Pulsar

THURSDAY 23 APRIL 2020

Jacqueline Carnot strode over to a long table in the data processing lab in the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Research Center at CalTech. A frown clouded her pretty face. The cut of her shoulder-length brown hair and her careful choice of tailored clothing stamped her at once as “European.”

Her skirt, blouse and clogs were her only items of clothing. It was not that she did not own stockings—and purses—and makeup—and rings—and perfume—and other “women’s things;” it was just that she was in too much of a hurry in the morning to bother with them, for she had work to do. The French government had not given her a state fellowship to study at the International Space Institute so she could spend all morning getting dressed.

The slender woman swiftly cleared the table of its accumulated scraps of paper and tossed down a long data record at one end. The cylinder of paper rolled obediently across the table, then obstinately off the end and five meters across the floor before it finally stopped. Jacqueline left the roll on the floor and started to analyze the data. This menial task would normally have been handled by a computer. Unfortunately, computers now insisted on a charge number for everything, and when Jacqueline had logged on this morning she had found that the meager balance that she had been saving out of Professor Sawlinski’s allocation for her thesis had been swallowed up by another retroactive intercurrency account readjustment. She knew that Sawlinski had plenty of rubles in his research budget; but, without his budget authorization and his personal approval to the computer (by the crypto-password that she knew, but dared not use), she was reduced to waiting and hand-processing until he returned.

Actually, it was fun working with the numbers in this personal way. With the computer doing the analysis, the numbers would be crammed into digital bins whether they were real data or noise, and right now there was a lot of scruffy noise on the graph.

The data Jacqueline was analyzing came from the low frequency radio detectors on the old CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe that was the first major cooperative effort between the Soviets and Europeans. Back in the early days of the race to the Moon, the Europeans had supplied the first Soviet lunar rover with laser retroreflectors. Then, after a disastrous experience with the Americans in which one of America’s four precious Shuttle spacecraft and Europe’s only SpaceLab had exploded on the launch pad, the Europeans had turned back to the East for cooperation. The Europeans built the instrumentation for an Out-of-the-Ecliptic spacecraft that was launched by one of the giant Russian launch vehicles. The craft first traveled five astronomical units out to Jupiter. But once there, instead of taking pictures and going on to other planets as previous spacecraft had done, it went under Jupiter’s south pole- to shoot straight up out of the plane formed by the orbits of the planets.

As the spacecraft climbed up out of the ecliptic plane, its sensors began to see a new picture of the Sun. The magnetic fields that blossomed out from the sunspots at the middle latitudes of the Sun were now attenuated, while new effects began to dominate the scene.

The data from the CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe had been thoroughly analyzed by many well-funded scientific groups early in the mission. The information gathered had shown that the Sun had a case of indigestion. It had eaten too many black holes.

The scientists found an extremely periodic fluctuation in the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field. The magnetosphere of the Sun had many variations, of course. Each sunspot was a major source of variability. However, sunspots were irregular in time and were so strong in the middle latitudes that they dominated everything. It was not until the OE probe was above the Sun, sampling data for long periods of time, that the finely detailed, highly periodic variations in the radio flux were found and interpreted as periodic variations in the Sun’s magnetosphere. It was finally concluded that the Sun had four dense masses, probably miniature primordial black holes, orbiting around each other deep inside the sun. These disturbed the Sun’s normal fusion equilibrium by gnawing away at its bowels. The effect of the black holes on the Sun would become serious in a few million years, but all they did now was bring on an occasional ice age.

Although the human race realized that the Sun was not a reliable source of energy for the long term, there was little they could do about it. After a short flurry of national and international concern over the “death of the Sun,” the human race settled down to solving the insoluble problem in the best way that they knew—they ignored it and hoped it would go away.

It was now two decades later. Miraculously, one of the two communication transmitters on the satellite and three of the experiments were still running. One of them was the low frequency radio experiment. Its output was sprawled across a table and clown a computation-lab floor, slowly being marked up by the swift, slender fingers of a determined graduate student.

“Damn! Here comes the scruff again,” Jacqueline muttered to herself as she slid the long sheet across the table and noticed that the slowly varying trace with the complex sinusoidal pattern began to blur. Her job for her thesis was to find another periodic variation in that complex pattern that would indicate that there were five (or more) black holes. Failing that, she needed to prove that there were only four. (At least she had been able to get her peripatetic advisor to agree that a well-documented negative result would be an adequate thesis.)

However, she was worried. The scruff was blurring the data, ruining a good portion of it. It wouldn’t have made much difference if the good part had shown some new pattern and she could have ferreted out a new black hole to add to the Sun’s problems. However, it was now pretty obvious that she would have to be content with a negative thesis, and this noise was going to make it difficult to convince the examining committee that there were only four black holes in the Sun. She stared at the noisy portion as her arms rapidly slid the long sheet of paper across the table.

“I shouldn’t complain about this antique spacecraft,” she said. “But why did it have to start stuttering now?”

She moved along the trace. The scruff got worse, then slowly faded away. When she got to the clear section, she started to measure the amplitude averages again. In a way it was good that the computer was not blindly working on this data. She had enough sense to ignore the noisy parts, and thus end up with a very clean spectrum. But if the computer had been handling the data, it would have folded the scruff in with the good data and the resulting spectrum would have had a lot of spurious spikes that would have given the examination committee plenty of ammunition. Jacqueline finished her data analysis late in the evening. She looked at the neat figures in the notebook.

“That is the hard way to analyze data,” she said to herself. “Tomorrow it gets worse, when I have to read it all into the computer. I hope old Saw-face has loosened the purse strings by then.” Jacqueline glanced wearily at the long tumbled ribbon of paper on the floor and, swirling it around, finally found a loose end and started to roll it up.

“Up and down with a double hump, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff, then up and down with a double hump, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff…” Jacqueline stopped her semiautomatic mouthing of the pattern on the roll. She quickly gathered up the whole pile of paper and carefully carried it to one end of the long room and stretched it out on the floor. She then went to one end and strode rapidly along it, looking for the noisy portions. “The scruff is periodic!” she exclaimed.

The noise seemed to have a period of about a day, and, as she went from one end of the roll to the other, it slowly drifted with respect to the more regular periodic bumps that were the meat of her thesis. She had previously thought that the noisy portions were due to random malfunctions of the spacecraft, but now the periodic nature of the scruff made her look elsewhere for the cause.

“It could be that the spacecraft develops an arc in the transmitter for a few hours every day, but that doesn’t sound very likely,” she said. She finished rolling up the paper and, carrying the roll with her, went into the communications lab. The first thing she looked up was the spacecraft log. Fortunately, that information was in the general library file and the computer would let her look at that without charging her. She flashed the log backwards, page by page. Most of the entries had her name entered:

J. CARNOT: ESA: ACCOUNT SAW-2-J: LFR DATA DUMP

“I seem to be the only one using this satellite,” she said.

Finally she came to an engineering note. Once every few days or so, during slack periods, the spacecraft engineers at the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Network communications center would take the spacecraft through its engineering check list.

POWER 22% NOMINAL
X-BAND DOWN-LINK 80% NOMINAL
K-BAND DOWN-LINK DEAD
ATTITUDE CONTROL DEAD
SPIN RATE 77 MICRORAD/SEC
FUNCTIONING EXPERIMENTS
    LOW FREQUENCY RADIO
    SOLAR IR MONITOR
    X-RAY TELESCOPE (STANDBY)

“Only two experiments on,” she said. “The engineers must have turned off the X-ray telescope since the last time I checked.” She looked at the number for the spin rate, flipped the computer terminal into compute mode, and made a quick calculation.

“Seventy-seven microradians per second comes out to be a little more than one revolution per day—about the same period as the scruff. The scruff must be caused by the effect of the solar heating on the transmitting antenna or some other solar effect.”

She logged off the terminal, took the roll of paper, and headed back through the pre-dawn hours to her room. The roll would join the many other rolls that lay stacked in a pile on her bookshelf, while she joined the rest of Pasadena in sleep.

FRIDAY 24 APRIL 2020

In her sleep, Jacqueline was flying. No, not flying, but drifting through empty space. She looked down and finally realized where she was. Below her was the bright globe of the Sun. Spread out before her was the whole Solar System as seen from above. Her astronomically trained mind had placed the dream planets in their proper positions and she could almost imagine faint lines tracing out the nearly circular orbits that gave the Solar System the appearance of a bull’s-eye target from this perspective. She found the tiny double-planet system that was the Earth-Moon pair and was straining to try and make out detail on the Earth when the slow, inexorable rotation of her body dragged her eyes away from the scene. Unable to turn her head around any further, she was forced to gaze upwards away from the Sun, her arms and legs outstretched in the form of an X. “Just like the low frequency radio antennas sticking out of the OE probe,” she thought.

Soon the rotation brought her body around again and she admired the view. She finally concentrated on looking at the north pole of the Sun. She had no trouble looking at the Sun despite its brightness, and she searched for any variations on the nearly featureless surface. As she stared, she saw nothing with her eyes, but she finally began to notice weak pulsations in her arms and legs. A double pulse, triple pulse, pulse…

“I’m picking up the complex radio signal of the orbiting black holes!” she thought, as her body continued to revolve. Soon she could no longer see the Sun, but she could still feel the pulsations in her arms and legs. Then, while staring out at right angles from the Sun, she felt a rapid tingling sensation building up in her right arm. It became stronger and stronger, nearly blotting out the slower, rhythmic pulsations. “The scruff!” she exclaimed, and then began to laugh at herself…

“Nothing like getting yourself so wrapped up in your thesis work that you dream you have become the spacecraft yourself,” said Jacqueline as she sat up in her room. She looked at the bustling noonday traffic out her window and rubbed the prickles out of her right arm, restoring the circulation it had lost while trapped under her exhausted body.

She was halfway through her belated breakfast when the dream surfaced again in her mind. Although she knew the spacecraft’s operational characteristics almost as well as she knew the operating characteristics of her own body, it did seem strange to her that in the dream the scruff came when she was looking away from the Sun, not toward it.

She thought about it for awhile, then went to her bookshelf and got down the roll she had been working on the previous night and an older one from several months ago. She unrolled a section from each of them on the floor, one above the other, and slid the old one back and forth until the slowly varying complex pattern caused by the orbital motion of the black holes was matched up on the two rolls. She then looked along both sheets and came to the noisy portions. They were different. First of all, the scruff a few months ago was significantly weaker (although that could be explained by a degrading piece of equipment or insulation), but there also seemed to be a definite shift in the position of the peak of the scruff activity with respect to the position of the Sun. She got out an even older roll, and checked it. The scruff was very weak now. In fact, she remembered that the computer had had no trouble obtaining a nice, clean spectrum from this data since the spectral energy in the noise had been so small. Again, however, there seemed to be a delay in the position of the peak intensity of the scruff.

“Well, this is one time when the number-crunching objectivity of the computer is orders of magnitude better than the highly subjective human hand and eye. It is back to the computer for you, Jacqueline,” she said to herself. “But first you have to get some more computer time from old Saw-face.”

Jacqueline walked across the CalTech campus to the Space Physics building. The huge edifice, built in the days when space budgets were a significant fraction of a nation’s budget, was now the Space Physics building in name only. Only the basement computer room and the first floor offices contained space research activities. The remaining floors of the building had been taken over by graduate students of the Social Sciences department. If the CalTech-Jet Propulsion Laboratories combine had not been able to talk NASA, the Europeans, and the Russians into combining their dwindling national space budgets into supporting one international space research center with a single Deep Space Network, then there would be no deep space research at all.

After the Americans had given up sponsoring deep space probes and the European Space Agency had broken into squabbling factions after the loss of SpaceLab, the Russian planners, without visible competition, had lowered their priority for deep space research to almost zero and concentrated their funding on manned and unmanned Earth orbital ventures. The cold war was still on, but it had degenerated into an almost automatic name-calling at the United Nations. The Russian standard of living rose, and as it did, the party planners found that they had to give more and more attention to a no-longer docile population and could not justify a separate deep space program.

Jacqueline walked down the almost deserted corridors of the Space Physics building to Professor Vladimir Sawlinski’s office. Jacqueline hesitated, then knocked.

“Da?” said a gruff voice.

Jacqueline opened the door and walked in. A thin, middle-aged gentleman swiveled away from a computer screen filled with text in Cyrillic characters and turned to look at her. Jacqueline’s Russian was good enough that she could tell that he was reading a science news article about the supposed discovery of a magnetic monopole in some iron ore in Nigeria.

Sawlinski’s clothing was unusual for a Russian. It was a tailored suit in the latest European style. Its very presence on his spare frame advertised that the wearer was a multi-cultured world traveler who was given significant freedom and even more significant financial reimbursement by a worldly wise Russian government that expected great things from him. The man’s balding head bent forward as he peered over his reading glasses at the young woman.

“Jacqueline!” Sawlinski said, his face beaming with pleasure. “Do come in, young lady. How is your thesis work coming? Have you found another collapsed sub-stellar object?”

Jacqueline grinned inwardly at the Russian’s refusal to call them miniature black holes. Unfortunately, the Americans and Englishmen who had first popularized the concept of black holes were not aware that the phrase “black hole” had a context in the Russian language that was not used in polite company.

“I have used up my account and the computer will not talk to me anymore,” she said. “I thought I had plenty of computer time left, at least for another month of work, but a retroactive intercurrency adjustment canceled it out.”

Professor Sawlinski flinched. He had been afraid of something like that. His budget from the Soviet Academy was quite limited, but worst of all, it was in rubles. Now that the Chinese and Russians were heating up the border war in Mongolia again, the Russian ruble had been falling fast in the international money markets. He had been glad to have Jacqueline working for him, for she came free. As one of its few full-time graduate fellows, ESA paid all her expenses. When he had come to America to work in the International Space Institute, he had despaired of being able to afford any graduate student help, so getting Jacqueline had been a lucky break. She was smart (and pretty besides).

“All right,” he sighed. “I will transfer more money from my main account. But my account will also be depleted by the same adjustment. I am afraid that this means that I won’t be able to go to the Verona conferences this summer.” He turned to the computer terminal at his desk and carried out a short dialog with the financial account program.

He turned after a minute and said, “The computer will now talk to you again. However, please be prudent in what you ask it to do, for the rubles are getting scarce.”

“Thank you, Professor Sawlinski,” Jacqueline replied. “However, I still have much work to do to finish my thesis. As of now, I cannot find any other periodic signals in the data. Also, the records from the probe are getting worse. The noise on the traces is growing in amplitude, and I have to throw out a good portion of the data. The noise itself is interesting though. I went back through some old traces and I find it is not only increasing in amplitude but the peak seems to shift in time with respect to the radio signals from the Sun.”

“Da, the ‘scruff,’ as you call it,” he said. “It is not going away, but getting worse? Well, we should not expect much from a spacecraft that is so old.”

“But the shift with time is strong evidence that the scruff is not generated by the Sun,” Jacqueline protested. “I think we ought to look into it.”

“I can think of many mechanisms whereby the failing electronics on the spacecraft could produce this static,” he replied with a smile. “We want you to get your thesis done without spending too many of my precious rubles, so I think we ought to concentrate on the analysis of the radio data that is not bothered by the noise.”

“But it would not take long for me to have the computer go back through the data and get a good estimate of the drift,” she said. Then remembering the tingling in her right arm, she suddenly became sure of something else, although it was against all logic that her position in bed in Pasadena had anything to do with an inanimate spacecraft cruising through space two hundred astronomical units away. Yet many a scientific idea had first surfaced in a dream of the researcher. Perhaps her subconscious was trying to tell her something.

“I am almost positive that the scruff is being picked up by just one of the four antenna wires,” she said eagerly. “If I could get the engineers to switch the data collection mode to read each antenna separately…”

“Nyet!” boomed Professor Sawlinski. “Paying the Deep Space Network to point their antennas to a given spacecraft to collect a one hour prearranged data dump is expensive enough. Do you realize how much it costs to send a command to a spacecraft?”

She started to speak, but Sawlinski cut her off as he dropped his recently acquired “American Professor” image and reverted to his autocratic old school Russian stance. “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” he said as he turned his back on her and switched on his computer console. “Do svidaniya, Mademoiselle Carnot.”

Jacqueline started to speak, but realized that the interview was over. She seethed inwardly, but finally decided to leave and take her frustrations out on the computer. At least he had transferred the money to her account before he had turned her off. Quietly closing the door behind her, she made her way downstairs to the computer console room.

“I wonder how much a command change really does cost?” she thought as she made her way down the steps. “I will go out to Jet Propulsion Laboratories, talk to the Deep Space Network engineers and find out if it is as expensive as he thinks it is.”

With the computer glad to see her again, now that she had money in her account, she read in the figures that she had laboriously extracted the previous evening. She then ran an analysis of the collected data. The peaks in the power spectral density curve were still in four families. The four lowest peaks were the fundamental orbital frequencies of the four black holes, while the higher harmonics were evidence of the slight ellipticity of the orbits. The basic pattern had not changed for decades. Although the black holes were orbiting in the interior of the Sun where the densities were hundreds and thousands of times greater than water, as far as the ultra-dense black holes were concerned, they were orbiting in a near vacuum.

She searched carefully between the four lowest spikes, but could find no evidence of another peak. She had the computer repeat her search, and it came up with three two-sigma candidates, but they looked like noise to her and a quick check with a random half-data set proved her right. She was through for the time being, for a data dump was not scheduled for another week. But while she was on the computer, she decided to have another look at the noise problem.

She first wrote a program to extract the noisy portions from the data sets, then to find the maximum of the amplitude of the scruff (which was a hard concept for the computer to grasp), then to plot the phase of the scruff maximum with respect to the position of the Sun. In the process, she learned that the spin rate of the satellite had increased slightly in the past years, somehow gaining angular momentum from the solar wind and light pressure.

Further examination of the drift of the phase and some calculations of the orientation of the spacecraft with respect to the Sun found that the peak in the scruff stayed constant with respect to the distant stars.

“That means that whatever the source of the noise, it is outside the Solar System!” Jacqueline exclaimed.

Then she realized that she had never asked herself what the “scruff” really looked like. On the hardcopy printout of the reconstituted analog signal from the spacecraft, the scruff just looked like random fuzz. She cleared the screen and called up the latest data dump. The curve of the low frequency radio readout wound its familiar way across the screen. She stopped it as she came to the maximum of the scruff. The scruff was so strong in this section that it often saturated the screen.

She called on a section of the data analysis program that she had seldom used before, and a small section of the data was expanded on the screen. The hours-long humps that were the subject of her thesis were now stretched out so much that only a portion of one of them could fit into the screen. The scruff now dominated the screen and looked as noisy and nasty as ever. She called for another expansion, and the computer activated an override warning circuit.

WARNING!
PLOT SCALE INCOMPATIBLE WITH DATA DIGITALIZATION RATE.
PLEASE CONFIRM COMMAND.

Jacqueline hesitated slightly, then hit the confirm key. Immediately a set of almost random dots filled the screen. The short-term variation from point to point was strong, but the general amplitude level seemed to rise and fall slowly, with a period of many minutes.

Again, she called on the computer to carry out an operation on the data that she had never used before. She had been interested solely in the variations of the data with periods of weeks to days. Now she asked it to carry out a harmonic analysis with periods of seconds. Again the computer complained.

WARNING!
SPECTRAL ANALYSIS SCALE INCOMPATIBLE WITH DATA DIGITALIZATION RATE.
PLEASE CONFIRM COMMAND.

There was no hesitation this time: Jacqueline had hit the confirm key long before the computer had printed its objections. The spectral analysis plot flashed on the screen. There was a large spike around one Hertz that represented the one per second data digitalization rate, but at 0.005 Hertz there was a strong spike, indicating a periodic fluctuation with a 200-second period. However, the 200-second variation could have been caused by a beating between the one Hertz data sampling rate of the spacecraft and some high frequency oscillation that was close to some harmonic of the sampling rate. Jacqueline felt from the behavior of the data that a high frequency variation was causing the scruff, but it would be hard to prove it with the spacecraft sampling rate set at one sample per second.

Jacqueline, her enthusiasm finally exhausted by confusion and sleepiness, dropped the hardcopy printouts of the data into Professor Sawlinski’s mailbox and went off to bed. She again had a dream about flying above the Solar System, only this time she was whirling around rapidly. She awoke feeling dizzy, then went back to sleep to dream ordinary, quickly forgotten dreams.

After awakening the next day, Jacqueline went by Professor Sawlinski’s office. His door was open, and her data sheets were spread out on his desk. He was talking with Professor Cologne, the astrophysicist.

“This high frequency scruff is definitely not random noise, for there is evidence of a strong periodicity of 199 milliseconds, or a little over five cycles per second. The beating between the 199-millisecond pulsations and the one-Hertz data sampling rate gives it the 200-second beat pattern. However, it is not a 200-second fluctuation because the engineering interruptions in the science data are not exactly an even number of seconds long, and the 200-second beat starts with a new phase after each engineering readout. If you take enough data, and do an analysis of it, you find the 199-millisecond periodicity.”

As he spoke, Professor Sawlinski held up Jacqueline’s printout. Professor Cologne studied it briefly, then returned it with the comment, “It has all the earmarks of a pulsar, but there just isn’t any known pulsar of that frequency. I would suspect the spacecraft somehow has found a way to become a low frequency radio oscillator.”

Professor Sawlinski saw her standing in the door. “Ah, Jacqueline, come in. I was just showing Professor Cologne our latest data. I have decided that we ought to arrange to have the data digitalization rate increased to at least ten times per second, so we can obtain a better idea of the time varying nature of these pulsations.”

“But the cost…” Jacqueline interjected.

“Yes, it will cost some money, but by the time the computer billing gets to us, we will be well into the new planning year,” he replied. “Could you visit the JPL people and arrange for the change?”

“Nom de Dieu!” muttered Jacqueline under her breath. “First, not enough money, and now plenty of money.”

Aloud, she replied, “Yes, Professor Sawlinski. Do you also want to try reading out the antennas sequentially?”

“Nyet!” he replied brusquely. “How many times must I remind you, only change one parameter at a time in an experiment!”

“Yes, Professor,” she said, and practically bowed her way out of the office.

Once in the hall, she found herself automatically heading down the stairs to the computer room. She stopped and started to turn back to go to JPL, but then she decided to spend a little more time learning how the spacecraft command system operated. She felt that perhaps she could not only satisfy Professor Sawlinski, but also her own curiosity.

After a few hours spent browsing through the engineering handbooks, she smiled and headed up the stairs, where she caught the CalTech jitney bus to JPL. Sawlinski’s name moved her swiftly through the administrative maze and she shortly was assigned to Donald Niven, one of the JPL project managers.

When she walked into the office she had been directed to, she saw a chunky young man with neatly trimmed dark hair and the slacks, sports coat, and tie that seemed to be the professional uniform of the engineers at JPL. She guessed that he was in his late twenties. She had thought that a project manager would be someone older, but as their conversation proceeded, she could tell from his cool, calm, methodical questions that, despite his age, he had acquired years of experience in the Deep Space Network organization. Their discussion was half technical, half financial.

“So the length or complexity of the command has almost no bearing on the cost?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Donald said. “So that groups like yours could plan their expenditures, we worked out a standard rate for each command cycle.”

“Suppose a command has a series of steps in it?” she asked.

“As long as the steps are something for the spacecraft computer to go through and do not involve us, then the charge is the same for one or ten steps,” he replied. “What do you have in mind?”

Jacqueline got out her program sheets. Donald swung his computer console around so they could both look at it. He typed in the code for the OE spacecraft operations manual.

“The first thing I want to do is to increase the low frequency radio data digitalization rate to its maximum,” she said. “Then, after a week of high rate data collection, I want to have the data taken alternately with the four antennas, each one taking data for one minute at a time. After that, I want to have the X-ray telescope reactivated. It has a one-degree field of view, and I want it to scan between these two angles at a rate of one degree per day.” Jacqueline handed over the sheet of paper and he took it.

“I see these are in spacecraft coordinates,” he said, his opinion of the young woman increasing with every second. “Thanks for taking the trouble to convert them for me.”

“It was no trouble,” she replied calmly. “I have been living with that spacecraft so long that I practically think like it.”

Together they worked out the command procedure, and Donald transferred it to the programming section. The computer would actually do the programming, but the programmers had to take the computer result through several tests to make sure that some bugs had not crept into the computer simulation in the decades since the spacecraft had been launched.

“I’ll give you a call when the command is ready,” Donald said. “It’ll be a few days before the formal procedure is finished. Fortunately, I don’t think we will have any trouble getting permission from the sponsoring agency. Although the experiment package was built by ESA, the spacecraft itself was built by the Russians, so the authority for command changes rests with the Soviet Academy of Science, and Professor Sawlinski’s name should be good enough for them. Do you have a telephone number where I can reach you?”

FRIDAY 1 MAY 2020

As the days passed, Jacqueline and Donald spent many hours poring over the command time line. It was a long sequence, with even longer delays in it.

“Why can’t we leave the low frequency radio on high digitalization rate while the X-ray telescope is scanning?” Jacqueline asked. “That way, if the X-ray telescope picks up something unusual, we can check the low frequency radio to see if the scruff is active.”

Donald paged the screen to the section describing the operational characteristics of the low frequency radio digitalization block. “The X-ray telescope uses a lot of power, especially when it is in the scanning mode,” he said. “I’m afraid that, because of the age of the radioisotope power generators, the voltage on the power bus will drop so much that the low frequency radio digitalization will blank out if we ask it to keep operating at its highest rate.”

“How fast can it operate?” Jacqueline asked.

“Well,” Donald said as he looked through the table, “it was minimum-voltage designed for an upper rate of eight times a second, and we have it pushed all the way to sixteen times per second. With the low voltage on the bus, we ought to come back to either eight or four times per second.”

“Leave it sixteen times a second,” said Jacqueline firmly. “No data is preferable to poor data.”

Donald looked at her with a slightly bewildered expression as if he were seeing past her pretty face for the first time. He started to protest, but decided against it and made the short change in the command sequence as she wanted it.

Slowly the command was assembled. Jacqueline and Donald worked on it periodically during the day when Donald was charging to Sawlinski’s account. They also talked about it over lunch and in the evenings, when Sawlinski’s budget received an extra dividend of Donald’s time.

SATURDAY 2 MAY 2020

Donald lay back on the grass of the recently mowed lawn of the Griffith Park Observatory. It was Saturday and a pleasant evening lay before him. First, a visit to the early show at the planetarium where he would see the highly touted Holorama show. Then an evening under the stars at the Greek Theater down the hill to listen to the Star Crushers, the latest sensation in popular music. And, to go with it all, a fascinating and beautiful, but perplexing, girl.

The Sun had set and Donald’s mind wandered up into the lightly star-sprinkled sky as it had been doing ever since he was a little child and he and his father would go out into the back yard in the evening to look at the stars. Occasionally they would both be rewarded by the quick slash of a meteor or the slow progression of a satellite. Donald knew that since those days, his life had been fixed. He wanted to go to the stars!

Unfortunately, mankind’s reach for the stars had faltered as Donald came of age, but his persistence had garnered him one of the few jobs left in the field. Although it now looked as if he would never get off the Earth himself, he was out there in proxy in the spacecraft that he tended.

Jacqueline took another sip of wine and watched Donald’s eyes as they peered into the darkening skies. They were as vacant as the deep space they were contemplating.

“Next time he will make the picnic supper and I will bring the wine,” she said to herself as she thoughtfully slid the sip of wine back over her tongue. “These California vintages are good, but he has a lot to learn if he thinks this is better than a good French wine.”

Jacqueline knew Donald well enough to realize where his mind was. “Which one are you looking at?” she asked, knowing that he knew the position in the sky of every one of the six deep-space spacecraft that he was responsible for monitoring.

“Not one of mine,” he replied, “but the first one to leave the Solar System—the Pioneer X. It went out between Taurus and Orion. It must be at 10,000 AU by now. I was imagining that I was out there, no longer able to communicate with Earth, pushing on alone, buffeted by micrometeors and the interstellar wind, getting more and more tired but pressing onward and outward…”

Jacqueline’s tinkling laugh brought him back to Earth. He rolled over and glowered somewhat shamefacedly at her.

“Don’t be mad,” she said. “You and I must be more alike than we realize, for I too sometimes dream that I am a spacecraft.”

She told him of her strange dream, and then they both talked about the well-known phenomenon of graduate students living, eating, and even dreaming their thesis problems.

“Your subconscious was probably trying to tell you something,” he said.

“I know,” she replied, “and I take that dream almost as seriously as I do the results of my calculations, or at least I will until we get something out of the spacecraft that contradicts it. But I was thinking, perhaps if we delayed the start of the X-ray telescope scan, and first stepped through the various digitalization rates on the low frequency radio, we might pick up some additional information on the exact spectrum of the scruff.”

As Jacqueline shifted from being a companion for the evening to a colleague at work, Donald realized that the drifting mood of the picnic had disappeared, and they could talk shop standing in line just as easily.

“Maybe,” he said as he started to pack the basket. “Let’s put this in the car and then get in the line for the show. We can talk about it more there.”

TUESDAY 5 MAY 2020

The Deep Space Network spent five minutes (and many rubles) to launch the command into space. The five light-minute long string of radio pulses traveled for over a day before it reached the OE probe 200 AU away in its high arc over the Sun. The command was stored, and the spacecraft computer rapidly computed the check sum. It found no obvious errors, but the string of bits was treated like a potentially dangerous cancer virus. It was not allowed to get into the command mechanism just yet, for if there were something wrong in that string of bits, it could kill the spacecraft just as surely as a meteor strike. A copy of the bit stream stored in the holding memory was sent back to Earth. There the copy of the copy was checked with the original. Finally, another copy of the original command string, followed by a separate execute command, was sent out to reassure the OE probe that it could now change its operational state.

Jacqueline was waiting when the next data dump came into the computer. It was nearly midnight—a typical working hour for a graduate student—only now she was not as lonely as she had been in previous months when she had sat at this console in the early morning hours.

“Looks like a good dump,” said Donald as he watched the Deep Space Network report build up on his screen.

Jacqueline turned to smile at him, but was interrupted by another, less kindly voice.

“Clean up the low frequency radio data and do a quick plot on the screen,” Professor Sawlinski commanded.

Jacqueline’s practiced fingers flew over the keyboard, and soon the computer was rearranging the data from spacecraft format to plotting format. There was a lot of data now that the digitalization rate had been increased, and it took some time.

“Here it comes,” said Donald, as he watched the plot start to build up on Jacqueline’s screen. The complex, humped pattern of the low frequency radio variations snaked their way across the display, crowding all their variations into a few inches of screen. Jacqueline peered closely at the display and slowly the greenish white line changed texture, as if it were going out of focus.

“The scruff is starting,” she said.

They all looked as the slow variations became almost submerged in a flurry of noise.

Jacqueline noted the time of onset of the scruff and stopped the slowly moving plot with a few strokes of the delete key. A few more commands, and soon a new plot came on the screen. This time the sinusoidal variations were well spaced, and the scruff was now a distinct pulsation.

“It is definitely periodic!” Sawlinski said. “Expand it further!”

In the next plot, the slow variations that were the basis of Jacqueline’s thesis had been reduced to a gradually increasing trend line. And on that line there marched a series of noisy spikes, as equally separated as soldiers in a parade, but varying greatly in their size.

“It certainly looks just like a pulsar,” exclaimed Sawlinski. “What is the period?”

“I’ll run a spectral analysis of this section,” Jacqueline said.

Soon the spectral analysis was on the screen. There was a lot of noise and some sideband spikes, but there was no doubt that the data centered predominantly at a frequency of 5.02 Hertz or a period of 199 milliseconds.

“Something that regular can only be manmade—or a pulsar,” said Sawlinski. “I want you to find the other sections of scruff and see if the periods are the same. If they are, see if one section of scruff keeps in step with the beat set up by the preceding sections. I will check the library to get the latest data on pulsars.” He went across the room and activated another console.

Jacqueline peered at the screen and said, “If you are going to look up pulsar periods, I would say that the period is 199.2 milliseconds, although the last number could be off by a few digits.”

By the time Sawlinski had put the console into library mode and had obtained a list of the known pulsars with periods of less than one second, Jacqueline had determined that the pulses indeed kept very exact time. Although they faded away and reappeared a day later as the spacecraft slowly rotated, the new line of marching pulses was still in step with the first batch. She followed the pulses through the whole set of data. They kept accurate time during the whole week.

“The period is now 0.1992687 seconds and seems to be good to at least six places,” Jacqueline said as Sawlinski glanced at her.

He looked through the tables of pulsar periods on his screen. “There are no known pulsars with that period,” he said. “Yet it must be a pulsar. If we only knew exactly where to look, maybe the radio telescopes here on Earth could find it.”

Jacqueline finally decided to tell him of her decision to add an additional command to the original one. “Professor Sawlinski,” she said, “while Donald and I were working out the details of the command to the spacecraft to have it speed up its data digitalization rate, we realized that the length of the command made no difference to the cost of sending the command. We also figured that, after a week of high rate data, we would have obtained most of the information on the nature of the high frequency scruff, and we could then have the spacecraft do something else.”

“What did you do!” Sawlinski barked at her.

Jacqueline faced him and patiently explained. “After a week of data collection at high rate, we programmed the spacecraft to continue at a high data rate, but to switch cyclically between the four antenna arms. I hoped that the scruff would show up more on one arm than another, and we could at least tell from what quadrant of the sky the signal was coming from.”

Sawlinski’s face glowered while he thought over what she had told him. Finally he relaxed and said, “Horosho!” He then turned to Donald and asked for the time of the next data dump.

“One week from now, minus about a half-hour.”

“Horosho. I will see you both then,” he said. “Meanwhile, Jacqueline, you had better get this information ready for publication in Astrophysical Letters. We will want the period, the apparent strength, and anything else you can extract out of the data. We will hold off sending it in for review until we have had a chance to see next week’s data. Dobri vecher.” He turned on his heel and left them.

TUESDAY 12 MAY 2020

The following week, the console room was crowded. Professor Sawlinski had brought a few radio astronomers with him, and several of the faculty and graduate students, having heard rumors in the halls, had also gathered to get in on the excitement. Donald had brought along a spacecraft antenna design engineer; together they had dredged up the exact configuration of the low frequency radio antennas on the spacecraft and calculated the exact radiation pattern of each arm. The antenna patterns were very complex because the response of an individual arm depended strongly on the detailed shape of the spacecraft on the side where that particular arm was attached.

Jacqueline was also ready with a complex data reduction program that would produce five plots on the screen, one showing the signal detected in each arm, and one showing the combined response of all the arms.

Donald turned from his console, where he had been monitoring the engineering data from the Deep Space Network.

“The dump is finished. You should find the data in the computer files now,” he said.

Jacqueline’s hands flew over the keyboard and soon five greenish white lines were snaking their way across the screen.

“Here comes the scruff,” she said. Then leaning forward she looked at the four top traces and exclaimed, “The pulses are showing up in only one of the antenna arms!”

It soon was obvious that, as the spacecraft tumbled slowly through space with its four long antenna arms sweeping across different portions of the sky, one of the antennas was doing a much better job of picking up the high frequency pulses than were the others. They would now be able to do a better job of pinpointing the source in the sky.

The spacecraft antenna design engineer shook his head in puzzlement. “It doesn’t make sense that one of those antennas would be that much more sensitive than the others. After all, they are only long hunks of wire, and their antenna patterns should not look all that different. Which one is it?”

“Antenna number two,” Jacqueline said.

The engineer turned to his console and soon a directivity pattern, fleshed out in pseudo-three-dimensional shape by the computer, flashed on the screen.

“I don’t see any significant directivity here,” he said.

Donald had been watching, and had noticed a frequency number at the bottom of the screen.

“The pulses could be high frequency bursts that are higher than the nominal design frequency for the low frequency radio antennas,” he said. “Can you calculate the antenna pattern for a higher frequency?”

“I already have that calculated and stored,” said the engineer. He typed in a command and soon the pattern was replaced by another one. Sticking up out of the center of the pattern was a high-gain spike.

The engineer looked at it for a second and then announced, “That spike is called an ‘end fire’ lobe and is a complex interaction of the antenna with the panel and instruments on that side of the spacecraft. We often see such spikes showing up at the high frequency end of the design range.” He turned to Jacqueline and said, “That makes it easy; your pulses are coming from the direction the antenna is pointing.”

The radio astronomers began to get interested. They now knew in which direction relative to the spacecraft the pulsating signals came from. However, it took a few hours of work with the Deep Space Network and the spacecraft engineers before they knew exactly how the spacecraft was oriented with respect to the stars when the pulses were at their maximum.

Within two days, several radio dishes were pointing their narrow beams out into space, searching for the new pulsar. Even though they knew the exact period and even to a fraction of a second when they should see a pulse, none was found. The mystery grew deeper.

TUESDAY 19 MAY 2020

“Little green men begin to sound more and more plausible,” Donald said as he lay on the grass next to Jacqueline. He had taken her to a show and had been pleased that she had taken the trouble to put on her “women’s things.” Behind her prettied-up face, the intelligence that was Jacqueline peered out and frowned disapprovingly.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “There has to be a perfectly simple explanation, but we just have not thought of it yet. Perhaps the X-ray telescope will tell us something. Fortunately, it scanned over the probable position in the sky in the second day of this week’s data collection, so we won’t have to wait too long.”

“Does Sawlinski know about that part of the command?” Donald asked.

“No,” Jacqueline said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell him. In fact, he has been so busy giving seminars and visiting radio astronomy antenna sites that I haven’t seen him for a week.”

Donald looked at his watch and said, “Well, it is almost time for the next data dump. Let’s go in and monitor it on the consoles.” They rose and walked through the darkness to the Space Sciences building.

This time the console room held only two people. Donald sat behind Jacqueline and leaned on the back of her chair, smelling her perfume and watching her slender fingers play over the keyboard.

“The X-ray data is in a different format from the radio data since it is just a count of the number of X-ray photons detected,” she said. “First, I will get the directional plot and see if there is any significant increase in counts in the same direction as the low frequency radio experiment detects radio pulses.”

Soon a histogram of pulses versus the direction in the sky flashed on the screen.

“Look at that spike!” Donald said. “Is that the right direction?”

“Mais oui!” Jacqueline’s fingers stumbled in the excitement, and she had to erase a distorted plot before she slowed down and finally got the computer to show the number of counts versus time when the telescope was pointing in the right direction.

“There they are, just like little soldiers, five times a second!” said Donald.

“5.0183495 times per second,” Jacqueline retorted. “That number is engraved in my memory. What I really hope to get out of this X-ray data is some evidence of delay between the X-ray pulses and the radio pulses. The X-ray pulses will travel at the speed of light, but the radio pulses will be delayed slightly by the interstellar plasma and will arrive later. The more they are delayed, the more plasma they had to travel through. The combination of X-ray data and radio data will give us a rough idea of the distance to the pulsating source.”

As she talked, she was working the keyboard, and soon, underneath the marching row of X-ray spikes, there was a similar row of spikes from the radio antenna.

“It is a good thing you decided to digitalize the radio data sixteen times a second so we could see the individual pulses,” Donald said. “If we had tried four times a second as I recommended, we would have missed most of them.”

“There is no delay!” Jacqueline cried, bewildered.

“Hmmm,” said Donald, “maybe the delay is almost exactly 200 milliseconds and they are just shifted.”

“No,” Jacqueline said, pointing to the screen. “Look—there is a very weak X-ray pulse followed by three strong ones and then two weak ones. You can see the exact pattern in the radio pulses, right below them. The delay is almost zero. That must mean that whatever the source of the pulses, it is very close to the detectors.”

“…and the closest thing to the detectors is the spacecraft itself,” Donald said. “I am afraid that somehow the spacecraft is putting spikes into both the low frequency radio antenna and the X-ray telescope.”

Jacqueline frowned, then quickly produced two more plots with much larger scales. The pulses were now so close together that they were back to being scruff again. But the scruffy region on the X-ray plot was much shorter than on the radio plot.

“No, it is not the spacecraft,” she said. “Look here, the pulses come and go with time much faster for the X-ray telescope than for the radio antenna. The X-ray telescope has a field of view that is limited to one degree, while the high sensitivity spike in the radio antenna has a beam width of almost three degrees, and these plots are consistent with the width of those patterns.”

“Well, if it isn’t the spacecraft,” said Donald, “then what is it?”

“Give me a few minutes,” she said, and went back to typing on the keyboard.

Donald got up, walked down the hall to the coffee machine and bought them both a cup of coffee. It looked like a long evening ahead. When he returned, she had the X-ray and radio-pulse trains up on the screen again, but now they were blown up so far that only three pulses appeared on the screen.

“There is a very slight time delay,” she said as he walked in. “I wish I could remember the number density for the interstellar plasma near the sun. I worked out the values for the latest solar wind cycle last month; I will have to go upstairs and look it up.”

She made a hardcopy printout of the graph on the screen, then ran quickly upstairs. Donald followed slowly behind, carrying the two cups of coffee. By the time he made it up the stairs, she had found the number for the interstellar plasma density. She was punching away on her hand calculator when he walked into her office.

“2300 AU!” she exclaimed. “That pulsar is only one-thirtieth of a light year away!”

“A star that close?” Donald asked. “Surely we would have seen it moving across the sky long ago.”

“No,” she said, “a pulsar is a spinning neutron star, and a neutron star is only about twenty kilometers in diameter. Even if the temperature were high, the size of the light-emitting area is so small that we wouldn’t be able to see it unless we looked in just the right place with a very large telescope. But you are right, it is strange that it has not been picked up in one of the sky surveys.”

“If the pulsar is that close, then why didn’t the radio astronomers find the pulses too?” he asked.

“Neutron stars give off their radiation in beams that shoot out from the magnetic poles, and you have to be in the direction of the beam to see the pulses,” she replied. “That is why the spacecraft sees the pulses and we can’t. The spacecraft is up out of the ecliptic by 200 AU and has moved up into the path of the beams.” She walked over to the whiteboard in the office, picked up a colored marker, and started to pace and scribble.

Donald kept silent as slender feet clicked back and forth across the floor in their dress shoes. He waited patiently while long fingers scrawled diagrams and calculations on the board. He watched in admiration as the pretty face puzzled out the complexity of the mathematical transformation from one set of astrophysical coordinates to another. Five minutes later, he was still admiring Jacqueline from behind when she finally turned and spoke.

“It is up in the northern sky,” she said. “But it is not where we thought it was. Because the neutron star is so close, there is a difference of over five degrees in the angle from the spacecraft to the star and from the earth to the star. No wonder the radio astronomers could not find it. We told them the wrong direction.”

She went over to a star chart on her wall and carefully made a tiny cross. She turned and, with a wry grin on her face, remarked, “And the reason it was never picked up in a sky survey is that it is right next to Giansar, the fourth magnitude star right at the end of Draco, the Dragon constellation. It would take a good telescope to see the neutron star image in that bright glare.”

She drank down the rest of her coffee.

“Let’s go wake up old Saw-face,” she said. “We’ve got a paper to publish.”

FRIDAY 22 MAY 2020

In two days the paper was prepared and accepted into the Astrophysical Letters computer. The next day it was on the astrophysical information net, along with a note from the radio astronomers that very weak 199-millisecond pulsations had been detected from a region in the northern skies right at the end of the constellation of Draco. Shortly thereafter, the new ten-meter telescope in China found a faint speck in the sky, and pictures of “The Egg of the Dragon—Sol’s Nearest Neighbor” appeared in Sinica Astrophysica. The popular press copied the picture—along with the picturesque Chinese name, and soon people were peering up at the night sky, vainly trying to catch a glimpse of “Dragon’s Egg,” resting just off the end of the constellation Draco, as if the star were a recently laid egg.

SATURDAY 13 JUNE 2020

It was Saturday evening. Donald and Jacqueline sat on the grass of the Griffith Observatory and talked. They were much more relaxed than they had been for months. Jacqueline’s thesis was completed, and her formal oral defense the day before had been a mere formality, what with the world-wide scientific acclaim and video-news publicity being made over the discovery.

“I still don’t understand why Sawlinski is doing the video-news interviews,” Donald said with a frown. “You were the one who discovered the neutron star first, not he.”

“That is not the way science works,” Jacqueline explained. “A Professor starts a research project hoping to discover something new. The student sometimes makes the discovery, but without the Professor’s research project, the discovery would not have been made. Since the Professor gets the blame if the project is a failure, he should get the benefit from any successes. Besides, it doesn’t upset me—after all, my career is off to a great start!”

Donald only felt a greater admiration for the woman of whom he had become so fond. He kept silent and continued to look upward at the stars.

After a long time, Jacqueline spoke. “I wonder if we could ever go visit Dragon’s Egg. At the speed it is traveling, it will be gone from the Solar System in a few hundred years. I wish I could go myself, but I guess maybe it will be my grandchild or great-grandchild.”

“We may be going sooner than you think,” Donald said. “The latest news on the Nigerian magnetic monopole discovery is that they have used the first monopole in a large magnetic accelerator to generate other monopoles, and some of those have already been used as a catalyst for a deuterium fusion reaction. The JPL engineers are excited about the fusion results. They are already starting to design fusion-rocket concepts for interstellar spacecraft. I don’t think a ship will be ready soon enough so that you and I could go for a visit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in twenty or thirty years, one of our children will be looking down at Dragon’s Egg from a close orbit.”

And inevitably, the years passed…

SUNDAY 15 AUGUST 2032

Quick-Mover was getting tired. He only hoped the Swift was tiring faster. The Swift was much quieter than he, but its brain was slow, and it never seemed to learn from its repeated failures to catch him. This particular beast had been harassing his clan for the last three turns of the sky, and the clan had been forced to retreat to a cluster of boulders that blocked the Swift’s rush. There was nothing they could do until the huge beast tired and went away, or else caught one of them out in the open—like Quick-Mover—who was now beginning to regret his attempt to get a food-pod from a nearby plant.

He watched carefully with six of his eyes as the Swift laboriously moved in the hard direction until it figured it was directly east or west of its intended prey. Once there, it would start accelerating, swiftly slithering toward him as its long narrow body twisted across the crust. As it neared, the great, glowing maw would open, and out from under each of the five eyes ringing the gaping mouth would spring a long, sharp fang of crystal.

Quick-Mover knew how sharp those fangs were, since he had one stored in a tool pouch in his body. He had retrieved the fang from the mangled carcass of a Swift that had been the loser in a mating duel and had used it to cut up the drying carrion that he and his clan had enjoyed as a supplement to their food-pod diet.

The Swift launched its rush. Quick-Mover waited until the Swift had committed itself to its attack; then, thinning his flexible, opalescent body down, he pushed into the hard direction with all the speed that his muscles could command. The Swift was now moving so rapidly that it could not change its course, but it was close. One of Quick-Mover’s trailing eyes winced when a fang nicked its thick support stub.

As the Swift slowed its rush and turned to attack again, Quick-Mover became desperate. Soon one of those sharp fangs was going to slash a large hole in him, and the next time the Swift made its rush, it would catch him.

Then suddenly, Quick-Mover had a thought. He had a fang too! He watched the Swift shift position off at a distance and begin its rush. He quickly shaped a section of skin into a short tendril and, reaching into the tool pouch orifice, pulled out the fang. He enlarged the tendril into a strong manipulator, backed up with a thick crystal bone core, and pushed the rest of his body into the hard direction again. This time, he left a portion of his body out in the path of the Swift. It was the thick manipulator holding the fang. Quick-Mover felt a jar, then his eyes glowed as he saw the Swift stumble to a halt, fangs snapping at its flank, where the glowing vital juices poured out onto the crust.

Quick-Mover looked in awe at the fang held in his manipulator. Both were covered with dripping gobs of glowing juice. He sucked them clean, enjoying the unaccustomed taste of fresh juice and meat. He moved over to the still-thrashing Swift. Carefully keeping well off in the hard direction, he watched the Swift as it grew weaker. Finally, feeling bolder, he moved the manipulator with its fang over the center of the long thin body and struck downward. The sharp point sank deep into the body. The Swift, struck in its brain-knot, shivered and flowed into a fleshy pile.

Quick-Mover raised the fang and struck once more.

It felt good.

He was mightier than a Swift! Never again would one of these beasts terrorize his people!

The fang struck again and again and again…

FRIDAY 5 NOVEMBER 2049

Pierre Carnot Niven floated in front of the console on the science deck of the interstellar ark, St. George. The thin young man pulled thoughtfully at the corner of his carefully trimmed dark brown beard as he monitored the activities out in the asteroid belt surrounding the still-distant star, Dragon’s Egg.

“It’s still ‘Mother’s Star’ to me,” Pierre thought as he recalled his childhood years, lying in his father’s arms out on the lawn to watch the first interstellar probes go out to explore the neutron star his mother had found.

There had been some whispers of “favoritism” when he had been picked to be Chief Scientist of the Dragon’s Egg exploration crew, but those who whispered had not been as driven as he. He had felt his mother had received too little scientific recognition for her discovery, and his whole life had been spent rectifying that supposed wrong. He had not only made himself the world’s expert on neutron-star physics, but had also taught himself to be a popular science writer so that everyone—not just a few scientists—would know of the accomplishments of the son of Jacqueline Carnot. Pierre had been successful, for his ability to communicate science concepts at every level had led to his being chosen leader and spokesman for the expedition. Now the talking and selling and explaining were through, and the scientist in Pierre took over.

The expedition was still six months away from Dragon’s Egg, but it was time to start the activities of the automated probes that had been sent ahead by St. George. There would be a lot of work to do in preparation for their close-up view of the star. Now that they had found and identified the asteroidal bodies around the neutron star that they would need, the work could be done as easily by robot brains as human ones.

The largest of the probes was really an automated factory, but its single output was very unusual—monopoles. It had some monopoles on board already, both positive and negative types. These were not for output, but the seed material needed to run the monopole factory. The factory probe headed for the first of the large nickel-iron planetoids that the strong magnetic fields of the neutron star had slowed and captured during its travels. It started preparing the site while the other probes proceeded with the job of building the power supply necessary to operate the monopole factory, for the power that would be needed was so great that there was no way the factory probe could have carried the fuel. In fact, the power levels needed would exceed the total power-plant capability of the human race on Earth, Colonies, Luna, Mars, asteroids, and scientific outposts combined.

Although the electrical power required was beyond the capability of those in the Solar System, this was only because they didn’t have the right energy source. The Sun had been—and still was—very generous with its outpouring of energy; but so far the best available ways to convert that radiant energy into electricity, either with solar cells or by burning some fossilized sun energy and using it to rotate a magnetic field past some wires in a generator, were still limited.

Here at Dragon’s Egg, there was no need for solar cells or heat engines, for the rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star was at one time the energy source and the rotor of a dynamo. All that was needed were some wires to convert the energy of that rotating magnetic field into electrical current.

The job of the smaller probes was to lay cable. They started at the factory and laid a long thin cable in a big loop that passed completely around the star, but out at a safe distance, where it would be stable for the few months that the power would be needed. Since a billion kilometers of cable was needed to reach from the positions of the asteroidal material down around the star and back out again, it had to be very unusual cable—and it was. The cables being laid were bundles of superconducting polymer threads. Although it was hot near the neutron star, there was no need of refrigeration to maintain the superconductivity, for the polymers stayed superconducting almost to their melting point—900 degrees.

The cables became longer and longer and started to react to the magnetic field lines of the star, which were whipping by them ten times a second—five sweeps of a positive magnetic field emanating from the east pole of the neutron star, interspersed with five sweeps of the negative magnetic field from the west pole. Each time the field went by, the current would surge through the cable and build up as excess charge on the probes. Before they were through, the probes were pulsating with displays of blue and pink corona discharge—positive, then negative. The last connection of the cable to complete the circuit was tricky, since it had to be made at a time when the current pulsating back and forth through the wire was passing through zero. But for semi-intelligent probes with fractional-relativistic fusion-rocket drives, one-hundredth of a second is plenty of time.

With the power source hooked up to the factory, production started. Strong alternating magnetic fields whipped the seed monopoles back and forth at high energies through a chunk of dense matter. The collisions of the monopoles with the dense nuclei took place at such high energies that elementary particle pairs were formed in profusion, including magnetic monopole pairs. These were skimmed out of the debris emanating from the target and piped outside the factory by tailored electric and magnetic fields, where they were injected into the nearby asteroid. The monopoles entered the asteroid and in their passage through the atoms interacted with the nuclei, displacing the outer electrons. A monopole didn’t orbit the nucleus like an electron. Instead, it whirled in a ring, making an electric field that held the charged nucleus, while the nucleus whirled in a linked ring to make a magnetic field that held onto the magnetically charged monopole.

With the loss of the outer electrons that determined their size, the atoms became smaller, and the rock they made up became denser. As more and more monopoles were poured into the center of the asteroid, the material there changed from normal matter, which is bloated with light electrons, into dense monopolium. The original atomic nuclei were still there; but, now with monopoles in linked orbits around them, the density increased to nearly that of a neutron star. As the total amount of converted matter in the asteroid increased, the gravitational field from the condensed matter became higher and soon began to assist in the process, crushing the electron orbits about the atoms into nuclear dimensions after they had only been partially converted into monopolium. After the month-long process was complete, the 250-kilometer-diameter asteroid had been converted into a 100-meter-diameter sphere with a core of monopolium, a mantle of degenerate matter of white dwarf density, and a glowing crust of partially collapsed normal matter.

After the first asteroid had been transformed, the factory turned to the next, which had been pushed into place by a herder probe that had started its task many months ago. The process was repeated again and again until finally there was a collection of eight dense asteroids circling the neutron star: two large ones and six smaller ones, dancing slowly around each other as they moved along in orbit. They were kept in a stable configuration with thrusts from the probes, which used the magnetic fields from a collection of monopoles in their noses to exert a push or pull from a distance on the hot, magnetically charged, ultra-dense masses.

The probes, herding their creations along, now waited patiently for St. George to arrive. As the humans approached the neutron star, the herder probes became more active. They pushed, pulled, and nudged the two larger asteroids until they approached one other. As the ultra-strong gravitational fields of the two asteroids interacted, they whirled about one another at blinding speed and then took off in opposite directions on highly elliptical orbits that would meet again many months later at a point much closer to the nearby neutron star.