Robert L Forward

DRAGON’S EGG

STARQUAKE

DRAGON’S EGG was a neutron star, an incredibly dense sphere only twenty kilometers in diameter, with a surface gravity sixty-seven billion times that of Earth. No human could ever land on such a star. Only by the most advanced technology could science even study it.

Yet on that impossible world, researchers detect intelligent life: the cheela, aliens who live so fast that one of our hours is the equivalent of more than a hundred years to them. The cheela struggle from savagery to science in a span of days—and the astronauts orbiting above Dragon’s Egg are by turn observers, then teachers, then friends…

Then a monstrous STARQUAKE rocks Dragon’s Egg, decimating the cheela. On the surface, the few survivors fight to stay alive. Meanwhile, high above the neutron star, their human friends face a dreadful choice: return to Earth and let this alien race risk extinction, or remain to help…and certainly die in the attempt!