Escape

01:01:10 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

“That’s the last of the HoloMem storage crystals, Pierre,” Jean said as she turned away from the communications console. “Most of the material on that one was encrypted. I hope they have the crypto-keys.” She swiveled back as the image of Sky-Speaker flashed on the screen.

“Keys obvious,” said Sky-Speaker. “Goodbye.”

“I liked the old Sky-Teacher better,” said Pierre. “He talked so verbosely that it gave you time to think.”

“We have plenty of time to think now,” Jean said quietly as she shut down the communications console. She reached under the counter and extracted the HoloMem crystal that had come from the library and replaced it with the regular console crystal that kept a log of everything that went through the console.

“Too much time,” said Pierre. He followed Jean as she ottered her way down the passageway to the crew deck. Jean went to the library console and restored the HoloMem to its place in the storage rack. Pierre, driven by his command responsibility, returned to the galley and stared at the listing of the food supplies on the food storage lockers. There was food for eight more days at normal rations, sixteen days at half-rations, thirty-two days at quarter-rations…only one month. It would take five more months after that before Oscar returned from its long elliptical orbit around Egg. His eyes didn’t look at the bank of lockers with the blank label. Bouncing lightly in the low gravity, he passed Jean at the library console and turned into the lounge. Doc was talking with Seiko and Abdul was looking pensively out of the viewport in the floor.

“HoloMems done?” asked Abdul, looking up.

“Yep,” said Pierre, floating lightly to the cushion beside him.

“Anything left for us mere humans to do?” Abdul asked.

“The cheela don’t need us anymore. They should be well on their way to recovery by now.” A tiny white-hot speck appeared outside the viewport window and stopped.

“Smile,” said Abdul. “You’re about to have your picture taken by some tourists.”

The speck released a shower of sparks. There was a flickering of light, then the sparks rejoined the glowing speck and it sped away.

“What are your plans for the rest of the mission, Pierre?” Seiko asked.

“I have no plans.”

“You must!” Seiko sounded disturbed. “We must not waste our lives doing nothing until we die!”

Pierre raised his gaze from the viewport. The anguish in his face showed through the ragged, unkempt beard.

“I can’t find a way to save us,” he said, tears starting to well up in his eyes.

“Of course you can’t,” said Seiko. “There is no way to save us. It is simple mathematics. There are five people to feed and only eight days of food rations. We might be able to stretch that out using our body reserves, but we will be out of food in a month. We could even consider eating Amalita’s body. At best, we could only get about 50 kilos of meat from it.” She turned to Doc Wong.

“How many calories in meat, Doctor Wong?” she asked him.

“I can’t believe this conversation!” said Abdul. “There is no way I’m going to be a cannibal! I’m leaving!” He started to dive out the door to his private quarters, but Pierre held him back with a hand on one shoulder. He kept it there as he nodded at Doc to answer.

“Use the values for pork, Doc,” Abdul blurted. “I hear from my cannibal friends that you can’t tell the difference.”

“Most meats have about 4000 calories per kilogram,” said Dr. Cesar Wong. “The average person could live on a half-kilo of meat per day if the diet were supplemented with vitamins.”

“So 50 kilos would only last us 20 days at full rations or 80 days at quarter rations,” said Seiko. “We are still short by two months.” She paused for a second. “As I said, there is no way to save us.”

“I thought for sure that the next thing you were going to suggest was that we draw straws,” said Abdul to Pierre.

“Abdul!” Pierre said severely.

“I have calculated that option,” said Seiko. “There is a problem. If we wait for a person to die of hunger, then there is very little nourishment left on the body.”

“There’ll be none left on mine!” said Abdul.

“If, however, a person dies at the beginning of the period, then not only does his body become a source of significant nourishment, but he is not consuming food as time goes on. Using Doctor Wong’s calorie estimate, while two carcasses would allow quarter rations for four people over the same period, three could supply adequate nourishment for the remaining three for six months.”

“Great!” cried Abdul. “Why stop at cannibalism when we can have ritualistic murder?”

“Although such an option is technically feasible,” continued Seiko, “I personally have no intention of suggesting or participating in any such option.”

“What’s the matter?” Abdul asked. “Afraid of drawing the short straw?”

“No. The long one,” answered Seiko. “Neither you, nor I, nor any of the others, could return to our respective cultures if we had to survive using that solution. I, for one, am going to spend my last days completing my scientific studies, preparing my work for publication, and transmitting it back to St. George. It will be the culmination of my career. When I am done, I am ready to go.” She turned to Dr. Wong again.

“We do have termination capsules on board, Doctor Wong?” she asked.

“Of course,” Cesar replied.

Seiko then turned back to Pierre. “It will be difficult to stay rational as time goes on,” she said matter-of-factly. “I would recommend that you consider consigning Amalita’s body to space now. That way we can avoid temptation later.” She dove out the door and pulled herself up through the passageway to the Science Deck.

Pierre looked around at the others.

“She’s right,” Jean said.

“I’ll help take her out,” said Cesar.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather be somewhere else,” said Abdul. “I don’t think I could take it.”

“Sure,” said Pierre. “Doc and I can handle it, and Jean can run the EVA controls for us.”

Amalita had been placed in the storage locker in a fetal position, so she was relatively easy to move around on the deck, but it was a close fit through the passageway holes. She was still in her spacesuit, since Doctor Wong had not bothered to examine her further after he had removed her helmet and found the broken neck. Seiko closed down the star physics console and dimmed the star image table as they brought Amalita to the Science Deck.

“I’ll hold Amalita while you get your suits on,” she said softly, taking the frosty burden from them.

“The EVA lock is ready,” said Jean. She got up from the EVA console, helped Pierre and Cesar with their suits, and took them through the checkout sheet, trying to be as careful and thorough as Amalita had always been.

“Magni-stiction boots…” said Jean. Pierre flicked a switch in his chest console that rearranged the pseudorandom pattern of the magnetic monopoles in the soles of his boots so they matched up with the hexagonal pattern of monopoles built into the inner plates and hull of Dragon Slayer. His boots clanged onto the deck, twisted outward at a 30-degree angle.

“Check,” he said, then clumped into the EVA lock. He turned around and helped Cesar maneuver Amalita’s body in through the door.

“Don’t forget your safety lines,” said Jean. “There are some weird gravity fields out there.” Pierre attached a line to himself and another to the ring in Amalita’s suit. Just then a dark head appeared in the passageway hole in the deck.

“I had to say goodbye,” said Abdul. He forced himself to look at Amalita’s badly burned face. His left hand reached into the singed hair and held it lightly, while his right hand took two kisses from his lips and placed them softly on the frosted blisters of Amalita’s closed eyelids. He turned and dove down the passageway, leaving behind clusters of teardrops moving upward in the swirling air.

Jean cycled them through.

“The best place to release her is near the viewport window,” Pierre said as he climbed out the outer lock. He carefully attached his magni-stiction boots to the hull, then shifted his safety line to a tiedown. “She’ll be pulled outward to the ring of compensator masses and be gone in a flash of plasma. The last thing we want is to have her, or ‘pieces’ of her, in orbit.”

They moved carefully over the hull to a point near the viewport. They were standing at the south pole of their little moon that circled around the neutron star five times a second. The hull of Dragon Slayer did not spin while it orbited, however, but stayed oriented with respect to the distant stars. To the two humans standing on the hull, the white-hot neutron star seemed to be rotating around the equator of the ship five times a second, while above and below them whirled a ring of six red masses that passed over the two poles of the spherical ship while it rotated to always be tangent to the direction to the star. In this configuration, the gravity tides from the ring of masses cancelled the dangerous gravity tides from the star and allowed the humans to survive.

“I’ll give her a slight push while you pay out the safety line,” Pierre said.

He let go of Amalita’s body, and the uncompensated tides started to pull her outwards. The further she got away from the ship and the closer she got to the massive bodies in the ring, the stronger the forces became. A sprinkling of white-hot sparks gathered off in the distance to observe.

“She is getting heavy,” said Cesar.

“It looks stable,” said Pierre. “Let her go.”

The last of the safety rope whipped through the tiedown and followed Amalita as she accelerated rapidly toward the ring 200 meters away. Just before she reached the ring her body was momentarily surrounded by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash, and she was gone.

When Pierre and Cesar came inside, Jean and Seiko helped them out of their suits.

“Unless somebody is going to use the console library, I think I’ll get back to working on my book,” said Pierre.

“Which one?” Jean asked.

“The popular version that covers everything that happened on the trip. I was going to call it Dragon’s Egg, but the editors at Ballantine Interplanetary said that they already had a title of that name in their inventory. Besides, they wanted something more personal, so they chose, My Visit With Our Nucleonic Friends. I think it’s a dumb title, but they are the ones buying the book.”

“I don’t think money is a consideration anymore,” Seiko reminded him.

“Hmm.” Pierre glanced down at the star image table and noticed that there were a number of new features on the surface of the neutron star.

“There have been some changes in the last hour,” he said to Seiko.

“Yes,” she replied. “While you and Doctor Wong were outside, the cheela have reestablished a highly technological civilization on the ground and have resumed extensive space travel activities. They have rapidly caught up to where they were at the time of the starquake and are continuing on at a rapid pace.”

“I’d better get busy writing if I am going to stay up with them.” Pierre reached down and pulled himself through the passageway hole in the deck. He stopped when he came to the main deck. Abdul was there. He had opened the metal shield on one of the equatorial viewports and was looking out through the tinted glass.

“Hey! Look at the sightseers,” Abdul hollered across the deck. “It’s like being one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. Why don’t you come over and pretend to be Teddy Roosevelt? You’ve got the beard for it.” As Pierre approached the window, the number of specks outside increased dramatically.

01:30:04 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

Busy-Thoughts moved around the creche-classroom critiquing the work of the students. Although most of the youngling’s education was done through holovid connections to the “Master Teacher” program in the central computer, there were still some topics that were best handled by live teachers in central classrooms. Plasma art was one of them, especially since the generators were massive and expensive.

“Excellent structure, Lovely-Eyes,” said Busy-Thoughts. “But the colors are a little weak for such a bold form. Perhaps you should try more current in the ion generators.”

The student adjusted the controls under his tread and increased the intensity of the ion beams shooting into the shaped magnetic fields. The ions spiraled along the magnetic field lines, giving off a glow of synchrotron radiation. With the increased current, the interior of the magnetic sculpture glowed brighter. Lovely-Eyes then increased the strength of one of the magnetic field generators in the base and adjusted some transparent superconductor guides attached to the top. The sculpture was now a floating form of brightly glowing colors. The shape was bi-symmetric. There was an intense inner violet structure that was basically spherical, but had large rough holes penetrating it. Two circles were set side-by-side in the violet sphere, with a triangle and a rectangle below them. Covering the violet structure was a lumpy blanket of softer plasma in blue-white with patches of yellow-white.

“It looks strangely familiar,” said Busy-Thoughts.

“It is a portrait of one of the humans,” said Lovely-Eyes. “This one is Pierre Carnot Niven, the Commander of the Expedition.”

“If you say so. The Slow Ones all look the same to me.”

“Not once you know them better,” said Lovely-Eyes. “Pierre has hairs on the bottom side of his head-lump as well as the top side.” Lovely-Eyes went on eagerly, “I’ve been learning all about the humans in my holovid courses. The Master Teacher program says I do well in that subject and has allowed me to take a special advanced program in humanology.”

“That’s very nice, Lovely-Eyes, but this is an abstract art class. As strange as humans look, they don’t qualify as abstract art. In the next class I want you to concentrate on doing your assignment.”

Busy-Thoughts moved to the center of the classroom and ’trummed the class to attention.

“Everyone finish his sculpture and set the control pattern in memory. When you finish I have an announcement.”

There were whispered exchanges between the students as they made last minute adjustments to their pieces and closed down their generators. As they gathered around the teacher, Busy-Thoughts momentarily felt the instinct to reach out and cover them all with his hatching mantle. He shook off the feeling, then made a resolve to apply for rejuvenation again. He had been putting it off too long.

“The White Rock Clan has prospered this year,” said Busy-Thoughts. “With the decrease in our egg quota from the Combined Clans Population Control Board, we have had fewer creche expenses. The elders of the clan have decided to send the entire creche-school on a trip to see the humans. After all, we are in a unique period in history, when all five humans can be seen, up close, at the same time.”

Lovely-Eyes was ecstatic at the announcement. For the first time he would be able to see the humans he had been studying.

The class took a glide-carrier to the West Pole and rode up the West Pole Space Fountain to the top. Busy-Thoughts had arranged a special hookup to the Master Teacher. On the way up the class was given a lecture on the geographical features of the West Pole hemisphere they could see below them. At Topside Platform they switched to a tourist ship especially made for viewing the humans. It had artificial gravity generators and tiers of platforms so that everyone had a good view, yet the human spacecraft wasn’t uncomfortably “overhead.”

“Oh my! They are huge,” Lovely-Eyes said as the tourist ship floated to a stop a meter away from the porthole that held the motionless visages of Pierre and Abdul. He formed a tendril and pointed it at one of the humans. “That’s Pierre. You can tell because of the yellow patch all over the bottom of his head. The other one is Abdul. He only has a thin yellow patch under his nose.”

“What is the yellow stuff?” one of his classmates asked.

“Hairs. Humans are mostly hairless like us, but they have hairy patches like Slink hide on their heads.”

“Ugly!!!” she replied.

The tourist ship moved on to the next porthole where Jean Kelly was looking out.

“They all look the same,” someone said. “I thought they had hides of different color.”

“They do, in the long wavelength portion of the spectrum where the humans eyes work,” said Lovely-Eyes. “But they all look the same to X-ray vision.”

The tourist ship set up a holovid projector with a time-lapse sequence. First they saw Abdul at the porthole calling Pierre, the appearance of Pierre at the window, then Abdul and Pierre talking and looking at the visiting spacecraft. The jerky time-lapse photography had everyone rumbling their tread.

“Stop laughing!!!” Lovely-Eyes shouted into the deck.

“Those brave humans have given up their lives to save Egg, and you laugh at them like Slinks in a zoo!”

“Lovely-Eyes!” Busy-Thoughts’ tread rapped in the distance. “Behave yourself!”

Lovely-Eyes’ tread fell silent, but his brain-knot was still seething. “There must be a way to save them,” he thought. “And I will not change my accursed egg-name until I find it. When I do, the name I shall choose will be a better name, a noble name.”

01:30:05 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

“Look at those spaceships!” said Abdul. “They are almost 10 centimeters long and have multiple decks. They must be the equivalent of cruise ships, coming up to see the sights.”

“They are no longer spherical.” Seiko was peering out an adjacent porthole. “They have found an efficient method of producing gravity, so they no longer need to carry along miniature black holes. Their technological capability is increasing at an astounding rate.”

“I wonder if they’ll ever be able to move asteroids,” Jean said wistfully.

“They have plenty of energy to do the job,” said Pierre. “It’s just that Oscar is so fragile, and they and their machines are so dense.”

“Superman may be able to lift icebergs in the holovids,” said Abdul. “But if he tried lifting a real iceberg he would end up with nothing but a pile of ice cubes.”

“There is no way they could bring Oscar back any sooner than six months,” said Seiko in her authoritative Teutonic tone. “We might as well stop wishful thinking; it’s counterproductive. We’re going to die, and there is not much we can do about it. I’m going down to the galley for something to eat. Anyone care to join me?”

“I’m not hungry just now,” said Cesar. The others kept looking out the windows at the blizzard of visiting spacecraft.

03:54:50 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

The turn eventually came when Lovely-Eyes at last gave up on his quest and returned to White Rock City, the homeland of his clan. He found the creche-master and asked for a position tending the young ones.

“Few positions left,” said Creche-Master/71. “PopCon Board decreasing cheela, more robots instead.”

Lovely-Eyes didn’t like the abrupt language style that had developed in the last 60 greats of turns. Now that nearly every cheela had a horde of robots at its beck and call, and seldom interacted with other cheela, politeness had nearly dropped out of the language. After all, robots didn’t have feelings and didn’t have to be persuaded to do anything, just told to do it. Since he was talking to a cheela, however, he thought that perhaps he would do better if he used the old style.

“I would really appreciate it if you could find a position for me,” said Lovely-Eyes. “I have worked hard for 300 greats of turns and am looking forward to tending the hatchlings.”

“Experience?” asked Creche-Master/71.

“I have advanced degrees in Humanology, Human Medicine, Expanded Matter Science, Inertial and Gravitational Engineering, and Science Administration. I was also Leader of the Fourth Segment in the Legislature of the Combined Clans.”

“Successes?”

“Not many, I’m afraid,” Lovely-Eyes said. “I have spent most of my life trying to find some means to prevent the eventual starvation of the humans. I have studied human medicine to find some method like deep sleep to keep the humans alive without food. I have studied expanded matter science to find a way to make food with the equipment the humans have on Dragon Slayer. I have studied inertial and gravitational engineering to find a way to return the distant asteroid sooner. I was unsuccessful.

“I went into politics, became leader of the fourth segment, pushed through the funding to form a special task force to solve the human starvation problem, then left the legislature to run the task force. I had the brightest minds, both cheela and robotic, working on the problem for two generations. They were unsuccessful. When the funding for the task force was terminated I gave up and came here. I have no successes to tell the younglings about. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be a good choice for that job.”

“No,” Creche-Master/71 agreed. Her tread was manipulating her touch screen. “One egg available for hatching in 18 turns.”

“I’ll take it!” said Lovely-Eyes.

The driven soul of Lovely-Eyes was, at last, at peace. The egg had produced a near-perfect hatchling, exactly as the geneticists had predicted. The hatchling had the official name of White-Rock/207891384, but Lovely-Eyes, recalling an old story he had read in his humanology studies, called him Grandest-Tiger.

Grandest-Tiger was dodging in and out from under Lovely-Eyes’ hatching mantle, playing peek-and-chase with its robotic hatchling-mates. While Grandest-Tiger played, Lovely-Eyes picked up one of the hatchling’s learning toys. It was quite expensive for such a simple toy, but the hatchling psychologists felt it was important for the young ones to have experience with the paradoxical phenomena early in their life.

The toy was a simple ring. It came with a dozen tiny metal spheres. When a sphere was pushed through the hole in the ring, it didn’t come out on the other side immediately. Depending upon which side the ball was put through, it would come out at some different time, either in the past or the future. Right now there were six spheres lying on the crust. Idly, Lovely-Eyes picked up five of the spheres and poked them, one at a time through the ring. There was a long pause, then the five spheres popped out again.

Suddenly, Lovely-Eyes pulled back his hatching mantle and rushed out of the pen, leaving a bewildered Grandest-Tiger behind. The robotic hatchling-mates diverted the attention of Grandest-Tiger from the disappearing Old One while they sent emergency messages to the creche-master for a replacement.

03:55:03 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

The screen on the communications console flashed on to show the image of Sky-Speaker. Above the electronic chitter of data being transferred there came a calling signal. Seiko went to the console, and the image of Sky-Speaker started talking as she approached.

“You read fast,” the image said.

“You listen slow. Read.”

The image was replaced by text that scrolled rapidly up the screen, keeping in pace with the scan of her eyes. Seiko didn’t know how the cheela had done it, but they had taken over control of the communications console display program.

“Pierre,” said Seiko, still reading. “They are going to try to rescue us.”

“Did they find a way to move Oscar?” he asked, floating over next to her.

“No,” she said. “They found a way to move us.” Pierre read the screen along with her, then said to the rest of the crew, “Everybody get into the high-G protection tanks,” he said. “The cheela are going to take us for a ride.”

04:02:35 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

Neutrino-Maker/84 watched as his swarm of robotic workers approached the gigantic viewport window at the south pole of the human spacecraft. They stopped a few meters away from the hull and set up three neutrino generators that flooded the interior of the spacecraft with beams of neutrinos at carefully selected frequencies. He then took his crew around to the other side where they set up a dense array of neutrino detectors. Each robot had the ancient cleft-wort symbol of Web Construction Company emblazoned on its back.

“One more imposs-proj for Web-Con,” said the engineer proudly. Once the detectors were in place, a computer generated holo-image slowly began to build up in the display.

“Air, water, humans, steel, all like vacuum,” said Neutrino-Maker/84 as he waited impatiently for the image to build up. If they had done a neutrino scan on a decent density object, the image would have formed almost instantly.

After a half-turn, the image was good enough for him to see that the humans were all in their tanks and the last of the air was being replaced by water.

Neutrino-Maker/84 switched his console to communicate with Void-Maker/111. An old and experienced Web-Con disinto engineer, she had been assigned the delicate job of removing the laser communicator from the human spaceship while leaving it in operating condition. The communicator was going to be delivered to another group of Web-Con engineers to calibrate some machines that would allow the ultra-dense cheela to power and control the tenuous human equipment without damaging it.

“Humans in tanks,” said Neutrino-Maker/84. “Proceed.”

“Proceeding,” Void-Maker/111 replied as she set her crew of disinto robots to work.

The communicator had two connections through the hull to the electronics inside Dragon Slayer. One was an electrical power cable for the laser power supply, and the other was a fiber-optic modulator cable that carried the information. Moving carefully, the disinto robots formed microthin fans of disintegration rays and cut the two cables right at the connectors. Being careful to avoid the free ends of the cables as they waved slowly back and forth in the variable gravity fields outside Dragon Slayer, the disinto robots then attacked the mechanical support structure. The laser communicator came loose.

Void-Maker/111 rubbed her tread screen, and the image of another Web-Con engineer appeared. It was Graviton-Maker/321. His engineering badges had a circle for gravity instead of a triangle for disinto.

“To you,” said Void-Maker/111.

“To me,” replied Graviton-Maker/321. “Next to electromagnetic-makers.”

“Don’t touch!” chirped Void-Maker/111 at the screen.

“Nor you,” said Graviton-Maker/321 as the screen went blank.

Graviton-Maker/321 set his crew of gravity robots in the path of the slowly tumbling laser communicator. His job was to get the laser under control and bring it to a halt. He had to catch it without touching it, for the fragile human instrument could not stand the lightest touch by any cheela machines.

His squadron of Web-Con gravity robots were specially designed for this job. They were spherical in shape, and each had a small black hole in the center. The black hole provided the basic gravity field that the robot used. The hull of the robots contained powerful gravity exchangers and diverters that modified the shape, strength, and even the direction of the gravity forces coming from the black hole. Staying carefully off at a distance, the robots pushed and pulled at the tumbling laser communicator until they brought it under control. They then took it out through the whirling ring of compensator masses to a safe place where the electromagnetic-makers could try to operate it.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 was waiting patiently for the arrival of the laser communicator from the Slow Ones’ orbital position. He had his team of electromagnetic engineers ready. There were young ones who would provide the drive that they needed and experienced ones who would provide the caution, for they were treading on new crust when they tried to couple their ultra-dense nucleonic machines to the expanded matter electronic machines that the humans used.

The electromagnetic-makers were a strange breed. It took a perverse type of personality to specialize in a field like electromagnetic engineering where there was almost no opportunity to practice the craft. In general, electromagnetic engineers just talked to themselves, devised exotic experiments involving electromagnetic conductors that stretched hundreds of meters across the surface of Egg to measure the ultra-long electromagnetic waves coming from space, and worked on improving the instructional programs in the Master Teacher Program in case some other student was strange enough to want to become an electromagnetic engineer, too.

This was the first time there had been a need for the management of a team of electromagnetic engineers and Electromagnetic-Manager/1 was the first of his profession.

Graviton-Maker/321 and his crew of robots brought the laser communicator to a halt near the electromagnetic-makers’ strange machines floating in orbit some distance away from Dragon Slayer. He stacked up most of his robots, but left a few at the job of keeping the laser communicator in place. Electromagnetic-Manager/1, his team of engineers, and their hordes of specialized robots were waiting for him.

“To you,” said Graviton-Maker/321.

“To me,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“Don’t…” started Graviton-Maker/321.

“…touch,” chirped a chorus of treads from the team of electromagnetic-makers.

The power cable for the laser was brought near an electron generator. It was difficult for the electromagnetic engineers to generate large currents at such low voltages, but soon four amperes of electrons at 500 volts were shooting from one end of the electron generator and four amperes of positrons from the other end. The Web-Con electromagnetic robots steered the beams with the electric and magnetic fields emanating from their bodies and directed them at the conductors in the cut end of the cable.

“Laser photons detected from end of human instrument,” said Electromagnetic-Maker/32, who was monitoring the response of a long-wavelength photon detector in one of his robots that he had positioned in front of the laser communicator.

“Positron erosion?” asked Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“Ten picometers per methturn,” replied Electromagnetic -Maker/25.

“Good,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. The technique for extracting the electrons from the return conductor seemed to be working. A set of ultraviolet generator robots kept the return conductor illuminated with ultraviolet photons which knocked electrons out of the metal. The electrons billowed up in a cloud over the end of the positively charged conductor where they were annihilated by the stream of positrons. Most of the annihilation gamma rays were scattered by the electron cloud, but some high energy photons reached the metal and caused the loss of copper ions.

“Wire temperature?” Electromagnetic-Manager/1 asked another engineer.

“Stablized at 352 K,” said Electromagnetic-Maker/28. “Electromagnetic cooling working.” His team of robots were monitoring detectors that estimated the detailed spectrum of the heat photons excited in the surface of the metal where the beam of electrons penetrated. The electron beam was then modulated to produce heat photons that had the same estimated spectrum but with the phases reversed, so that on the average, the new photons would tend to cancel the old photons. Being a statistical technique, it didn’t work perfectly, but it did keep the wires well below their melting point.

“Modulation!” ordered Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

Electromagnetic-Maker/55 tapped his control console, and his 20,736 robots each started emitting long-wavelength infrared radiation from their bodies. The robots were arranged in a 144 by 144 array, and their infrared output was phased so that it focused down into a narrow waist just as it entered the optical fiber in the cut end of the communications cable.

“Modulation detected,” Electromagnetic-Maker/32 reported.

“Good,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. He was now sure that the cheela could find a method of getting information on and off the human electrical wires and optical fibers. He contacted Graviton-Maker/321.

“Turn laser toward St. George…” said Electromagnetic-Manager/ 1.

No reply was needed. Graviton-Maker/321 proceeded to manipulate his crew of robots by treading touch-blocks on the sides of his touch-taste screen.

“…and…” continued Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“…and?” queried Graviton-Maker/321, puzzled by the verbosity.

“Don’t…” started Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“…touch!” rumbled Graviton-Maker/321, greatly amused.

St. George was far away from the dangerous neutron star in a 100,000-kilometer orbit a third of a light-second away, so it took three turns before Electromagnetic-Manager/1 established contact with the computer on St. George using the laser communicator taken from Dragon Slayer. Once the computer realized that it was communicating directly with cheela instead of the slow-thinking humans, it rapidly repeated the message that it had been sending. The image was that of a female human with yellow hair bound into a single long braid over one shoulder. It reminded Electromagnetic-Manager/I of a ridiculous type of inbred pet Slink that had hair so long that the pet needed a robot attendant to hold its hair up, out from under its tread when it wanted to move. His console computer link identified the human as Carole Swenson, the Commander of the Dragon’s Egg expedition.

“Dragon Slayer! Your last laser communicator is dead. Switch to alternate links! Dra…”

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 thought for a while about answering the anxious human in order to reassure her that the crew was in no immediate danger. But by the time she had finished saying the word “Dragon Slayer,” he would have obtained permission to proceed with the rest of the mission and he could tell her the better news that the cheela were going to try to return the crew to the command ship, St. George. He erased the image of the human from his screen and set up a call to the Administrator of the Slow One Transport Project.

Two turns later, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 received an in-person visit by the administrator of the Slow One Transport Project. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 didn’t like working with the Ancient One, who insisted on being addressed by his archaic egg-name, instead of his position.

“I am Lovely-Eyes,” said the administrator. The wrinkled hide and erratic eye-stub motion contrasted with the intense gleam from the dark red eyes.

“Coupling experiments successful,” reported Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“Excellent!” said the administrator.

“Excellent!!” the administrator said again, unnecessarily repeating himself.

“Excellent!!!” said the administrator once again.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 began to be concerned. The eye-stub wave pattern on Lovely-Eyes accelerated, and his hide changed color as his emotions reached the breaking point. His tread started to move again.

“Pro…” Suddenly four eye-balls fell sightless to the deck. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 immediately realized that the ancient one had suffered a stroke affecting one of the tri-lobes of his brain-knot.

“Lovely-Eyes!” Electromagnetic-Manager/1 rushed over to assist the Ancient One. His tread ’trummed an emergency call into the deck as he moved.

Eight, intense, dark red eyes stared him to a halt. They were not “lovely eyes,” they were fanatical eyes.

“Pro…Pro…ceed with project.” The treading was weak, but distinct.

“Lovely-Eyes,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. “I stay until medicos come.”

“Go!” came the reply. “And call me Lovely-Eyes no longer. Call me Human-Savior.”

The great wrinkled hide shuddered and collapsed. The body of the Ancient One flowed in all directions. When the medical robots tried to enter, their way was blocked.

After checking with Manager-Director/5, the Web-Con supervisor of the Slow One Transport contract, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 returned to the laser communicator. The human, Carole Swenson, had finished her sentence and was now looking wide-eyed at the screen as she read the message from the cheela. There wasn’t time to wait for the human to react, so Electromagnetic-Manager/1 left a long message for the St. George computer and a shorter one for her.

“Dragon Slayer will be disintegrated. Six Eyes of Bright will be collapsed. Return for crew in six months.” He turned off the laser communicator, gathered his engineers and their robots, and headed for Dragon Slayer.

Void-Maker/111 arranged her robotic crew with care around the periphery of the large viewport window in the south pole of the human spacecraft. When she received the signal from Manager-Director/5 she activated her console and the robots disintegrated the hull around the window. The viewport blew away as the air emptied out of the ship. She touched her tread screen and the image of another Web-Con engineer appeared. It was Graviton-Maker/321.

“To you,” said Void-Maker/111.

“To me,” replied Graviton-Maker/321.

“Don’t…”

“Won’t.” Both of their screens rippled with laughter.

Graviton-Maker/321 set his crew of gravity robots in the path of the slowly tumbling plate of glass. This piece of high-strength glass was one of the many parts of the spacecraft that the expanded matter scientists wanted to examine. As soon as his robots had the viewport under control, he sent some of them off with the window while he and the rest of the crew returned to Dragon Slayer. By the time he had returned, Void-Maker/111 had cut a large circular sample out of the spacecraft hull. The task of capturing the circular piece of hull was so similar to the task of catching the viewport that Graviton-Maker/321 did not even bother to monitor the robots. They were faster thinking and more intelligent than he was when it came to doing their job.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 and his team had arrived and Graviton-Maker/321 joined them as they entered the hole where the viewport had been. They all felt a little uneasy as they entered the dark interior of the ship. Not only was the friendly glare of Egg gone, but they could no longer see the sky.

“Human Protection Tank 6 ahead,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1 to his team as they floated into the center of the cylindrical room. “Take over control.”

A team of electromagnetic engineers brought up their generators. Each team was assigned a disinto engineer whose crew of robots were used to clear a path through the walls and cut the cables. In a few dothturns they had cut free Tank 6 containing Abdul from the main hull, had replaced the ship’s power to the tank with their own, and had inserted their own optical link in the fiber optic connection to the rest of the tanks.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 monitored the video transmission channel and looked once again at a human as seen in their own region of the visual spectrum. This human was very different from Carole, the Commander of the human expedition. The hair on top of this human’s head-lump was short and black instead of long and yellow. But instead of the ridiculously long thick braid coming out of the top of the head-lump, this human had a ridiculously long string of hair in the middle of the head-lump. The face was dark colored, and the pupils of the eyes seemed very wide open. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 wondered if the look of the human was due to the breathing mask that the humans had to wear under water, or whether something else had caused it.

04:02:39 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

“I lost power for a second!” said Abdul, just short of panic. “What’s going on?”

“The cheela have breached the hull and are wandering around inside Dragon Slayer,” said Pierre.

“I sure hope they know what they are doing!” Abdul replied.

04:02:40 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

Manager-Director/5 set up a conference link with her team leaders.

“All tanks separated,” said Void-Manager/18.

“All tanks powered,” said Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

“All samples obtained,” said Science-Manager/23.

“Monopole generators ready,” said Monopole-Manager/4.

“Inertia pushers ready,” said Graviton-Manager/53.

“Proceed,” said Manager-Director/5. She returned to the task of braiding the long hair on her prize-winning Slink. She could have had robots do it for her, but Rapunzel deserved personal care.

“Cut away,” Void-Manager/18 told his team of engineers.

Void-Maker/111 and her robots sliced off the science tower at the north pole of Dragon Slayer, and it floated upward in the residual gravity tides. There it would be held in place by gravity robots while the disinto robots reduced it to stored energy.

“To you,” said Void-Maker/111.

“To me,” said Graviton-Maker/321. He paused, waiting for the next phrase from Void-Maker/111. There was a long pause.

“Touch,” said Void-Maker/111, holding off her disinto robots for a while.

“Touch!” said Graviton-Maker/321. He sent his personal flitter directly at the gigantic structure. He pulled his eyes in under their eyeflaps to avoid the glare as the cold metal turned into a hot plasma as it was torn apart by the strong gravity field surrounding his spacecraft. There was a breeze of ionized gas that rapidly settled to the deck and he was through to the other side.

“Touch!” he hollered again on his screen as he swooped his flitter around and dove once more at the mountain of nothing.

Soon, most of the engineers had put their crews of robots on automatic and joined in the fun. Manager-Director/5 was notified of the disruption by the contract performance program, but she did nothing about it. The robots would probably get the rest of the job done in half the time, now that the cheela engineers were out of the way having fun.

It took five long seconds to reduce Dragon Slayer to five spherical steel tanks, bobbing gently in the center of the ring of six condensed asteroids. The cheela electromagnetic engineers brought back the laser communicator, attached it to Pierre’s tank, and set it up so it was pointed out to St. George.

04:02:45 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

“Am I glad to see you!” Carole Swenson said as Pierre’s face appeared on her screen. “Is everyone okay?”

“So far,” said Pierre. He reached to his control panel and set up a split screen display format that combined the images of the remaining crew members of Dragon Slayer with that of Carole.

“I’d sure like to see what those busybodies are doing to us,” said Abdul. “But the monitor cameras went with the rest of the ship.”

“We have the large telescope trained on you,” Carole told him. “At this distance, each of your acceleration tanks is just a blob, but we can resolve the compensator asteroids easily. We can even detect the activities of the cheela. Although they and their machines are too small to see, they are white-hot and we can get a lot of information from speckle interferometry. Except for a few machines near you, they seem to be concentrating out at the asteroid ring. Let me transfer a picture.”

The screen blanked and a visual image overlaid with computer graphics appeared on the screen. The computer had strobed the picture at the rotation rate of Egg so the asteroids looked as if they were standing still.

“One of the asteroids is smaller than the others,” said Jean.

“According to the plan they left with me,” Carole explained, “they are going to shrink all the asteroids by dumping magnetic monopoles in them. Then they are going to shrink the radius of the ring until the asteroids coalesce into a solid rotating ring of magnetically charged, ultra-dense matter. I don’t like that. The tides from the gravity field of the ring are going to get orders of magnitude larger than the tides from Egg. I don’t think even your acceleration tanks are going to help you survive that.”

“You forgot the augmentor masses,” Seiko told her.

“What are those?” asked Carole.

“The augmentor masses were well covered by the cheela in their briefing to us, Commander Swenson,” said Seiko. “I’m sure the information was in your briefing.”

“I just scanned it quickly,” admitted Carole.

“The augmentor masses are dense masses just like the compensator masses, but there are only two of them. Instead of being placed in a ring around the point to be protected, they are placed above and below the place to be protected. In that position the two masses add to the tides of the neutron star.”

“But that would just make the tides worse,” said Carole.

“Not in this case. When they shrink the size of the ring of compensator masses, the tides from the ring get stronger than the tides from the star, so the star tides have to be ‘augmented’ by the augmentor masses.”

“The cheela are bringing them now.” Cesar was looking out the porthole in his acceleration tank. The augmentor masses were modest-sized, old-fashioned cheela spaceships about the size of a softball. They had black holes in the middle of them to provide enough gravity to keep the cheela in their condensed state.

“Looks like we each get two augmentor masses,” Abdul said as he watched the activity outside his porthole. “I thought there would be two big ones.”

“Because of the way that tidal forces add,” said Seiko. “They can do a better job if they null out the tides for each one of the tanks individually.”

“The asteroids are now tiny dots,” said Jean.

“And the ring is starting to shrink,” Pierre added.

“I’ll never complain about a mere 200 gees per meter again,” said Abdul. “Hey! The ultrasonic pressure drivers have started. This is getting serious!”

“The ring of asteroids is now at 50-meters radius and has coalesced into a solid ring,” said Carole. “Things seem to have halted.”

Suddenly the screens blanked and a message appeared on all their screens.

NEXT PHASE STARTS IN 10 SECONDS.
DRAGON SLAYER CREW WILL RETURN IN SIX MONTHS.

The ten seconds passed slowly. The next two milliseconds were full of activity. Each tank was jerked upwards away from the center of the ring. The ring was collapsed until it was only a few meters in diameter. As it shrank, its glowing surface turned redder and redder, finally turning into a deep, dark, impossible black. It did not even reflect the yellow-white light from Egg. Then, one by one, the tanks were thrust through the hole in the center of the invisible ring. The heavy steel tanks distorted visibly as they passed through. They did not come out the other side.

04:03:01 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

Pierre screamed as his arms slammed against the creaking walls of the heavy steel tank. Just as he thought that his fingers were going to be pulled off his hands, it was over. He coughed up some water he had inhaled, cleared his mask, and tried his control panel. The video display was dead, so he looked out his porthole.

He could make out the presence of three of the other tanks from the light coming from their portholes. Egg and its ever-present glare was gone.

Most of the sky was black and starless. In the distance was a small elliptical patch with a few dozen stars in it. The stars in the patch of sky were blue to ultraviolet in color. What was most confusing was that the patch of starlight seem to be rotating, while he and the rest of the tanks were standing still.

“That was a Kerr space-warp!” Pierre said out loud.

“That is correct,” came a voice. The image of Sky-Speaker was on the screen.

“That can’t be!” said Pierre. “I remember from my gravitational engineering courses that a Kerr ring with the mass of a sun would have a one-kilometer hole. The compensator asteroid masses are orders of magnitude less massive than the sun. The biggest ring they could make would be less than a micron in diameter. According to Einstein, that was impossible…”

“Einstein was intelligent, but human,” said Sky-Speaker. “He failed to combine gravity and electromagnetism. We have. The unified theory agrees with Einstein for large masses. For very small masses, the diameters of magnetized space-warps are larger than Einstein predicted.”

While Sky-Speaker was talking, Pierre noticed that the string of free-floating spheres was being moved. The tanks with their clouds of robot-tended equipment had moved back under the rotating patch of sky. The cheela robots formed the tanks into a circle and accelerated them until they were moving in the same direction as the whirling patch of sky above them. The acceleration continued.

“We’re moving in time,” said Pierre.

“Yes,” said Sky-Speaker. “The rate is one month normal galactic time per ten minutes proper time for your crew. You will return through space-warp in one hour. Six months will have passed in normal space. The asteroid Oscar will have returned.”

The cheela robots now had communication links set up between all the tanks, and Pierre could see each of the remaining crew members on one of his miniature screens.

“Is everyone okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Abdul. “But I’m not looking forward to going back through that meat grinder again.”

“The engineering check program indicates a problem,” said Jean.

“I’m surprised it is still functional after the drastic changes the cheela made,” said Seiko.

“What’s the problem?” Pierre asked.

“There is a leak in Tank 6,” Jean replied.

“Whose tank is that?” asked Pierre.

“Mine,” replied Abdul. “She’s right. I’ve lost some pressure. The water must have frozen and plugged the leak, though. The pressure seems to have stabilized.”

“The tank must be repaired!” Cesar said. “It surely cannot withstand another trip through those extreme tidal forces.”

“The cheela can work miracles. But I don’t think they can weld the mist we call steel. I’ll just have to risk it.” Abdul paused, looking puzzled, then turned away from the video pickup and put his hands against the back wall of the tank.

“Hey!” he said. “I feel little tiny tugs of gravity near the wall. They keep zipping back and forth.”

“I can see some activity outside your tank,” Seiko told him. “It looks like an electric arc. I think they are attempting to weld the leak shut.”

“I hope it holds,” said Abdul.

05:06 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
(00:01 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)

“Ten seconds to reentry,” said Sky-Speaker. Pierre saw the view outside his porthole tilt and shift as the circle of tanks turned into a line of tanks that swooped away from the patch of sky in a large arc, then dove headfirst through the Kerr-warp at high speed. The next few milliseconds passed too quickly for the tortured humans to follow.

As Oscar neared the space-warp the five tanks popped, one by one, out of the flat circle of black. After the passage of the second tank, the diameter of the ring expanded a little, then shrank just as the third tank passed through. The oscillations in the ring grew larger, and the fourth tank was highly distorted by the tides of the contracting ring. The cheela obviously hadn’t expected this instability. They managed to slow the last tank down so that it wasn’t trying to get through the ring at its minimum radius, but it wasn’t enough. The tank ruptured, spewing a human being and gobbets of water into the vacuum of space.

The cheela robots assembled the remaining four tanks in a line just below the periapsis of the plunging asteroid, Oscar. The asteroid passed rapidly over the tanks, and one at a time its gravity field jerked the tanks upward in a high trajectory that took them quickly away from the tides of Egg.

The cheela attempted to help the remaining human. They moved a piece of tank to shield him from the radiation from Egg. They kept him from being torn apart by the gravity tides by making a miniature compensator ring of dense spacecraft that circled around him. However, they couldn’t prevent him from being dragged back toward the massive space-warp. His eyes temporarily protected from the vacuum of space by his underwater mask, Abdul looked up and waved goodbye to his departing comrades. Then, pushing off from the heavy piece of steel tank, he dove headfirst into the whirling black ring to join the atoms that had once been Amalita. Just before he reached the ring his body was momentarily surrounded by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash and he was gone.

05:15 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
(00:10 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)

The four tanks were met at the top of their trajectory by a flitter from St. George that took them in tow. While one spacesuited figure secured the tow line, another came over and peered in Pierre’s porthole. It was Commander Carole Swenson. He saw a big grin on her face as she put her helmet against the outer wall of the tank and hollered a greeting.

“That’s the last time I let you have a spaceship to drive,” she said. “Did you get the license number of the truck?”

She knew Pierre couldn’t talk underwater except through his throat mike, so she shouted one more message and pushed back to the flitter for the ride in.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “See you in the air lock.”

Pierre couldn’t understand why Carole was so happy. Perhaps it was because at least four of the crew of Dragon Slayer made it back. All Pierre could think of, however, was that two of them didn’t. They had been his responsibility, and now they were dead. He dreaded what he had to do next. He would have to let their families know. How do you tell someone that their loved ones had been torn to atoms?

05:50 CREW TIME 22 JUNE 2050
(00:45 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)

The four tanks were crowded into the cargo air lock on St. George, and soon the lock was full of balls of water and sloppy, wet, sobbing people.

“I’m sorry about Amalita and Abdul, Carole,” Pierre said as he took off his mask. “If only there was something I could…”

“Hush…” Carole was smiling happily. “Come! I want you to meet a couple of friends of ours.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor to the communications room. The room was empty except for the communications operator. Pierre was completely baffled.

“Hello, Pierre.” It was Amalita’s voice.

“Did you have a nice ride up from Egg?” Abdul’s voice asked.

Pierre whirled around to face a communications screen at one end of the room. He saw video images of Amalita and Abdul in two segments of the screen.

“Surprise! Surprise!” Abdul yelled.

“It really is us,” Amalita said. “Or at least all of us that counts.”

“I even have a moustache to twirl.” Abdul lifted his hand to twirl the end of his long moustache. “And it feels like the real thing even though it’s made of software instead of hardware.”

Carole squeezed Pierre’s arm in reassurance as she spoke. “The cheela scanned them thoroughly just before their bodies were destroyed,” she said. “Their intellect patterns now reside in cheela supercomputers.”

“But Amalita was irradiated and frozen,” Pierre protested.

“I admit I have a lot of missing memories,” said Amalita. “But the basic personality is still there.”

“Yeah!” said Abdul. “She’s just as bossy as ever.”

“Hush!”

“See?” said Abdul, raising his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders. “She’ll be even more bossy when we get into those walk-around bodies they’re building for us.”

“We have slowed ourselves down so we can say goodbye to all of you and our families,” said Amalita. “Then we had better get back up to normal cheela rates if we are going to stay up with what is going on down here…”

“Doc! Seiko! Jean!” Abdul called. “Over here on the screen.”

Pierre turned around to see astonished looks on the remainder of his crew as they came into the communications room. His chronometer chimed the hour, and he looked down at it. He started to reset it to make it agree with the clock on the wall, but decided against it. Not many people lived on a time-line six months shorter than the rest of the universe.

06:00 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

The long day was over.