Volcano

14:44:01 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

Broken-Petal flowed his elongated body down through the ragged rows of petal plants, anxiously feeling the swellings of the ripening pods on the underside of each plant with his tendrils. He subconsciously counted the pods as he went along, but not in terms of numbers, since his total mathematical knowledge consisted of: one, two, three—many.

Although Broken-Petal could not count, he was very good at equating large numbers. He knew that, sometimes, what seemed to be many pods was still not enough to feed the clan—for there were many in the clan and all were always hungry. As he moved and felt, the many pods in his mind grew and, as the number grew, his anxiety for the many in the clan became less and less. He found his undertread adding a youthful t’trum pattern to his smooth flowing motion as he came to the end of the last row. He let his opalescent body resume its normal flat, ellipsoidal shape and looked at the crop with pride. The petal plants were tall. He would have liked to have seen them all, but he was content to rest at one end and look with only three or four of his dozen dark red eyes down between the rows that he had struggled so hard to get the clan to dig.

Broken-Petal remembered the time, many turns of the stars ago, when he came across proud old Dragon-Flower with a stub of a broken dragon crystal in her manipulator.

“What are you doing, Aged One?” Broken-Petal asked.

“I’m tired of having to wander in the wilderness to find a petal plant that has not already been stripped of all of its pods,” she said. “I’m going to have my own plants, right here outside my wall.” She left the dragon crystal sticking in the crust, and flowed back to let him see what she had been doing. As she did so, the strong crystalline bones in her manipulator dissolved, and the muscle and skin that had covered the thick, articulated appendage shrank back into her body until her surface was smooth again.

“Why are you digging those holes, Aged One? How will that get you your own petal plants?”

She replied, “I may be old, but I still see well and remember well. The last time the young ones came back from a hunt, they had traveled so far away they had found some petal plants that had never been picked. They brought home as many pods as they could carry. There were many delicious ripe ones and some that looked all right, but, when opened, were runny and the seeds inside were hard. Naturally, being an Aged One, I got the overripe pods. I ate all that I could—the taste is not bad once you get used to it—but the seeds inside were too hard to crack, so I rolled them outside.”

“I remember that hunt,” Broken-Petal said. “We never did find a sign of a Flow Slow or even a Slink, but that patch of untouched petal plants made up for it all.”

Dragon-Flower continued, “One turn I noticed that one of the seeds had rolled into a crack in my wall. It had a little petal growing from it. I watched it turn after turn as it became larger and larger. It grew into a petal plant! I was happy, I would have my own petal plant right near my door. I would dream of picking the pods whenever I wanted, without having to go far distances. Maybe I could even wait and have a ripe pod to eat all by myself, as I did in the old times when I was a young warrior and went on hunting expeditions.”

Her t’trums became sadder as she went on, “But the stones in the wall kept the petal plant tilted to one side—and it fell over and died.”

She added, “I watched the other seeds, but none of them grew into petal plants. They just sat there under the sky and did nothing. Then many turns ago, having nothing better to do, I cleaned out my stockade and pushed a pile of dirt, old pod skins and Flow Slow nodes out the door. The pile covered one of the seeds. Later I noticed it too had started to grow into a petal plant!

“That’s it over there,” she said, rippling her eye-stubs.

Broken-Petal’s eyes followed the ripples and saw a small plant growing up from the corner of a decomposing heap of trash. The plant was still small enough that he could look down on its concave topside, cooled to a dark red by the black sky above, while the lumpy underside of the many-pointed leaf structure reflected the healthy yellow glow of the crust.

“It should be big soon,” Dragon-Flower said. “I can already see some pod swellings on the underside.”

Several thoughts ran through Broken-Petal’s mind as he looked at the plant, with its promise of food. But there was one thought that made him feel in a funny way that he had never felt before. He felt the spark of inspiration.

“Aged One! I have thought of a new thing! Let us take all the hard seeds we can find and put them under piles of trash that we take out of our stockades. The seeds will grow into petal plants and we will have all the pods that we want!”

Dragon-Flower paused a moment, reformed her manipulator, and grasped her broken shard of dragon crystal. “You are wrong, Broken-Petal. The seeds do not need trash. My first petal plant was not under trash, it was in a hole in my wall,” she said. “It is obvious that the petal plants just want to see the sky. As long as the seeds stay out on the crust where they can see the sky they are happy and do not grow. But if you take away the sky, they get unhappy and break out of their hard coats and grow until they can see the sky. That is what I am doing with this broken crystal. I use the sharp point to make a little hole in the crust. I put the seed in the hole and cover it up so that it cannot see the sky. The seed will get unhappy and start to push up until it can see the sky once more, only by then it will be a petal plant, instead of a seed.”

Broken-Petal knew better than to get into an argument with an Aged One, even if he was Leader of the Clan. He watched as Dragon-Flower continued with the arduous task of poking the sharp end of the broken crystal into the hard crust. She soon tired and quit, but not before there were many holes around the perimeter of her stockade, and in each hole was an unhappy seed, covered over with powdered crust.

Dragon-Flower’s experiment was both a success and a failure. Most of the seeds grew into plants, and soon Dragon-Flower was on friendly terms with many, as she had more pods than she could eat. Broken-Petal had to put his weight on a few of the more rash youngsters and give them a good drubbing before they stopped their raids on her plants.

“You lazy flats!” he would holler on their hides. “Go out and find your own pods! And make sure you bring back the best one for Dragon-Flower to replace the one you took!”

He couldn’t let them get lazy and weak; he would need their strength on the next raid or hunt.

Then, things got worse. The plants grew and grew until they blocked the sky over most of Dragon-Flower’s stockade. Although no one really minded reaching a manipulator under a plant to take a ripe pod to eat, it was really nerve-wracking to have those heavy-looking petals hanging over one. Dragon-Flower had to tear down her walls and build a new stockade away from the plants. It was good she did, for as the plants aged, their support crystals grew weak; then one or more of the petals would break off under the extreme gravity; and would instantly reappear on the crust, its crushed mass sending out a shock of vibration that went rippling through the clan compound, making everyone nervous.

Broken-Petal knew a good thing when he saw it, and the most important trophy from the next hunt was not the torn-up carcass of a Swift, but many overripe pods, bursting with hard little seeds. Then his problems began, for the cheela in his clan were hunters.

Hunting was not hard work. It consisted of a leisurely stroll in the country with a bunch of friends, followed by a short period of exhilarating terror and a chance to demonstrate how brave and strong one was, climaxed by an orgy of eating and lovemaking that compensated for the long trek home carrying hunks of flesh.

Farming, however, even poke-and-cover farming, was hard work, especially in the tough crust of Egg, and there was no heroism or fun involved to make up for it. And worst of all, after all that hard work, it took many, many turns before there was any food to show for the effort. Broken-Petal had to tread on the edges of quite a few before he finally saw all the hard little seeds safely tucked into holes in the crust, unhappy at the loss of the sky.

Broken-Petal moved to the next row and the next, feeling proud. This had been their third crop of petal plants. The first crop had gone well, but there had not been enough plants for the whole clan, and they still had to forage to feed everyone. Broken-Petal had made sure that there were enough holes the next time, and his care was made easier by the cooperation of the digging crew, who now appreciated the long-term consequences of their labor.

As Broken-Petal moved between the rows, he saw a white patch in the crust. As he passed over that section of the crust, it seemed strangely hot. He moved back and forth, feeling the crust with his underside. He was bewildered. This had never happened before. As he went between the plants to check in the next row, the crust trembled underneath him. The automatic sonar sensors that he used to track his prey sprang into action and his bewilderment changed into shock. The source of the trembling was directly below him! He was scared.

“Is it a dragon?”

“No. No. There is no such thing as a dragon,” he reassured himself. The old hunters used to tell tales of a tall, fire-shooting monster that came up out of the crust and stopped a cheela in his tracks by searing his outer edges with its violet-colored fire. The dragon would then fall on him from its tremendous height, smashing him like an egg sac and then absorbing him for dinner. No one had ever seen a dragon, but the large, very strong crystal bones that were found scattered in profusion over and underneath the crust certainly gave a taint of credibility to the tales, for no one knew where the dragon crystals came from.

Broken-Petal moved away from the area as the crust got hotter and hotter and the trembling from underneath continued. He was halfway back to the clan stockades when some of his rear eyes saw a spurt of bluish-white gas shoot from a crack in the crust, searing a petal of the plant overhead.

A group from the stockades met him as he approached. “It feels like a crustquake,” one said, “but it keeps on repeating in the same place.”

“It is not far,” said Many-Pods, one of the clan’s best trackers.

“You are right, Many-Pods,” Broken-Petal said. “Whatever it is, it is right in the middle of our field.”

The clan flowed carefully to the edge of the field and took turns looking down the affected row as the hot smoke and gas continued to pour from the crack. More plants were burned now.

Broken-Petal had been thinking, and when the clan had finished looking and formed to the east and west of him, he knew what he had to do.

“The smoke and hot gas are going to kill our plants,” he said. “Pretty-Egg, get back to the stockades and get everyone here fast. Even the littlest hatchling can carry a few pods. The rest of you, start picking as fast as you can. Start by going as near the smoke as your treads can take, then pick everything off those plants. Even the unripe pods will taste good after the ripe ones are gone.” Broken-Petal led the way down the row as his instructions radiated away through the crust.

“Just when things were getting better,” he thought. “The gods shall tread the edges of the proud,” the old storytellers had always said. Well, he had let himself get complacent, and the Old Ones were right.

He moved as close as he dared to the vent. The smoke was reaching high up into the atmosphere now. The heat radiating down on his dark red topside from the billowing bluish-white column was uncomfortable. Although the crust was hot, he could still get to within three plants of the vent. He paused for a moment, formed three manipulators, and started picking pods, ripping most of them away from the flesh of the plant, although some of them were near-ripe and came away easily. He stored the pods in a carrying pouch he formed in the upper part of his body. He moved back and forth, picking pods as he went, approaching the crevasse at a distance that was mediated by the desire for food overcoming the unwillingness of his tread to move to hotter crust.

The first section of plants nearest the crevasse went quickly. Broken-Petal organized things so that the pods were dropped by the pickers at the edge of the planting, to be taken back to the stockade by the younger ones and stored away by the Old Ones. Although they moved as fast as they could, they lost many pods from the plants that were too close to the crevasse. The tedious work continued, with the laborers constantly harassed by shocks and crust dust falling on their topsides.

Soon, all were back from the field, their eating pouches sucking quietly on pods as they rested at the outskirts of the clan compound. Some of their eyes scanned the small, blue-hot hill that now grew in the middle of the devastated petal plant field, while other eyes followed the pillar of smoke that went far up into the sky until it seemed to touch the stars. The smoke went from an intensely glaring blue-white column at the base, to deep, deep red clouds far up in the cool black sky, the bottoms of the billowing red clouds tinged with a yellow glow from the crust below.

The times grew difficult. The food they had harvested lasted a long time, but the diet of immature pods was a great deal less tasty and nourishing than the steady turn after turn of feasting that they had enjoyed after they had learned about farming.

Broken-Petal tried to salvage things. There were no overripe seed pods from the recent crop, so he sent out a team to forage in the far regions for more, while he had the rest gouge holes in the crust away from the towering column of smoke. After much labor, the holes were ready, but the hunting party returned empty-handed.

Broken-Petal knew better than to berate them. In times like these, a successful hunting party had its pick of love partners, while these would only have each other for many, many turns.

“What was the problem?” he asked.

See-High spoke for them. “We saw many hunting parties that were doing what we were doing, out gathering every pod and hunting every animal they could find, even the almost worthless Tiny Shell.”

He went on. “We went as far as we could before our own food ran out. It was the same everywhere. Everyone was so busy hunting that there was no fighting. We thought about attacking one of the other groups, but it was obvious from their thinness that they were carrying very little in their pouches in the way of catch, and were as bad off as we were. We even attempted to talk with some of them using long-talk. Although they don’t speak just the way we do, it was obvious from what we could make out that all the clans are afraid of the tower of smoke and the constant trembling of the crust.”

Flow-Hunter, the clan’s bravest hunter, who had been allowed to change her egg-name after her third kill of a Flow Slow, interrupted with a laugh. “Some of them think that the tower of smoke is from the fire of a dragon, and the trembling is the dragon moving over the crust to get them! All of them are talking about leaving, saying the place has become taboo.”

Then Broken-Petal had a flash of inspiration born out of the natural instincts that had made him Leader of the Clan. “If every clan is out hunting and stripping the crust bare of food,” he said, “we will go where they don’t go.”

He spoke to the hunting party. “Go eat and load up with food. With the next turn you are going out hunting again, only this time you are to go southward—in the hard direction.”

There was a shuffle of discontent from the group. They had been expecting to be sent out again in an attempt to redeem themselves, but to be sent in one of the hard directions sounded like punishment. No one ever went in the hard direction unless he had to—not even the powerful Flow Slow. See-High started to object, but Broken-Petal tapped him to silence with a sharp ripple from his tread. His tread started again, softer this time, and the encouraging words rippled through the crust to vibrate against the treads of the hunting party.

“I’m not angry with you, and I know that to travel in the hard direction means that you will move so slowly that you will still be within sight after three turns,” he said. “Think—every clan we know is east or west of us, and we all go back and forth over the same territory, stripping it bare. If you go in the hard direction far enough, you may find land where there are fewer clans and more food. Now, eat and go!”

Long before the turn was complete, the hunting party was ready to leave. Broken-Petal gave them last instructions. “Go neither east nor west until you can see mature petal plants; then you can go off to examine them to see if there are any seed pods. If not—continue south until you do. But don’t go beyond your food supplies. I want you back.” His tread rippled with wry humor. “After all, there are two directions that are hard going, and if you don’t find anything in one direction, you could always try the other one.”

With a rumble of bitter humor, the hunting party pushed off toward the south. After a half a turn, they were out of reach of short-talk, but still were visible as figures halfway to the horizon. After three turns they disappeared over the horizon and the rest turned to their chores—and waiting.

See-High pushed slowly into the springy air. The most difficult part about traveling in the hard direction was that his body kept trying to slip to one side or the other. If he didn’t hurry, but kept sliding a thin edge into the hard direction, then expanding it to make a crack that he could flow into, the going was steady. It was like going into a wind, but different. The wind kept pushing on him even when he was still, but the only force he felt from moving in the hard direction was the force he himself made when he attempted to move in that direction. If he stood still, for a while he could still feel the pressure, but then it slowly penetrated his body until he finally felt nothing—until he tried to move again.

See-High looked around and saw the rest of the party slowly struggling their way along. Ahead of him was Flow-Hunter, one of his favorite fun partners. Although he was leader of the hunting party and shouldn’t be doing such things while they were on a hunt, the slow grind of pushing into the slippery air had made him bored. He pushed even harder and in a little while was right behind Flow-Hunter. He tickled her trailing edge. “What are you planning at break period?” he whispered, the electronic waves of his whisper tingling her multihued skin.

“Stop that!” Flow-Hunter protested. “It is hard enough pushing through this slippery stuff without being tickled from behind. Get back or I won’t be doing anything with you for many turns, much less during break period.”

See-High persisted. He flowed forward, both above and below the trailing edge of Flow-Hunter, giving her friendly squeezes as she tried to ripple him off. She pushed forward harder to get away from him. Although normally she could out-distance him, See-High found that he kept right up to Flow-Hunter with almost no effort. Suddenly he stopped playing around and tapped her to a stop. “I had no trouble at all keeping up with you,” he said in amazement. “There you were, pushing away in the hard direction and I felt as if I were going east or west! Why?”

After a little bit of experimentation (and many giggles and slaps) they found that, once a gap was opened by a pathbreaker, the gap would remain open as long as she kept moving. Then if someone else stayed right on her trailing edge, very little extra effort was needed for him to move forward. As See-High had found, it was like moving in the easy direction (except for the pathbreaker, of course).

Before long, the hunting party was rearranged in a line. The head of the line worked at top effort as long as possible, then dropped to the side to let a fresh pathbreaker move ahead, while the tired one dropped into the end of the line and strolled along, cuddled up to the friendly trailing edge of someone of the opposite sex. The hunting party pushed forward at rapidly increased speed, with no breaks needed except when the two mismatched males got tired of being in on only half the fun and insisted upon being between two females.

They soon reached lands where there were fewer and fewer hunting parties and, after many turns, came to a region where mature petal plants could be found with pods still on them. It was not long before they had not only plenty of ripe pods for food, but also more than enough seed pods, bursting with little hard seeds. They stuffed pods and seeds into carrying pouches until the pouch orifices in their skins bulged out painfully.

The way back was rougher, for their bulky thickness caused by the load of pods and seeds made it necessary to open a wider gap in the hard direction before they could move through it. Their thickness also made them obvious targets for attack. Their new technique for moving in the hard direction saved them from being overcome by a large war party from a neighboring clan, but it cost them See-High, who was at the end of the column when the war party rushed at them from ambush out of the east as they went by. They were going to turn and attack, but See-High ordered them to continue while he kept the attackers at bay long enough for them to escape.

Broken-Petal eventually saw a thicker but shorter column of hunters show up over the horizon. At first he was bewildered by the shape and speed of the moving cluster of cheela. From a distance, they looked like a strange new type of Flow Slow, except that a Flow Slow was too lazy to move in the hard direction. He started to call an alarm, but it soon was obvious that that unusual motion of the head of the monster was the peculiar heave of Flow-Hunter as she pushed her way along.

Soon the whole clan gathered at the edge of the settlement and watched as the happy, giggling hunting party returned and dumped their booty. The seeds were distributed and quickly planted in the waiting holes by a large crew, all munching on ripe pods.

Flow-Hunter spent the next turn giving a detailed account of the trip to Broken-Petal. The report of the loss of See-High caused a moment of sadness in them both, but they turned their minds back to the present and continued on.

The nearby volcano dominated their lives. Fortunately it became dormant for a while, with just a thin wisp of yellow-white smoke spiraling up into the air, but the rumbling in the crust grew worse every turn. The crop grew well, but when the volcano became more active again, Broken-Petal decided that they had better move further away. The crop was harvested and the clan took the food and their few belongings, especially the precious broken shards of ultra-hard dragon crystal, and moved off toward the south.

There were many in the clan, and they were not in a hurry, so a modification of the hunting party path-breaker technique was used. The stronger young ones formed a broad front and pushed ahead in the hard direction. They kept up a steady pace and the rest of the clan, packed close together, followed along behind.

14:44:14 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

The interstellar ark, St. George, settled into its orbit around the spinning neutron star at a radius of 100,000 kilometers and with a period of thirteen minutes. The science crew began their scientific surveys. Although they would get much better data when they could go down in Dragon Slayer to look at the neutron star from only 400 kilometers away, they still could do a preliminary survey with the long-range telescopes.

Jean Kelly Thomas was belted into the seat in front of the imaging science console on St. George. The belt was adjusted to accommodate the fact that she was sitting on her crossed legs. With her cap of short red hair and her upturned nose, she looked like a pixie seated on a toadstool (with seat belt). Her bright blue eyes flicked over the features of the latest scan of the hydrogen-alpha ultraviolet imager. The computer had noticed something unusual in the last scan and had alerted her.

A blinking square drew her attention to a small oval bull’s-eye pattern that had appeared on the image of the star. In the upper corner of the screen, the computer had printed:

LYMAN-ALPHA SCAN TAKEN 14:44:05 22 MAY 2050
NEW FEATURE AT 54 W LONG, 31 N LAT

Jean leaned forward. “Identification?” The image remained, but the words were replaced with:

TENTATIVE IDENTIFICATION—ACTIVE VOLCANO.
CENTER TEMPERATURE 15,000 DEGREES.

Jean spoke again, “Switch Lyman-alpha scanner to high resolution scan of target region!”

She watched as the image was replaced on the screen with a close-up of the volcano. The image blinked five times a second as the imager took a scan at each rotation of the star. As she watched, she could see a flare-up in the central region, followed by a streak of brightness that flowed away from the center, the lava flow getting dimmer and dimmer as it moved.

A detailed history of the birth and death of a volcano was certainly worth keeping a careful watch on. Perhaps if they were lucky, the amount of matter that built up in the shield would become so great that it would initiate a starquake during their visit. That should set the whole star to vibrating and they might be able to determine the internal resonant modes of the star and get a better computer model for the thickness and density of the inner layers. The new volcano was certainly a high priority item, but it would have to take its turn. She couldn’t tie up the scanner to take pictures of only one thing.

She leaned forward again and spoke, “Assign Priority One to this target!

“Inform if any major change or if activity stops!”

She leaned back and pushed the print button.

“A volcano,” she thought. “Pierre will surely be interested in this one. He wants to study the internal dynamics of this star, and now he has some insides to look at. However, the hot gas and dust that monster is emitting are sure going to complicate my atmospheric studies.”

14:44:15 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

The clan moved very slowly southward. Travel in the hard direction against the magnetic field lines was not easy, even for the young hunters, and was still more difficult for the old and the hatchlings, although they were flowing into the gaps created by the moving van of pathbreakers. The hardest thing for them all to learn was to keep close together and keep moving. If a gap developed or if anyone paused for a moment, the east-west magnetic field lines would reassert their position, pinning their bodies on the lines like beads on a wire. Unless they had the strength to begin moving south again, their only choice was to move east or west and join the tail of a portion of the group that was still moving.

The clan got better at it, and by trial and error soon developed a flying-wedge technique, with one strong hunter out front taking the full brunt of the fields, and the rest of the stronger ones in a chevron behind, opening up the gap that was created. The other adults soon learned to form secondary chevrons behind, with the hatchlings and Old Ones in between. Then if a gap developed, it was soon closed by the adults in the following chevron, and the trailing edge of the moving clan now no longer looked like a wounded Flow Slow leaving a trail of vital fluid behind.

They had progressed a good distance when Broken-Petal called a halt. He knew that they were probably still on some clan’s territory, but he decided that, because so few hunting parties were on the horizon, they were probably in a region between two other clans. Normally, this would have been a poor place to stop; if they had had to depend on foraging to the east and west, there would have been less and less food to find the further away the hunters went. But with the ripe seeds and the knowledge of how to take the sky away from them to make them grow, the clan could stay in one place, always at full strength with all of its warriors home tending the growing plants, and going out only for game to vary their diet and to show off their prowess.

The clan settled in with relief, and a crew was sent off to a nearby cliff to get building stones for the stockades, pod bins, and the all important egg pens.

As Speckled-Egg approached the cliff with the quarry crew, the youngster grew frightened. Never before had he been so close to anything so tall. It seemed that it was going to fall directly down on him, but he certainly was not going to let his fright show on his first time with a hunting party.

“It sure is tall,” he remarked calmly.

“Sure is,” said Flow-Hunter. Her tread rumbled teasingly. “Looks as if it is going to fall right on top of you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but it has not fallen before, so I guess it won’t now,” Speckled-Egg said confidently.

“But it will when we get through with it,” said Flow-Hunter. Then turning serious she said, “Which end looks closer?”

The top of the cliff sloped downward toward the east. The party took off in that direction, carrying their broken shards of dragon crystal and one unbroken, round-tipped whole dragon crystal that they had found when digging holes for the seeds. They soon came to the end of the vertical fault plane and began the long, slow, arduous climb up the slope.

“It’s like traveling in the hard direction, but worse,” complained Speckled-Egg. “When you stop moving in the hard direction, you can rest. But when you are climbing up, you might as well not stop to rest. When you do, you still have to hold on to keep from flowing back down.”

Flow-Hunter showed him her trick of waiting until she came across a small stone before stopping to rest, and then stretching her body out upwards from the stone. With the stone preventing her from flowing downward, and the hard directions holding her in from the side, she could almost relax and enjoy her food-pod in comfort. It was a tricky technique, and Speckled-Egg found his edges flowing around the stone more than once, but soon he was as accomplished a climber as any of them.

Although they had gone east for only one turn before reaching the end of the fault, it took them many turns and much food to struggle up the sloping hill in the intense gravity and make it back to the top of the cliff. Flow-Hunter formed a strong crystallium core in one of her eye-stubs, held the eye up as high as she could, then moved slowly toward the edge.

“I can see the clan camp off in the distance. This is the right place,” she said. She stood still and looked for a long time.

“What is the matter?” asked Speckled-Egg.

“Just looking,” she said. “Everything looks very funny when you can look down on it. Come and see.”

The last thing Speckled-Egg wanted to do was go near the edge, but he did, one of his eyes held high in imitation of Flow-Hunter. Together they moved forward until they could see the members of the hunting party they had left at the bottom of the cliff.

“They are so big around!” exclaimed Speckled-Egg, “And so funny looking. You can see all the lumps on their topsides.”

“You would look just as big and lumpy yourself if you could see yourself from the top instead of only from the side,” said Flow-Hunter. “You are right about the lumps though; they are funny looking. I bet that big reddish yellow lump in the middle of Double-Seed is an egg that is about ready to be dropped.”

She pushed her way back from the edge. “Come on, we have a lot of hard work to do.”

The climbers started to work. The first thing they did was to push the large, whole dragon crystal to the edge and let it fall off. The nearly unbreakable, super-hard crystal became invisible and reappeared at the bottom, splintered into a dozen sharp shards. The waiting group at the bottom rode out the shock and then moved quickly forward to retrieve the now valuable hunting knives and digging tools.

When the dragon crystal shards had been removed, the climbers at the top moved forward to the edge and used their digging tools to gouge a long line in the top of the cliff. The gouge line was back from the edge a distance equal to the height of the stones that they could easily carry. They spread apart the fibers in the crust until there was a long, deep crack, held in place by the connections at either end of the long strip. They then went to the west end of the strip, where the nap of the crust would give them a better grip, and formed a chain with their bodies. Flow-Hunter stretched out as far as she could with the sharpest crystal shard held in front of her in a long manipulator. She concentrated for a moment and soon several short manipulators were arrayed at her back edge. Speckled-Egg and Dusty-Crust flowed above and below her and also formed manipulators to grasp hers. The rest grasped them and spread themselves out as flat as possible to form an anchor.

“Everyone ready?” asked Flow-Hunter. She then started sawing away at the end of the slit, only this time cutting across the fibers in the crust. It was slow hard work, for the fibers were the source of the real strength of the crustal material. They switched places; to Speckled-Egg’s horror, it was his turn to be sawing away when the weight of the long section of crust overcame the strength of the remaining fibers and the face of the cliff came away in a long curling rip that extended the slit in the top surface down to the base.

The top surface of the cliff, relieved of some of its stress, rebounded with a shock wave. For the first (and he hoped only) time in his life, Speckled-Egg’s tread was not solidly in contact with the crust. He had no time to be afraid before the crust came up to meet him with a bruising smash. They all lay quietly for a moment and then pounded each other with triumph as they backed away from the crumbling edge.

They hurried back down the way they had come, pausing only now and then for a little food. They all felt like having a little fun, too, but that had to wait (except for friendly pats and treadings) until they got to the end of the cliff, where the crust was flat. By the time they had returned to the bottom of the cliff with the jumble of stones at its base, Speckled-Egg was a full-fledged hunter, having not only been a hero by being at the point when the danger was greatest, but having been given a hero’s reward and his initiation into manhood by Flow-Hunter herself.

Having felt the successful conclusion of the quarrying expedition come rumbling in through the crust, Broken-Petal had sent out an additional work crew to help drag the stones back to camp. Soon the place began to look like home again. A pod bin was the first task, so that everyone could drop his load of pods without having to worry that the constant winds would roll them away. The Old Ones were most grateful for the pod bin, for they had been tied down holding onto most of the food store while the younger ones had been working. Now they could move around and get to the more important (and pleasurable) task of turning eggs and raising hatchlings.

Next came the egg-pen, and again another great load was taken off the clan as all the females could drop the eggs they had been hauling around since they had left the old home and started on their exodus.

For many, many turns the clan grew and prospered in their new home.

15:48:10 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

Pierre Carnot Niven, his long, straight hair in a halo about his head, worked away at the console keyboard, overlaying one multicolored computer display on another. His soft brown eyes peered at a complicated pattern of lava flows that would have hopelessly confused anyone but him. Pierre set the computer to calculating the load on the crust from the new lava flows. It was a complicated problem; while the computer was working, he floated out from in front of his console and went over to see what Jean was doing.

Jean was checking the plots showing the drift of the smoke from the volcano through the atmosphere, and correlating it with the magnetic field measurements and the Coriolis forces caused by the high spin speed of the rotating star. She was developing a computer model for the magnetic field structure so she could produce a detailed theory for the iron-vapor atmosphere and how it interacted with the conflicting forces of gravity, magnetism, and spin of the star.

Pierre floated nearer and watched over Jean’s shoulder as she had the computer rotate the image of the star slowly on the screen. The hot smoke patterns were in white, the magnetic field lines in blue, and the Coriolis and gravity forces in green.

“It looks like the weather patterns on the Earth,” Pierre commented, his fingertips resting on her shoulder to help him keep station.

“Yes,” Jean said. “The smoke travels mostly east-west from the volcano because it is easier for it to travel along the magnetic field lines than across them. But when the smoke reaches the magnetic poles, the easy direction is into the ground, so the smoke piles up into a big crescent with the volcano in the middle. There is some leakage at the poles though.”

“Why is the leakage staying in a belt north of the equator?” asked Pierre, “I can understand that the smoke leakage from the east pole would stay in the north spin hemisphere since it is above the spin equator, but why doesn’t the smoke leaking from the west pole contaminate the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere?”

Jean spoke toward the console, “West pole view!”

They watched as the image rotated to the view over the west pole and stopped. Jean pointed to the screen, “It happens that one of the stronger sub-poles of the chaotic west polar region happens to lie along the same magnetic longitude as the volcano, and it also happens to be above the spin equator. That sub-pole has blocked off that longitude, keeping all the smoke trapped in the northern hemisphere. The leakage from the west pole, combined with the leakage from the east pole, forms the intense smoke belt just north of the spin equator.”

16:45:24 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

Smoky-Sky looked up and worried. The sky was now nearly always full of smoke. When it was time to name him shortly after he had left the egg, the Old Ones in charge of the hatching pens had thought a smoky sky so unusual that they had given him that name. Now—many, many turns later—here he was, Leader of the Clan, and haunted by his own name.

The crops from the petal plants had been getting worse and worse. The nearly constant cloud cover overhead seemed to suffocate the plants. It was time to move. But could they go far enough to escape the ever-present smoke?

“I had better move slowly,” Smoky-Sky said to himself. “No use running from a Flow Slow right into the maw of a Swift.”

He moved to the clear place between the stockades and the field of plants and t’trumed a call for the clan to gather. Soon all but the guards and the hatchlings were arranged in arcs to the east and west of him.

Smoky-Sky spoke. “The times are not good. We will have to move where the sky is not so smoky and the petal plants can grow. It will be a long journey, so we must have much food to carry. Blue-Flow, you are to take a hunting party and look for a better place for us. I think it will be far from here, so take as many pods as you can carry, for you will not be back for many turns. Remember the words of our ancient Aged Ones—‘Go in a direction others do not go.’”

Blue-Flow moved off to one side, followed by a crowd of younger warriors eager for adventure. He picked a small group and led them off to the pod bin to load up on food. Smoky-Sky watched, musing, “He will be a good leader. He has picked the ones with stamina, even if they are not the best hunters. More importantly, since it will be a long journey, he has an equal number of both sexes.”

Smoky-Sky turned to the crowd and said, “I don’t know how many turns it will be before the hunting party comes back, but when they do, I want the pod bin filled to the walls. The petal plants are not growing many pods, so we will just have to plant more of them.” Amid a shuffle of groans, Smoky-Sky pushed his way to the tool bin, picked up a sharp shard of dragon crystal, and set off to the field to start poking holes in the hard crust, knowing that the best way to get people working on a long hard task was for the leader to start in first.

Blue-Flow looked over his group. They were all well bulked out with pods tucked away in their storage pouches. “Let’s go,” he said, and started to push his way southward in the hard direction, the others snuggled up to him in single file. After a turn of hard travel, they finally passed over the horizon and were on their own.

For many, many turns the hunting party moved along, the sky overhead still smoky. Finally, Shaking-Crust remarked during a pod break, “I think that the smoke is even worse here than back at home.”

They could not all agree then, but after a few more turns of travel it was very obvious to all of them that conditions were worse here. The smoke filled the sky, and the crust was covered with sickly red-yellow ash that chilled their treads as they flowed over it. There was some talk of going back, but Blue-Flow would have none of that. This was his first trial as a leader of a hunting party and he would not come back with pods still pouched in his body.

Blue-Flow drove them on, always moving in the hard direction. The difficult grind of pushing ahead, with the poor grip that the ashes gave to their treads, took all the fun out of the expedition. But something else was happening that added to their discomfort—they were becoming lost!

It was not for many turns that one of them mentioned what they had all been feeling. “This land bothers me,” said Final-Pod. “I feel that I am lost all the time. Yet I know right where I am. I can see the cliff over there that we passed a few turns ago, so logically I know that I could make my way right back to the clan with no problem, just by going in the hard direction in the opposite way we have been going—but I still feel lost.”

They all agreed. Logically they knew they were not lost—but they definitely felt as if they were.

“Let us move on,” Blue-Flow said, pushing off again. But the further they went, the worse they felt and the darker the sky became. Then the pods began to run low.

At the next break Shaking-Crust spoke up for all of them, “I think we should turn back, Blue-Flow. The land and the sky just get worse and worse the further we go. Perhaps the instructions of the ancient Aged Ones are no longer correct.”

Blue-Flow countered, “If we tell the clan to go back in the direction that we came from, they will just get closer to the volcano. If we have them go east or west, we know they will run into the other clans that are fleeing the volcano. If they stay where they are, the smoke will kill the petal plants and we will all starve. Our only hope is in this direction. We must keep going as long as we can.”

Shaking-Crust said, “You may go on if you like. I’m going back.”

Blue-Flow had been expecting something like this for a long time and was ready for it, but he had never expected rebellion from his favorite playmate. Without warning, he was on top of her, drubbing her brain-knot soundly with his tread and knocking her out before she had a chance to move. Still on top of the unconscious body, he whispered, “Does anyone else want to challenge me?”

No one moved as he flowed off Shaking-Crust, who was starting to recover from her sonically induced shock. As her senses cleared, she heard Blue-Flow talking.

“I don’t think you realize how serious things are. The volcano is poisoning all the Crust that it can reach. The only hope for the clan is for us to find a place where we can survive. If we do not, the clan will die, the hatchlings first.” This last was a telling blow. For although the cheela were not attached to a specific hatchling, and no female could even remember which egg she had put into the hatchery unless it had some distinctive marking, they were all very attached to the little hatchlings, who lived a spoiled life until they were old enough to go to work. The thought of hatchlings dying was enough to eliminate any thought of quitting.

Many turns later Blue-Flow was really worried. They were way past their food supply limit. It would be a weak and thin party of cheela that came back to the clan—if they made it back. The feeling of being lost had become worse. At the next break he was almost ready to quit. But first he decided to have a better look ahead. He took the longest dragon crystal spear that they had and poked its sharp end down into the crust. It stood far up into the sky, many times higher than he could ever lift an eye on one of his own flimsy eye-stubs. When the others saw what he was doing, they gathered in a circle around him and applied pressure on his edges. He formed a thick pseudopod with one of his eye-stubs at the end and flowed it up along the shaft of the dragon crystal spear until his eye was perched on top of the spear. The sky looked smoky right to the horizon…

“I see a star!” he shouted, and his pseudopod flowed back down so quickly that they were all rippled by the energy regained from its fall. “The sky is still smoky, but it must be thinner because I can see a star through it. The star was right on the horizon.”

Shaking-Crust insisted on seeing it, too; after much effort, she soon had one eye perched on top of the spear. The star was almost exactly in the hard direction, and right on the horizon. Shaking-Crust was almost positive that it was brighter than any star she had ever seen, but without any other stars visible to compare it with, she was not sure.

Great-Crack and some of the others wanted a look too, but Blue-Flow stopped the sight-seeing. “It takes as much energy to put an eye on top of the spear as it does to travel a few turns where we can all see it from eye level. Let’s get moving!”

With something to aim for, spirit returned to the column; for the first time in many turns, they made good time over the ashen land. Soon the star appeared above the horizon, and as it did, the feeling of being lost began to decrease. By silent agreement, the rest breaks were short and they pushed on.

Soon Blue-Flow noticed that there were short breaks in the intense cover of smoke. After a few more turns of travel, the ashes on the crust stopped being a hindrance to travel. Soon other stars were visible, strange ones that they had never seen before. But the strangest one of all was the intensely bright reddish yellow one that hung motionless in the southern sky from turn to turn, while all the others whirled about it like a cloud of minor deities paying homage to a god.

It was an awe-inspiring experience for them all as they moved forward out of the smoky hell in back of them into a new land, free from smoke and ash, and with untouched petal plants growing in delicious profusion all about them. There were plenty of game signs, and soon they were all enjoying the meat of a Slink, interspersed with delicious, perfectly ripe pods.

“There are plenty of game signs, but no sign of a single other cheela,” said Shaking-Crust. “The game was not particularly afraid of us. It is as if they had never been hunted before.”

“This place sounds like an Old One’s stories of heaven,” Great-Crack said.

“I guess we should call it Heaven,” Blue-Flow agreed. “Bright’s Heaven. For Bright, the God Star, rules over it all, and its bright glare keeps the smoke from coming over the horizon. Let us load up with food and head back over the ‘lost’ region to tell the clan the good news. We have been gone so long, they probably think we are dead.”

16:45:34 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

Pierre turned from the display on his console and called over to Jean, who was operating the Lyman-alpha telescope at another console. “I was trying to think if the weather would be any different on Earth if the magnetic field of the Earth were east-west instead of nearly north-south.”

“No,” Jean said. “The Earth’s magnetic field is too weak to affect the atmosphere on Earth as it does here.”

Pierre laughed, and Jean looked at him quizzically. “I just realized that the only real effect of an east-west magnetic field on Earth would be on homing pigeons. Homing pigeons use a combination of the earth’s north-south magnetic field and the east-west Coriolis spin forces for homing. They would feel completely lost if the magnetic field lines and the Coriolis force lines were in the same direction—as they are along the spin equator here. That would be even worse than the fact that the directional sense of a homing pigeon gets turned around when the pigeon is released in the southern hemisphere after being trained in the northern hemisphere.”

Pierre turned back and spoke at the console:

“Store that sequence!

“Continue monitoring volcanic lava flow pattern on Priority Two basis!”

He turned to Jean, “Well, the main console is all yours. I’m going to get some food, write a little, then head for bed. See you next shift.”

Jean pulled herself into the main console seat, quickly checked all the settings, and carefully buckled herself in. “What are you writing now?”

Pierre stopped himself at the hole in the deck and replied, “It’s a physics text for the ten-to-fourteen age bracket. According to the communication flashes from the publisher, I made such a hit writing scan-books about science and space for the eight-to-twelve age group on the way out to Dragon’s Egg that I actually have fan clubs. Do you realize that when I get back from this trip two years from now I am going to be getting more in royalties from children’s books than I will in salary for being a space scientist?”

“Well, none of us are jealous—much!” Jean said. “We all realize that every kid you make enthusiastic about space science is going to be a voting taxpayer after we return, and we should come back to Dragon’s Egg with a follow-up expedition before it leaves the Solar System.”

“I’m sure the World Space Administration agrees with you. They even gave my publisher a special rate on the cost of transmitting my manuscripts back.” He turned and pushed himself down the passageway.

16:45:35 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

Great-Crack was a pack rat. Although one of the better hunters in the clan, with two Flow Slow kills to her credit, she was the constant butt of jokes from her hunting mates because of her habit of picking up and carrying anything she found that looked interesting—and because of her highly developed sense of curiosity, practically everything looked interesting to her.

When it came time for the hunting party to load up with ripe pods for the long journey back to the clan, Great-Crack had to unpouch her trinkets so she could load up her pouches with pods. She went over to a shallow depression in the crust; amid ribald calls of “What are you doing? Laying three eggs at once?”, followed by “No, just one, but it’s the size of a Flow Slow!”, she dumped her precious pile of odds and ends, with the heavier ones around the pile in a low wall that she hoped would protect them from the constant winds. With luck, she would be able to pick them up again when they returned with the clan.

With her bulk reduced to fighting trim, Great-Crack flowed off the pile. Paying no attention to the jokes, she went off with the others as they moved through the petal plants, carefully picking off the best of the pods and storing them inside their body pouches until the whole hunting party was loaded to capacity.

“Are you sure that bulk is all pods, Great-Crack?” chided Shaking-Crust. “You didn’t go back for a few trinkets, did you?”

Great-Crack was in the midst of rippling out a vicious whisper about being a better fighter when loaded with pods than Shaking-Crust was in fighting trim, and would she like to have her prove it… when Blue-Flow interrupted with a loud t’trum on the crust.

“You two stop that!” he said. Then his eyes looked around to all of them and he called, “It’s time to go back!” Blue-Flow pushed his bulk in the hard direction, while the rest of them rapidly formed a single file and pushed off behind him.

Suddenly Blue-Flow stopped. “Wait!” he said in amazement. “We’re going in the wrong direction!”

They all looked up from their crouched, streamlined positions in back of him and looked ahead. There was the benevolent beam of Bright, directly ahead. They stopped, confused. They had come into Bright’s Heaven far enough that they had stopped having the lost feeling that they had experienced earlier under the smoke. Being good hunters, they knew instinctively where they were and in which direction to go. But their instincts were leading them directly toward Bright, while they knew from logic that the way back to the clan was in the opposite direction.

“I guess we will have to forget our where-sense when it comes to traveling in this land,” Blue-Flow said. He flowed to the back of the column and pushed off again, this time directly away from Bright.

The group soon reached the edge of Bright’s Heaven. They all cast longing looks behind with a few of their eyes as Bright dipped below the horizon and their sense of being lost returned. Blue-Flow kept the break periods short since they were all in good shape and well fed, and they made it quickly back across the “feeling lost” territory with its intense smoky sky flowing to the west.

Their sense of direction slowly returned, and Blue-Flow felt much better now that his instincts finally agreed with his logic. They were following their previous track very closely, and Blue-Flow was disturbed that he could read their spoor. They must have been extremely discouraged to have been so careless. Well—they were on their way back now, and that spoor of many turns ago would just lead any trackers astray if they kept their present track clean. When it came his turn at the rear of the column, he looked back and was pleased with the fact, that except for a quickly fading whitish track from the heat of their bodies warming the crust, he could see almost no evidence of their passage.

At the next break, most of them had another pod to eat. As was her usual custom, Great-Crack kept all the seeds from the pod in case the clan needed more. Blue-Flow noticed that she had only added a pod skin to the burial pit and came over to talk to her.

“You are a good hunter and a hard fighter, Great-Crack, so I have never complained about your bulk. But we are now on a very serious mission and everything that slows us down hurts the chances for the survival of the whole clan. I want you to put all the seeds and anything else you have picked up into the burial pit and stop collecting things until we have the whole clan back to Bright’s Heaven.”

“But the seeds are valuable!” she protested.

“The clan will have no need for seeds to plant when they are on the move to Bright’s Heaven, and there will be plenty of pods and seeds when we bring them there,” he replied.

She could only agree with him, and he stood by watching, first with amusement, then with amazement, as a steady flow of seeds, pebbles, worthless dragon crystal shards, and Flow Slow nodes filled the burial pit. He did not know that Great-Crack held back something. In each one of the food pods from Bright’s Heaven, the bottom seed in the clump had an unusual twelve-pointed cluster shape, instead of the normal oval shape. Great-Crack’s curiosity had been aroused by the unusual shape and she had looked carefully at each pod she had opened. Every pod had a cluster-shaped seed, and she was especially careful to keep each one. She wanted to plant them to see if the petal plant that grew from them would be different in shape than the ones that grew from the oval seeds. When she dumped her store of treasures, she withheld the cluster seeds.

“They are so small, they won’t slow me down,” she said smugly to herself. “Besides he will never notice, now that I have an egg growing.” Covering up the burial pit carefully to leave no trace of its presence, she returned to join the others.

After many, many turns the hunting party began to enter familiar territory. They took no breaks now, but pushed steadily onward. As they approached the home of the clan, they felt disturbing tremors under their treads. There were loud voices booming through the crust and much rapid movement of treads. Some of the voices were in a strange accent.

The clan was under attack! Blue-Flow moved ahead more rapidly. Thinning way down, he stopped just over the horizon from the camp. He quickly reinforced an eye-stub and raised one eye up to evaluate the situation.

A large war party from another clan was attacking the petal plant field. He could see movement between the rows as the war party drove the guards down the rows, so that others could strip the pods from the plants at the ends of the rows. There was another group that kept up feinting attacks on the pod bins and stockades on the other side of the camp, spreading the clan guard warriors thin. There seemed to be too few guards, and Blue-Flow could not see Smoky-Sky anywhere. There were no enemy warriors on their side of the field, so the plan of attack was obvious. Blue-Flow dropped his eye and whispered the situation to his group.

“The petal plant fields are under attack by a large war party that has control over the eastern half. We will go east from here, staying below the horizon, cross over in the hard direction until we are in back of them, then come down at them from the east and trap them in between.” As he spoke, pods and digging tools dropped out of pouches into a disorganized pile on the crust. Rugged fighting manipulators sprang from their bodies and pulled sharp shards of dragon crystal from their weapons pouches. Although Great-Crack tried to hide them, Blue-Flow saw with disgust the small pile of funny pod seeds. He resolved to give her a drubbing once the battle was over.

With their killing spears of shattered dragon crystal at the ready, the hunting party moved east, going many times faster than their previous rate of movement in the hard direction. Once they had moved far enough east to be over the horizon in that direction, Blue-Flow led them across in the hard direction until they were in back of the attacking party.

Putting his warriors in a line, each with one or more sharp spikes sticking out from strong manipulators firmly imbedded in their thickened front ends, he whispered to them all. “They do not know we are attacking, so move as quietly as you can. If we can surprise them, we will catch them with their brain-knots in our direction.”

They moved ahead smoothly, keeping a low profile as they came over the horizon. They flowed around a pile of pods that had been stacked for pickup.

Blue-Flow whispered, “We’re in luck. The pickers have gone down to fight and push the guards further back.”

They each chose a row and with their quarry busily engaged in a battle midway down the row, they were able to attack almost without warning.

It was hard to kill a cheela. If hit with something hard, the fluid body just retreated from the blow with the flexible skin absorbing the impact. If the something hard was very sharp, like the shattered end of a dragon crystal, it could poke a hole through the skin, and if that was big enough a hole, some of the glowing fluid inside would leak out before the automatic protection systems could close the wound. If an eye that was so rash as to be out on a stub could be caught, a sharp-edged shard might slice off the eye-stub with an accompanying shock of pain but only a partial loss of sight. After all, if one or two of the normal complement of twelve eyes were lost, the cheela could easily adjust the position of the remainder to have nearly complete vision.

The only really vulnerable part of a cheela was the brain-knot. It could be anywhere inside the skin, but it was a good bet that, if the cheela was fighting someone on one side, the brain-knot would be well over on the other side, far away from any sharp spears of dragon crystal. Blue-Flow was counting on this instinctive behavior as he rushed his enemy target from behind and flowed up onto her topside. He felt the telltale knot under his tread and shocked it into unconsciousness with a focused ripple from his underside, then neatly speared it three times as his momentum carried him up and over his now-dead foe.

“Blue-Flow!” shouted Weary-Tread, lowering the point of her spear. “Where did you come from?”

Blue-Flow surveyed the oozing hide of his old friend and replied, “We just got back and we have found a new home for the clan. But come, follow me, we have fighting to do.”

Blue-Flow moved down the row of plants until he could see a sparring trio of warriors between the plants. Warm-Wind and Great-Crack had an enemy warrior between them. The warrior had parried Great-Crack’s initial rush and was now fending them both off as he attempted to escape between the rows. In a rumble of despair he saw the long shard in Blue-Flow’s grasp as Blue-Flow blocked the way, sending his spear directly into the center of the enemy.

“Another brain kill!” Blue-Flow gloated as the foe collapsed into a spreading disk that filled the space between the plants.

He quickly whispered to Great-Crack and Warm-Wind, pointing with a ripple of his eye-stubs, “You two go that way and we will go this way.” Blue-Flow turned and, with Weary-Tread covering his trail, went down the row to find more of the foe.

With the return of the hunting party, the tide of battle turned, and soon the enemy war party had retreated, without their stolen pods, and with many of their number gone.

The clean-up work began. The stolen pods were stored in the pod bin along with the ripe pods that the hunting party had brought back with them. The many dead, among them Fuzzy-Crust and Star-Rise of the clan, were sliced open to let the fluid seep into the crust, and then the meat was dried and stored.

The news that the clan had for the hunting party was not good. They had been under almost constant attack by hungry war parties ever since the group had left. Smoky-Sky had died long ago in a battle to protect the fields and Weary-Tread was now Leader of the Clan. When Blue-Flow heard this news, he turned and looked at Weary-Tread, whose scarred hide was still oozing glowing, yellow-white fluid from some serious spear wounds.

“Now is the best time to do this,” Blue-Flow thought. “The clan needs a strong Leader for the journey to Bright’s Heaven.” He turned, raised his spear and issued the formal challenge to Weary-Tread.

“Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

There was a long pause as Weary-Tread evaluated her chances. She could still be a good Leader and did not want to be relegated to the status of an Old One, but never had she felt so like the dreary name she had been stuck with as a hatchling.

“You are, Blue-Flow,” she replied, and winced as the ceremonial slash from Blue-Flow’s spear added another small wound to her punctured hide.

Blue-Flow turned and said to them all, “I am Leader of the Clan. Does anyone challenge me?” There was no reply, and, with the formal ceremony over, his tone changed as he took command.

“I have good news. I have found a new land for us. A clean land with no smoke. A good land with no enemies, with much game and with many, many petal plants that have never been picked. It is a long distance away in the hard direction and the trail will be harsh and difficult. But we will go, for a new God Star and His Heaven—Bright’s Heaven—waits for us!”

For the next few turns, Blue-Flow had everyone who was not out hunting meat busy in the fields picking the edible pods and storing them in the pod bin. He was outside the bin with Great-Crack, looking with satisfaction at the pods spilling out of the opening.

“It is enough,” he said. “We will leave when the hunters return.”

“But is it enough?” Great-Crack wondered. “We needed to eat many, many pods to get from Bright’s Heaven back to the clan. There are many in the clan and they will travel much more slowly than a hunting party.”

“There are many, many pods, Great-Crack. There must be enough there to feed all the clan, for I have never seen so many pods before.” Blue-Flow went off to greet a returning hunting party.

Great-Crack stared at the flowing pile of pods. “There are many pods,” she thought. “But are there enough?”

She played internally with her pouch full of cluster-shaped seeds, which she had retrieved after the battle, and thought back over the many pods she herself had eaten while crossing the barren land between here and Bright’s Heaven. Many pods would be needed, for she had taken the cluster-shaped seed from each one as she had eaten it, and there were many, many of those seeds in her storage pouch.

Then, in a flash of inspiration, one of the greatest mathematical minds ever hatched in the past or future history of the cheela made a great leap of abstract thought.

“I took one seed from every pod that I ate,” Great-Crack said to herself. “So I have as many seeds as pods.”

Her mind faltered for a moment. “But seeds are not pods!”

It recovered, “But there are as many seeds as there were pods, so the number is the same.”

She laid the seeds out in a row that stretched all along the wall of the pod bin. There were many of them. She then took out pods and put one next to each seed until she had a row of pods.

“There,” she said. “I will need that many pods to get to Bright’s Heaven.” She put the pods to one side in a pile. She took out more pods and laid them next to the seeds until she had another row of pods.

“Blue-Flow will need these pods to travel to Bright’s Heaven,” she said as she gathered the pods up again and put them in another pile.

Great-Crack soon had pile after pile of pods stacked inside and outside the pod bin as she set aside rations for each of the clan members. She was only halfway through the names of the clan members when she ran out of pods. There was not enough food!

Great-Crack hurried off and brought Blue-Flow back to the pod bin to explain what she had done. She got nowhere.

“Yes, I see the piles of pods, but how do you know that each person will need that many?

“Yes, I see that when you line up the pods next to the seeds that the line of pods is as long as the line of seeds, but what do seeds have to do with pods?

“Yes, I understand that you saved one seed from each pod as you ate it on the way back from Bright’s Heaven, but what does that have to do with feeding the clan? You ate all those pods and there is nothing left but these deformed seeds.

“No, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the seeds tell you how many pods each one of us will need. Seeds are not pods.”

Great-Crack tried in many ways to get Blue-Flow to make the jump in abstract thought that now came so naturally to her, but he could not do it. Finally, in frustration, he lost his temper and stamped, “There are plenty of pods. Look at them all. We will go now, for Bright’s Heaven is waiting.”

Great-Crack flowed to block his way. “We cannot go!” she said, “We will starve before we get there! The seeds tell the truth!”

“Seeds are not pods,” he retorted, “and I have been meaning to tromp you for keeping those seeds after I told you to leave them on the trail.”

Her reply brought him up short. “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

She moved toward him while he backed out of the pod bin. “No use endangering the pods,” he thought. “We are both in good shape and this is going to be a long fight. I wonder why she is challenging me now?”

The clan gathered around them as they moved together into a clear place between the stockades. Blue-Flow watched with a combination of fear and amusement as his opponent emptied her pouches of tools and trinkets, formed a dueling manipulator, and raised her spear.

“Blue-Flow is in good shape,” Great-Crack thought as she made a neat pile of her precious “unusual things.” “I will need every advantage I can get to beat him. However, he must not be allowed to win—for he will lead the clan into sure starvation!”

She finally turned, raised her spear and repeated her challenge, “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?” She paused—then punctuated the challenge by ejecting her half-formed egg sac from the protection of her body onto the crust between them. The clan looked in shock at the precious, tiny eggling wriggling out the last of its life among the glowing remains of its ruptured egg-sac.

Blue-Flow alternated his horrified eyes between the cooling eggling and the stern visage of Great-Crack. “She is really determined to win. Could it be that she is right, and there are not enough pods?” He shifted his spear. “No matter—things have gone too far to stop now.”

Blue-Flow returned the formal reply, “I am—Hatchling!” He lunged at her.

It was not a pretty fight. Both were encumbered by the rule that they had to maintain control of their spears to keep from automatically losing, but were not allowed to use the points for cutting until the final ceremonial slash of the loser by the winner. They wallowed, struck at each other’s eye-stubs with the sides of their spears, trod one another’s edges, tried to wrest the spear from the other’s grasp, and slapped each other with muscular pseudopods in an attempt to deliver a knockout shock to the brain-knot.

The usually fluidless battle for Leadership ended in a shocking way when Great-Crack found Blue-Flow’s spear pointing in an opportune direction and deliberately impaled herself on it, taking it into her body. No longer in control of his spear, Blue-Flow had lost. He shook the glowing gout of Great-Crack’s fluid off his dueling manipulator onto the crust as she repeated her challenge. “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

“You are, Great-Crack,” Blue-Flow replied.

Great-Crack maneuvered her body and Blue-Flow watched, horrified, as his sharp spear broke out of the rapidly healing wound in Great-Crack’s side. The spear reached over to his surface and gave him the ceremonial cut, the fluids from the two bodies mixing together as they dripped off the spear point onto the crust.

Although she had suffered a significant wound, the injury would only slow an excellent fighter like Great-Crack, and when she repeated the challenge, no one had the courage to reply.

Great-Crack then told the gathered clan, “We will go to Bright’s Heaven, but not now. We do not have enough food to survive the trek across the bad lands between here and Bright’s Heaven. We must grow more pods. Go back to the fields and plant many more seeds. We will go after the next harvest.”

The clan turned to their work, their disappointment at the delay in reaching Bright’s Heaven countered by their natural reluctance to leave their home. Within a few turns, Great-Crack had mended, and she spent the time making sure not only that the clan planted enough seeds, but that she wouldn’t lose the services of Blue-Flow, one of the best warriors of the clan. At every opportunity she patted and teased him. In a few turns, he got over his sulk at losing, gave in to the teasing, and they enjoyed a romp together. Soon she felt a new egg growing inside her to replace the one she had sacrificed.

Great-Crack planted a few of the funny cluster seeds in one spot and watched the plants with interest, but to her great disappointment the plants, pods, and seeds inside were just like the plants grown from the oval seeds from Bright’s Heaven. She could never figure out why.

While the crops grew, Great-Crack played with mathematics. In the same manner as she had learned to identify pods with seeds, she now had a collection of pebbles, one for each member of the clan.

With the new crop coming in, a new pod bin had to be constructed. Great-Crack decided that it was about time to check to see if there were enough pods for the clan. She did not look forward to hauling all those pods out of the bins, lining them up against the collection of seeds that she had accumulated on her trek back from Bright’s Heaven, then putting them in stacks, and back into the bins again.

Then she made another conceptual breakthrough.

“Why do I have to move pods around?” she thought. “I can make a collection of seeds, one for each pod in the bin. Once that is done, then it is much easier to move seeds than pods.”

Soon the pod bin had a smaller bin outside the opening containing a pile of seeds, one for each pod in the bin. Monitoring the bin was the cheek’s first accountant, an Old One assigned to the task of adding a seed to the seed bin for each pod put into the pod bin, and taking one seed out for every pod eaten.

As the harvest proceeded, even the number of seeds grew to overflow their bin. Great-Crack looked at the seed bin and was both pleased and appalled at the number. Now that she had learned to use her mathematics to make her job easy, she kept trying to think of other ways to make it even easier. She mused as she pushed the seeds around in stacks. She then noticed that since the seeds were long ovals, they had a tendency to form into clumps. She found that if she arranged them so that their sides just touched, they formed a pretty cluster. Although there were too many to count, there was always the same number if they were all pushed together so that all the sides just touched. It was a pretty pattern, just like the cluster pattern of the bottom seed of the pods from Bright’s Heaven. She put one of the cluster seeds next to the collection of seeds. They looked identical. Then the now familiar habit of isomorphic identification struck again.

“If a cluster seed looks like this small clump of seeds,” she wondered, “why don’t I just save a stack of cluster seeds, each one representing a whole clump of oval seeds?”

Soon she had the seed bin replaced with a smaller one containing a large number of cluster seeds and a few odd oval seeds left over. That bothered her a little, having some pods represented by cluster seeds and some by oval seeds, but it helped that the cluster seeds were a little bigger than the oval ones. Her real problem came with her accountant, who didn’t understand at all.

“The old way was very simple, Great-Crack,” the Old One said. “One seed in the seed bin for one pod in the pod bin. But this does not make sense. How can one seed, even a cluster seed, mean many pods?”

Great-Crack tried hard to explain, and ran into the phenomenon that is often encountered by one trying to teach someone something—the teacher often learns something new herself. Great-Crack learned to count past three.

“Now look, Old One, I will go through it carefully. Here is one pod, and one oval seed. Here is another pod next to the first pod, and another oval seed next to the first seed. That’s two—and now three.” Great-Crack moved the third pod and seed into place, then reached for another set.

“Now this many is…” Great-Crack fumbled for the nonexistent word. “…the same number of ways that you can travel: east, west, and the two hard directions.” She continued adding sets. “And this many is the same as the number of fangs on a Swift. And this many is the number of petals in a petal plant…”

She went on. “And this…” she said as she completed the pattern, “is the number of bumps on the cluster seed. It is as many as your eyes.”

The accountant dipped each of his dozen eyes, one after the other, as he carefully touched each of the seeds in turn with a delicate tendril. “So it is,” he said, “That will make it easy to count them.”

The lesson really didn’t sink in the first time, but after many repetitions even the accountant was using one, two, three, travel, swift, petal… all the way up to a dozen, as if he had learned it as a hatchling. But soon even that did not suffice, for there were so many pods from the harvest that Great-Crack had to invent the name “great” for a dozen dozen of pods. The accountant was very satisfied with her choice of word, for it obviously represented a “great” number of objects.

With the accountant’s help, Great-Crack checked the results of the harvest. First the pebbles, one for each member of the clan, were placed in a column, then across the bottom were placed cluster seeds, only now the unique collection of cluster seeds that Great-Crack had accumulated during her trip back (and which measured the distance to Bright’s Heaven in terms of pods) had been replaced by a concept—a number—a petal worth of cluster seeds plus a swift of oval ones.

The forecast was not good. As the cluster seeds grew out from each pebble, Great-Crack came to the end of the seeds before she came to the last of the pebbles. Great-Crack felt once again the frustration of being Leader of the Clan. The volcano had become more active and the sky grew steadily worse. With their vision of the sky clouded, the crops grew poorly and the harvests were meager. Their neighbors to the east and west were hungry and restless and there had been many more attacks on the fields of the clan. They must go. But there were not enough pods.

Great-Crack stared at the diagram in front of her. Although the pebbles and seeds were far removed from hungry bodies and nourishing pods, they still foretold of great anguish for all.

“I can strip the unripe pods from the plants before we leave, and they will get ripe enough to eat after a few turns,” she thought. “There are usually about two nearly ripe pods per plant.” She flowed over to her stockade, where she kept a pile of seeds that represented the number of plants in the fields. She soon returned with a collection of seeds that represented the unripe pods in the fields, but even when these were added to the diagram, there were not enough.

“Dragon’s Fire!” she swore to herself. She shrank from making the obvious decision, arguing with herself, “But there are so many pods, surely there are enough for all to go.” But the diagram, empty at the top and end, stared at her with its cold logic.

“A dozen plus two of the Aged Ones will have to stay,” she decided, and winced as the numbers changed to names in her mind.

She called the clan together. To solidify her control as well as to signify her seriousness, she started with a formal challenge.

“Who is Leader of the Clan?” she asked, and her tread felt and marked the chorus of replies.

“You are, Great-Crack!”

Her eyes singled out and stared at a few warriors who were slow in responding, but soon all had replied. She then said, “We leave for Bright’s Heaven at the next turn, but there are not enough pods to feed us all on the long journey, so some can not go.” She reeled off the names of the Aged Ones who were either too injured or too old to be of much value anymore, and they stoically accepted their fate, having grown weary of life after so many turns. It did not take long for the clan to strip the unripe pods from the plants and load up the eggs, hatchlings, pods, and their few tools and weapons into skin pouches tucked inside their bodies. The clan left their home, moving as always according to the rule of the ancient Old Aged Ones: “Go in a direction others do not go.”

The massive group of burdened cheela pushed slowly south. It was almost two turns before they could no longer see the stockades and fields that had once been their home. Shortly after they had gone over the horizon, one of the guards at the rear broke ranks, pushed his way ahead and came up to Great-Crack, who was part of the pathbreaker chevron at the front.

“One of the Aged Ones that we had left behind is following us,” the guard whispered to her.

Great-Crack left her place in the chevron, doing it carefully so that her replacement just in back of her could close the gap smoothly, thus preventing any loss in the progress she had made. She and the guard flowed quickly east and waited as the clan moved slowly by.

Great-Crack looked at the approaching Aged One. “It is West-Light, one of the most able of those who were left. Why is he coming?” They waited for almost a turn until the exhausted West-Light approached them.

“You heard my command, Aged One!” she stamped at him. “You cannot come with us. There is not enough food! Go back now or I will kill you instantly!”

West-Light stopped and emptied out his pouches. He had been carrying some half-ripe pods from the fields that must have become edible since the trek had started, along with some nearly ripe wild pods.

“We were worried that perhaps there might not be enough food to keep the hatchlings healthy,” West-Light said. “So we gathered what we could these past few turns before you got too far away for me to reach. Here—take good care of the hatchlings.”

Great-Crack whispered, “Thank you, West-Light.” She moved forward to pick up his meager offering. She then stared as the thinnest cheela she had ever seen slowly pushed his way back to their now abandoned camp.

“He has not eaten a thing since we left,” she thought to herself. She turned and went back to join the rest of the clan, still moving slowly southward towards Bright’s Heaven.

The trek was dreary. The progress was much slower than Great-Crack had counted on, and she felt the pouch of seeds that represented the remaining food get smaller and smaller after every break. The quality of the food became worse as they ate all the ripe pods and started on the ones that had only partially ripened in their pouches. The littlest hatchlings didn’t want to eat these and were constantly sick. Great-Crack sent out hunting parties both east and west, but often they came back with neither pods nor meat. Great-Crack grew desperate. They were losing a hatchling every few turns; for the first time in ages, some of the clan’s eggs refused to hatch and had to be left after it became evident that the eggling inside was dead.

“All the clan is in poor shape,” Great-Crack said to herself as she worked in the rear, constantly closing gaps that a youngster or an Old One had let fall into the body of the traveling group. She looked backward. There was a long, straggling column that had become separated from the rest of the group when one of the members faltered and allowed the hard direction to close in on him. She watched as he attempted to move forward again, but it was obvious that the speed he was able to make in the hard direction would not be fast enough to let him and his followers catch up with the rest of the clan. She then saw a movement off in the smoky east that sent her into action.

“Attack from east!” she stamped as she pushed her way through the crowded clan members. When she got to the eastern edge she saw it was serious. It was a large, hungry war party and they had already cut off the straggling string from the rest of the clan. She soon had a group of warriors on either side of her and noticed with satisfaction that the clan had stopped moving and were now in a coherent group, with the stronger ones facing outward, spears and shards bristling. She started forward to rescue the captives, when her trained senses detected something from the west. It was another war party waiting for them to attack the first group, when they could rush on them from the rear.

“Stop!” she commanded. She led the war party back to protect the rest of the clan, then watched in agony as the captives were killed and the precious pods wrenched from their flowing bodies and devoured by the hungry band of marauders. The war party stayed for a few turns, trying to figure out a way to attack the rest of the clan. They made a few abortive attacks, one of which gave Great-Crack deep satisfaction as she dispatched two of the enemy, partially to avenge the clan members she had lost. Finally the war party gave up the siege and went off toward the west, hauling the meat from their victims with them. Great-Crack immediately took the clan off again toward Bright’s Heaven.

With their enforced rest, the clan was in better shape, and with the example of what happened to stragglers still etched in their minds, there were very few times that the gap opened by the pathbreakers was allowed to fail, and the clan made good time for a few turns. But it soon became obvious to Great-Crack that they were in serious trouble. At the next break she got out the pebbles that represented the members of the clan, and after discarding the ones that had been killed in the interchange with the attackers, she laid them out in a column.

She knew that they were still far from Bright’s Heaven, for they had just started to get to the “lost feeling” region. She made an estimate of how many turns it would take them to reach Bright’s Heaven and laid those cluster seeds out in a row. She then started to fill in the diagram with seeds representing the pods left. There was no question about it—they were short by many, many pods.

She stared at the large empty space in the diagram, and her imaginative brain turned the empty space into empty cheela. It was now time—she would have to risk the chance of another attack and split her forces.

The clan grew restless as the break grew longer while Great-Crack calculated. She finally called her warriors together and explained the situation to them. Blue-Flow had never really learned why the seeds and pebbles told things to Creat-Crack that he could not see, but he now was very glad that Great-Crack had prevented him from leading the clan off many turns ago. With far fewer pods, he would have had them all dead by now. But he didn’t need pebbles and seeds to tell him that there were not enough pods for them to make it to Bright’s Heaven.

“Blue-Flow,” she said, “I want you to lead a hunting party to Bright’s Heaven and bring back pods for us.” She looked down at the diagram and said, “You will only need a Slink’s worth of pods to keep you going. You are going to arrive very hungry—but the ripe pods at the end of the journey will make it worthwhile.”

Blue-Flow and the others in the hunting party emptied out most of their pouches. Some of them attempted to leave without taking any pods, preferring to leave them for the hatchlings while making do with bravado, but Great-Crack, trusting in her calculations, made them take their ration of pods. The hunting party took off and was rapidly out of sight of the slowly moving clan.

With her warrior forces depleted, Great-Crack took no chances and moved the clan along carefully so that no gaps developed and the perimeter always had warriors on the lookout both east and west.

The hunting party quickly traveled over the “lost feeling” region and soon saw the welcome sight of Bright peeking over the horizon. As they came into the region where the skies became clear and the petal plants flourished, they ate their fill and then started loading up their pouches in preparation for the long trek back to the hungry clan.

Suddenly Bad-Turn whispered, “I see a Flow Slow moving just over the horizon.” Blue-Flow and the others soon confirmed the sighting and they thinned their bodies to keep out of its sight.

“It is to the east and we could get to it easily,” Blue-Flow whispered. “The hatchlings have been without meat since we left home. Let’s kill it!”

The Flow Slow depended on its armored plates for protection. This one had never seen a cheela before, and ignored them as it ignored all small, scurrying creatures. The Flow Slow moved ponderously from plant to plant, its armored tread plates moving over its top surface to fall directly on the plant, crushing it to pulp, to be ingested in the gaps between the plates as the huge body slowly flowed onward. The Flow Slow sought out plants, but, as many an unfortunate cheela had found out, it would eat anything that happened to fall before its onslaught.

The kill was easy, since the Flow Slow had never tasted a dragon crystal spear before. The cheela slipped in ahead of it, timing their moves carefully, and planted spears in the crust in just the correct position so that the sharp points entered the gaps between the plates as they came down to the surface.

As they started to move away from the carcass, Bad-Turn looked back at it and said, “Too bad we can’t carry that whole carcass back to the clan. If they had all that meat to eat, there would be no worry about food for the rest of the trip.”

Blue-Flow replied, “I thought about that too. We could try to push a large chunk of meat ahead of us, but we can carry in our pouches more than we can push—especially when we have to go in the hard direction. Besides, pushing the meat through the ashes over that whole distance will ruin it.”

“If we only had some way to keep it out of the ashes,” murmured Bad-Turn, and he went over to one of the large Flow Slow plates and looked at it. It was large, half as big as he was. It was a flat square plate of material almost as hard as dragon crystal. At the front and back edges were curved lips that had been attached to the skin of the Flow Slow. Bad-Turn flowed onto the plate, thinking, “This could hold a lot of meat and pods, much more than I could carry in my pouches.” He flowed to the front lip and stayed there for a moment, his back edge hanging back on the front lip of the plate.

“What are you doing?” Blue-Flow asked. “We should be going.”

“Watch!” said Bad-Turn, and Blue-Flow and the others saw his back edge stiffen as he grew a long internal manipulator crystal that ran from one end of the Flow Slow plate to the other. Since the crystal was horizontal and did not have to fight the pull of Egg, he could make it very thin, thin enough just to fit under the lip of the plate.

“I never heard of growing a manipulator bone that way,” one of the party said to Blue-Flow. Then they both watched as Bad-Turn moved away, the front of his body digging into the crust and the back edge dragging the plate along behind, firmly attached by the strong crystal bar just under the skin and stretching from one eye to another.

“It feels funny, but it works,” Bad-Turn said. “Once I get it moving, it is easy to keep it moving despite its weight. With someone behind pushing, I think we could pull much more than we could carry.”

The others tried it and they were all quick converts, especially when they tried it with a huge pile of bulky chunks of meat that could never be crammed into pouches. Within less than a turn, the Flow Slow had been converted into meat piled on top of its own armored plates.

The hunting party then moved off in single file, a pathbreaker leading the way, pushing into the hard direction, followed by a plate-puller crouched up behind him, hauling a plate of meat and helped along by a pusher and followed by three other teams. The meat on the plates seemed to work as well as their bodies at keeping the gap open in the hard direction, so they made good time. Their rest breaks were few and short and only for downing another chunk of nourishing meat.

When Great-Crack observed them coming over the horizon, she saw them at a great distance. Many turns ago she had stopped the trek to conserve food, while she kept watch with an eye perched up on a long eye-stub. There were no longer any pods for anyone except the hatchlings, and they were doing poorly on those. The whole clan was gathered in a circle, too weak to move much, and Great-Crack herself was forced to lower her eye-stub often.

“Fine Leader you turned out to be,” she berated herself. “Leading your clan off to die beneath smoky skies in a place where they always feel lost.”

Still, she had faith that Blue-Flow would return shortly with pods and that then they could move again while Blue-Flow returned for more. She was relieved when she saw the returning column, but was amazed by the bulk and length of it. Only the obvious shape of Blue-Flow breaking path at the front of the column relieved her worry that it was another attacking war party.

The clan watched in awe as the procession pulled their wonderful-looking cargo into camp. Within two turns everyone was back to a good comfortable bulk. The hatchlings were soon feeling good enough to make pests of themselves while the adults were more interested in pairing off and having a little fun alone. Great-Crack listened in admiration as Blue-Flow recounted their journey, the kill of the Flow Slow, and the results of Bad-Turn’s invention.

“Bad-Turn,” Great-Crack said, “for too long you have been stuck with that dreary hatchling name. From now on you shall be Plate-Puller.

“Come with me,” she commanded, and some of her eyes turned to look back at Blue-Flow as they left. “I will see you later. This new name calls for a reward.” Blue-Flow watched the couple go off, a little jealous, but he would have his chance later this turn.

With their strength renewed by the meat and ripe pods, the clan moved off at good speed. It was not long before they began to feel less lost. The sky cleared and finally Great-Crack called a halt and arranged the clan so that all, even the smallest hatchling, could see the intense reddish yellow glow of Bright on the horizon.

“O Great Bright One. Brightest of all in the sky,” Great-Crack intoned, all of her dozen eyes staring at the bright star while her undertread rhythmically pulsed the crust. “We thank You for saving us from the rolling walls of blue-white fire. We thank You for saving us from the choking clouds of poisonous red smoke that kill the plants and still the eggs. We thank You for leading us out of the land of starvation and lostness to Your Heaven.”

Her eyes turned from the star and looked around at the clan. “Let us go now to claim our reward—a Heaven where there are no enemies and plenty of food and game. Come—all of you—into Bright’s Heaven.”

21:54:20 GMT TUESDAY 14 JUNE 2050

The strong limbs of Commander Carole Swenson pulled her compact body slowly along the central shaft of St. George, her long yellow braid flipping from side to side with the motion. Carole’s eyes automatically monitored the traffic in the side corridors, watching the to and fro motion of the humanity on her tiny planet. Although many of the crew were still busy with their normal tasks, there was a general flow toward the viewing ports near the bridge. However, Carole was headed in another direction, toward the port science blister. The view of the upcoming action would not be as good there, but she wanted to see the closeups from the cameras on the probe spacecraft. She swung into a corridor and with a dexterity born of many years in free fall, launched her body unerringly toward the hatch at the far end. Bouncing to a halt on the wall next to the hatch, she palmed the lock and floated in. No one saw her enter, for Pierre had his science crew busy.

“How much longer?” she asked the group gathered in front of consoles at the other end of the room.

Pierre glanced at the flickering numbers on the right of his screen. “Fourteen minutes, and everything looks fine.”

Carole looked at a display across the room. The field of view of the monitor camera contained the glowing sphere of one of the larger condensed asteroids in the lower corner, and a small white speck representing the other large asteroid in the upper corner. As she watched, the smaller speck moved slowly across the screen, getting brighter as it came. Carole looked at another console, the picture there was almost the same, but reversed. The geometry of the elastic collision of the two large ultra-dense asteroids was almost exactly symmetric.

Pierre stared at his console. There were no pictures on his screen, just a computer-generated plot of two curved lines that were slowly approaching each other in a collision course. Numbers in boxes along the side of his screen changed rapidly. “Thirty seconds to last abort point,” he announced. “Any problems?”

Jean spoke from another console. “Video monitors operating.”

“Computer control well within margins,” another voice said.

“Herder probe propulsion units all operational,” said another.

“I’ll let it go, then,” Pierre said, lifting his finger from the abort toggle and snapping shut the safety cover.

Carole watched one of the screens as the smaller blob grew larger and larger. Angry tongues of fire burst rapidly in seemingly random directions from positions near the two spheres as the computer directed the herder probes to keep the asteroids on their correct paths. Then suddenly, in a sequence that was too fast to follow, an ultra-dense asteroid flashed around between its twin and the camera probe, and the screen was empty.

Pierre flicked on another camera that was off at a different angle, but that view was only good for a few seconds before the rapidly shrinking spot faded from the screen.

They all turned to Pierre’s screen, which showed the orbits of the two asteroids. The trajectories had approached so close to each other that the tight curlicues in their respective paths due to their mutual gravitational attraction seemed to be placed one on top of the other. They now watched as one line headed outward toward the asteroid belt again, while the other seemed to be dropping straight into the neutron star. Actually, the falling massive asteroid would miss the star by a slight margin and was now in a highly elliptical orbit, with its aphelion near the 100,000 km circular orbit of St. George and its perihelion at just over 400 km from Dragon’s Egg.

Their elevator was in place.