per second. She then glanced up to see an elongated glob of crushed and extruded glass and metal come whirling back toward the hull of Dragon Slayer. The sharp points of metal on the glob were emitting a blue corona of electric discharge built up from the rapid motion through the strong magnetic fields of the star.

Amalita was appalled. If that ever hit the hull of Dragon Slayer they would be dead. Cursing herself for having been so careless, Amalita knew that this was no time to play it safe.

“Emergency! Emergency!” she called. Without waiting for a reply, she began a move-by-move description of the problem and her efforts to solve it.

“Laser radar module loose and moving at high velocity in vicinity of ship. I am jettisoning safety line and will use jet-pack to try to catch it.”

Amalita unhooked her safety line, moved her left hand to the jet-pack controls on her chest, and took off to capture the deadly missile.

As she swooped around the curve of the hull, she spotted the module above the turret. It had slowed down as the tidal forces had pulled on it. The module had looped slowly in a large arc and was now headed back again toward Dragon Slayer. She would have to catch it while it was moving slowly if she were going to hold onto it, so she jetted straight up to meet it.

As she flew past the spinning turret, her body began to feel the tidal pressures. She tried to hunch in her head and draw up her feet to cut down her length and relieve the forces, but it was hard work holding them in against the strong outward pull. It was worst on her head. Her ears and nose felt as if they were being pounded twenty times a second, while the top of her head felt as if she were being scalped by a savage with a dull knife.

Despite the pain, she continued upward to meet the module that was slowly gaining speed as it fell again toward Dragon Slayer. This is where her two seasons as captain of a free-ball team on L-5 would pay off. Her left hand played quickly over the jet control keys on her chest. She slowed, whirled about, and then accelerated again to match speed with the now rapidly falling chunk of metal. As her head changed orientation, the tidal pressures changed also. Her nose, now jerked viciously outwards, began to gush ellipsoidal globules of blood. Peering anxiously through her red-stained visor, Amalita found a short section of lanyard in front of her and grabbed it with her right hand while her left flicked over the jet controls. The laser radar module continued on its hyperbolic path downward past the hull of Dragon Slayer and then outward along the belt line. Slowly Amalita got it under control and dragged it down to the hull. Within seconds after her boots had clicked onto the plates, she had both herself and the distorted hunk of metal attached by shortened lines to safety rings on the hull.

Her voice was hoarse from the running commentary she had kept up during the chase. “All secure,” she croaked. “I will need some help getting this inside.”

“Are you hurt?” came a concerned voice over her suit speaker.

“I’m sore all over, Doc, but the only real damage is a bloody nose,” she replied.

Amalita was making her way back to the air-lock, moving her bruised body slowly from one safety ring to another when she saw a suited figure rising from the air-lock to help. She was only too glad to hand over her problems to the welcome crew mate.

“I am sure glad to see you,” Amalita said. “Even if only through a red haze. Here—you take what’s left of the laser radar module. Watch out for it—when it got mashed in the tidal forces of those asteroids several sharp spikes got extruded—they could nick your suit.”

“I’ve got it,” Jean said. “Now you get in that air-lock and cycle through. Doc is waiting on the other side with a warm wet compress for that nose. And in case you were wondering, the laser communication link is working fine. The first messages have gone down, and we have already received a reply back through the ultraviolet scanner.”