Landing

21:00:10 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

“Everyone out of the southern hemisphere,” Captain Otis-Elevator said into his tread amplifier. The command rippled out from the control deck at the “north pole” of the large cargo hauler and echoed back and forth through the hull underneath the deserted cargo holds on the bottom of the spherical ship. The warning was unnecessary. They were rapidly approaching the surface of Otis, and from the southern hemisphere it looked as if the planetoid were falling directly down upon them.

The inertia drive humming vigorously, the mighty cargo ship approached the planetoid. Otis-Elevator hovered at a point fifty meters from Otis while they watched the asteroid slowly turn. The attraction from Otis was now stronger than the attraction from the black hole in the middle of the cargo ship.

“Feels good being under a little gravity once again,” said Cliff-Web.

“I wouldn’t know; I’ve always lived in space.” Otis-Elevator slowly descended in a vertical trajectory. As they drew closer, the gravity became stronger and began to approach the gravity on Egg. Choruses of groans could be heard through the deck.

“I can’t hold my eyes up,” said Otis-Elevator.

Cliff-Web looked at the pilot, who was struggling to keep his eyes elevated in the strong gravity field. The eye-stubs were thin, and wavered as they attempted to balance the heavy eyeball on top of them. Cliff-Web’s eye-stubs had automatically thickened into the proper exponential shape. They ached slightly from generations of little use, but at least the automatic balance reflexes kept the eyes steady.

“I didn’t realize that you might not be able to function in high gravity,” said Cliff-Web. “Shall I take over the controls?”

“No, I can handle it, but I’m going to have to switch to tread-screen control.” He pulled his eyes in under his eyeflaps and concentrated on the taste image on the deck beneath his tread.

They dropped quickly down the last few meters, then, very slowly, Otis-Elevator put the cargo ship down on the crust. The hemispherical top flattened noticeably as Otis pulled hard at the black hole at the center of the cargo ship. Squeals and pops could be heard through the deck plates. The stabilizing fields that held the black hole at the center of the spacecraft finally reached their limit and the black hole fell through the bottom of the hull into the center of Otis where it evaporated. The hull rebounded a little, then stabilized.

Cliff-Web had thought they could begin work as soon as they landed, but it took a dozen turns and a lot of food to build up the space-bred cheela to the point where they could function in the strong gravity field. Cliff-Web had returned to normal rapidly and had taken a prospecting trip out on the ten-meter ball while the others were building up their strength.

“The portable analyzer says that the crust has a high percentage of high-strength metals,” he said upon returning. “The volcanic regions where we inserted the monopoles have ejecta containing some of the rarer neutron-rich isotopes that we might need for alloying, but other than that, the composition of the crust is pretty much the same everywhere. Let’s set up the power generators and start the mass separators and foundries going.”

Within half a great, the mass separators were pouring out powdered raw materials that were turned into working stock by the foundries. The first structure they constructed was a simple space fountain. It only had one stream of rings and only went up 50 meters to a crude top platform, but it sufficed as a landing dock for other spacecraft in the fleet. Soon, most of the space cheela were on Otis, working to make the gravity machines that would enable them to return from their enforced exile from Egg.

Their next task was the construction of a large gravity catapult capable of accelerating the lander at many times Egg gravity so it would reach the escape velocity of Egg after less than 10 centimeters of travel. Unlike the ancient gravity catapults now lying dormant on Egg, which had only to toss small spacecraft into the sky, this gravity catapult had to be big enough to toss a miniature copy of itself to those speeds. It took nearly four greats of turns to fabricate the twenty-centimeter ring with its meters and meters of high-strength tubing full of ultra-dense liquid and the battery of pumps to accelerate the fluid to high velocities rapidly. The uniformity of the resulting gravitational repeller field was important.

“Run it up again,” Cliff-Web ordered. He was monitoring the display of the array of gravity sensors spread across the center of the gravity catapult ring. The ring was large in diameter, but small in thickness. Cliff-Web had pushed every rule of gravitational engineering to make it. It only had to work once, but if it worked, it was worth it. The tests they were doing now were at fractions of its operational power levels. That would do—until the final blink when full power was applied. The machine hummed, and the sensors displayed a contour map of gravitational force levels.

“There is only a difference of a billion gravities across the central centimeter portion,” Engineer Push-Pull announced. “Surely the lander can handle that.”

Cliff-Web looked carefully at the contours, made minor adjustments to some trim loops and closed down the display.

“The launch ring is ready. Next is the lander,” he said. “We have passed apoapsis, so we have only four greats of turns to build it.”

“It will be ready long before that,” said Push-Pull.

“I’m sure,” said Cliff-Web. “But there is someone else we must consult with before it is properly delivered.” He reset his tread screen, treaded a brief formal message, then left without waiting for a reply. The reply would come later, much later.

21:02:03 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

The call that Pierre had been dreading came. “Request asteroid O-l be reprogrammed to arrive at spacetime point given by following coordinates,” said the image of Cliff-Web. There followed an x,y,z,θ,φ,λ,τ listing of coordinates in the Dragon’s Egg spacetime system. The requested orbit went far down in the gravity well of Egg so that the ten percent time rate and frame drag difference between deep space and the surface of the neutron star was significant.

Cliff-Web was not used to talking to humans. He forgot to always assume the same position each time he checked in at the screen for a reply, so his image flickered every fifth of a second.

Pierre hesitated. The image flickered.

The real decision had been made long ago. Pierre touched the screen in front of him, and the coordinates were transferred to the herder rockets that kept Otis on its desired path. Pierre then pushed the execute square on his touch screen. The engines on the herder rockets flared. Within seconds Otis was on a new trajectory that would take it within a few meters of the surface of Dragon’s Egg.

21:02:20 GMT TU6SDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Push-Pull looked up from his testing apparatus to stare out at the herder rockets that swarmed around Otis. “There seems to be some activity in the large human spacecraft surrounding us.”

“I noticed,” said Cliff-Web. “What is the status of the high flow-rate tubes?”

“They passed flow tests at twice design pressures, and failed just above that,” said Push-Pull.

“Good, but too good. Reduce their thickness by a half-dozeth and test them again. I want this machine light enough to jump itself 40 meters off Egg.”

The construction of the four-centimeter-diameter self-levitating gravity lander took significantly less time than the larger machine. They were finished with nearly a great of turns left before Otis reached periapsis.

Steel-Slicer came to see the completed lander. It was a torus sitting inside a larger torus.

“What’s its name?” Steel-Slicer asked.

“It’s just the lander,” Cliff-Web replied with obvious annoyance. “It doesn’t have a name except Egg Surface Descent Craft, if you want to be formal.”

“All ships have to have a name,” said Steel-Slicer. “Since it flies above the surface of Egg it should have the name of some flying animal.”

“There are no flying animals on Egg.” Cliff-Web was even more annoyed.

“There are flying animals on the human planet Earth,” Push-Pull interjected. “One of them is the eagle.”

“Eagle it shall be.” Steel-Slicer declared.

“If you say so,” said Cliff-Web.

“Is there anything else we should do?”

“I would do some thinking,” said Cliff-Web. “Once we have landed on Egg, there is no way to get off again until we have rebuilt civilization. We are mass limited and must only take the things we will need. If we forget to take something, there is no going back. Tell me. What is the minimum list of skilled technologists and equipment you need to rebuild a civilization?”

“I don’t know,” said Steel-Slicer.

“Neither do I. But 122 turns from now we had better know.”

The turns passed as the members of the landing party were selected and their equipment was packed in the compounds constructed on the topside of Eagle. Egg grew larger in the sky, then disappeared behind the horizon of their miniature planet as the human herder rockets turned Otis until the gravity catapult was facing back along the orbital trajectory. With the light of Egg gone from the sky they had to make do with the dull glow from the surface of Otis. The cold reddish light put a pall over their last turnfeast together.

The food preparers had done their best. Besides the large mounds of artificial foods from the food machines, there were a number of whole pet Slinks, especially fattened for the occasion and beautifully garnished with fresh nuts and fruits from the gardens that had been started on Otis from artificially fabricated seeds shortly after they had arrived. The center of attention, however, was a whole roast cheela. The body was badly flattened from a fall off the scaffolding around the gravity catapult, but that didn’t hurt the taste. Steel-Slicer and Cliff-Web decided not to try to push through the crowd and settled for one of the Slinks.

“Excellent Slink,” Steel-Slicer said, sucking the eye off an eye-stub chunk.

“Not as good as food Slinks back on Egg,” said Cliff-Web.

“I’ve been trying to forget they exist.”

“Back when I was on Egg, I never really paid much attention to my food,” Cliff-Web said. “At turnfeast I would just stuff my pouches as if I were recharging a machine. Now that we are getting close to returning to Egg, my pouches are beginning to ache for a decent chunk of food Slink or a squirt of South Pole singleberry juice.”

“It has been so long…” The Steel-Slicer turned silent as he thought of the agony and hopeless despair the two separated groups of cheela had undergone over dozens and dozens of generations. Although he had just undergone rejuvenation again, he felt old and tired.

The following turn passed rapidly. The elevator on the Space Fountain was in continuous operation as the base on Otis was abandoned and most of the cheela returned to their spacecraft. All that were left were the brave 144 that were to fly down to Egg on Eagle.

On the crust of Otis, Cliff-Web watched the cargo ship pull away from the top of the Space Fountain. Once it was clear, he flicked his eye-stubs at an engineer who was waiting at the controls. The engineer made an adjustment, and the high-pitched whine coming through the crust started to drop in tone. Slowly the tower grew shorter and shorter. Soon the tower was reduced to a pile of metal rings and a stack of platforms. It might have been simpler to turn off the stream of rings and let the tower fall, but Cliff-Web didn’t want any stray projectiles orbiting around Otis and dropping on Eagle.

Their next task was to charge up the flow tubes on Eagle.

“Attach the power cables to the pumps on Tube Array 1,” said Cliff-Web. Large masts rose from holes in the crust and coupled to two dozen pumps spaced around the periphery of Eagle. The pumps hummed to life, and the ultra-dense black-hole dust circulated faster and faster in the array of tubes. The hull of Eagle creaked as the fluid reached relativistic velocities; still the pumps pushed. The fluid became heavier instead of moving faster, and the gravity potentials inside the torus became so intense that they could no longer be described by the old Einstein theory. The rate of change of flow rate had been slow, however, so the gravity repulsion forces generated in the hole of the torus had been negligible.

Cliff-Web felt the whining of the pumps reach a peak and level off. Eagle now had one of its two multi-tube arrays charged with energy in the form of high speed ultra-dense mass. It was time for them to leave.

“Switch to internal power,” he said. There was a hesitation in the sound as the pumps were switched from the outside power connectors to internal stored power. The stored power to compensate for friction and gravitational radiation losses would only last a few milliseconds, so they had to be on their way. He watched as the huge power conductors that had energized Eagle were retracted from their connectors on the hull and lowered down into holes in the crust. Eagle, perched on its launching pad, was now free to fly.

Cliff-Web, his engineer’s part done, stopped the normal wave motion of four of his eye-stubs and stared at Otis-Elevator.

“Eagle ready for launch, Captain,” said Cliff-Web.

Otis-Elevator waited as the motion of Otis took the dot on the tread screen beneath him along its plotted path. The orbit would take Otis within 100 meters of the surface of Egg, where it would pass over the surface at one-third the speed of light. There were rumblings in the crust of Otis as the tidal forces from Egg attempted to pull the planetoid apart. Cliff-Web anxiously looked out in all directions, hoping that the crust in this region would hold together for a few more microseconds.

Just before the planetoid reached its periapsis, the captain acted. “Launch!” commanded Otis-Elevator. His tread moved rapidly over the touch screen beneath him and neutrino beams sent out coded signals from Eagle to the machinery sitting around it. The power generators had been storing their power in temporary accumulators while waiting for the launch command. When the signal came, all the stored energy plus all the power that the generators could produce was switched into the pumps that drove the ultra-dense dust in the bigger gravity catapult.

The pumps, shrieking from the high loads, pushed the dust in the twenty-centimeter-diameter torus at unbelievable accelerations. The moving stream of black holes generated a rapidly increasing gravitomagnetic field inside the torus. The increasing gravitomagnetic field in turn generated a repulsive gravitational field at the center of the torus. Eagle was repelled upwards at many times the gravity of Egg, but the crew felt nothing, for the forces were gravitational. Eagle reached a third of the speed of light in two nanoseconds and left the surface of Otis to find itself hovering motionless 100 meters up over the outskirts of Bright. It started to fall.

“Divert one-twelfth flow in Tube Array 1 to Tube Array 2,” said Otis-Elevator.

There was a pause, then the First Officer replied. “No response, Captain.”

“Try it again.” Eagle built up speed as it fell.

“I did, sir,” First Officer Space-Treader responded. “The signals are being sent and received, but the diverter valve is not responding. It must be stuck!”

“It’s not stuck,” interjected Cliff-Web. He transferred an image of the diverter valve from his engineer’s screen to that of the two officers. “Someone forgot to remove the safety pin. You can see the glow-tab at the end.” He flowed off the screen and headed for the inner railing that surrounded the hole in the torus.

“Use some of our accumulator energy to slow the flow in Tube Array 1,” he said as he squeezed his body beneath the railing. “We can’t land using that, but it will slow our fall and give us more time.”

“Where are you going?” Otis-Elevator asked. The reply was distant and muffled, for the vibrations set up by Cliff-Web’s tread had to make a circuitous path from the tubular engines of Eagle up to the command deck.

“I’m going to pull that pin,” said Cliff-Web.

Cliff-Web found Tube Array 2 and made his way along the gigantic bundle of pipes that wound in layers around the toroidal body of Eagle. Fortunately, Eagle had enough self-gravity that he was in no danger of falling. As he neared the central hole in the ring he could see the crust of Egg below him. The captain had the pumps to Tube Array 1 on, but Eagle was still falling rapidly. Cliff-Web reached the juncture where Tube Arrays 1 and 2 connected through the diverter valve. As he got near Tube Array 1 his tread started to slip as the rushing ultra-dense dust inside the tube tried to drag him along in its inertial reference frame. He clenched his tread tighter against the smooth surface of Tube Array 2 and carefully made his way to the diverter valve. He pulled the pin and held it up to the video monitor.

“Divert flow!” he shouted, hoping that they could hear him over the long distance through the hull.

“I will wait!” roared the captain’s amplified voice from the ship’s general announcement system. “Hurry!”

Cliff-Web looked at the rapidly approaching crust. Somewhere down there were dozens and dozens of bags of South Pole singleberry juice that he would never get to taste.

“Too late!” Cliff-Web shouted. “Divert flow!”

The diverter valve slammed. The ultra-velocity, ultra-dense dust switched from one Tube Array to the other. The change in gravity potential created an ultra-strong repulsive gravity field that pushed Cliff-Web from his perch near the diverter valve and threw him toward the crust below. There was a bright streak of incandescent plasma, and he was gone.

Eagle’s repulsor gravitational field reached out from the central hole in its hull and shoved against the mass of Egg below it. The spacecraft slowed its fall, Captain Otis-Elevator finally gained control. They couldn’t afford to hover for long, since they would soon have diverted all the flow. Eagle had drifted over a small mountain range, and he would have to move them to a flatter landing place.

Flying on the repulsive gravitational forces, Eagle coasted down the mountain slopes, causing minor crust-quakes as it made its own valley down a mountainside. They passed over a herd of animals grazing in the plains, scattering them in all directions. Then, with the last bit of stored energy surging through the pumps to augment the last of the diverted flow, they floated down to a landing. First Officer Space-Treader monitored the sensors and video monitors on the bottom of the hull.

“…200 millimeters…four-and-a-half down…contact indicator…engine stop…”

There was a pause as the heavy machine sank slightly into the crust, then ’trums and electronic whistles sounded as Captain Otis-Elevator announced through the neutrino communication link to the waiting ships in orbit.

“East Pole Station! Dragon’s Egg Base here. The Eagle has landed!”

Cheers vibrated throughout the hull of Eagle and were echoed by the communications console under Admiral Steel-Slicer’s tread. He did not join in, however, for all of his eyes were looking upward at the fragmented remains of the deorbiter mass, Otis. They had saved a world, but at the expense of sentencing five innocent friends to a slow death.

21:02:46 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

The first warning Letter-Reader had of the catastrophe was the rumbling in the crust from the direction of the low hills nearby. His eye-wave pattern hesitated for a blink, then resumed as his brain-knot identified the sound as just another crustquake. Four of his non-pink eyes then returned to their task of reading the ancient scroll that lay unsprung on the crust. The scroll contained instructions for the operation of a magical machine that could talk to the stars in the sky. There were many words that Letter-Reader didn’t know, but he hoped that by reading the scroll again and again they would become clear.

The crustquake continued to rumble and seemed to be getting closer. The hunting reflexes built into Letter-Reader’s pink and white speckled tread alerted his brain-knot, and he stopped reading to analyze the vibrations coming through the crust. It didn’t sound like the approach of a wild Swift, so his herd of food Slinks were not in danger of attack. It was something new, however, and it was coming his way.

Letter-Reader looked off in the direction that his tread had indicated. At first he saw nothing, then he noticed a disturbance in the crust. The disturbance was coming down the side of one of the nearby hills. He then looked up to see that one of the stars was falling from the sky. It was coming straight for him! His screaming tread carried him along as he and his herd ran away in panic.

Steel-Slicer waited until Otis-Elevator had closed down the pumps on Eagle and had stabilized the energy accumulators.

“Excellent landing,” said Steel-Slicer. “How much energy do we have left in the accumulators?”

“Only a quarter of what Cliff-Web had planned,” Otis-Elevator replied. “But it should be enough to keep ship operations powered for a dozen turns.”

“We will need to have a new power generator up and operating by then,” said Steel-Slicer. “Call the senior engineering staff up to the control deck. I will want your senior officers there, too. Place four spacers at the outer rail as lookouts. We are far from any city, but we did pass over someone on the way in.” The crew deck on Eagle was compact, so it was not long before the senior staff gathered.

“Now that we are on the crust, we spacers are out of a job until you engineers get this gravity catapult reactivated and bring down a ship for us to fly,” said Steel-Slicer. “With Cliff-Web gone, I am going to assume the responsibility for management of the engineering contingent. I want Captain Otis-Elevator to assume responsibility for the spacer contingent. Unless one of the spacers has a technical ability that the engineers can use, their job is support, security, and interaction with the Egg cheela. It is a long way from flying about in ultrasophisticated spacecraft to preparing food and interacting with barbarians, but the sooner the engineers can rebuild technology in this Bright-Afflicted spot, the sooner we can be back into space.”

“We are all in this together,” Otis-Elevator said. “My spacers will do anything that needs to be done.”

“It would help if we didn’t have to use any energy for the food generators,” said Steel-Slicer. “I noticed that we scattered a herd of animals as we landed. If you can form a food-gathering crew and find a few of those animals to feed us, your crew would not only help our energy crisis but be real heroes to a hungry group of engineers.”

“We will return shortly.” Otis-Elevator lead his senior officers off.

“Our first task will be to get power,” Steel-Slicer told the engineers. “Who is in charge of the miniature power plant?”

“I am,” answered Engineer Power-Pack. “My team is loading the parts on the elevator now.”

“I will go down with them,” said Steel-Slicer. “What else will you need?”

“A mass separator and a monopole generator,” said Power-Pack. “We will need hundreds of meters of high-strength pipe to reach the neutron-rich magma below the crust.”

“They will be ready when you need them,” Engineer Delta-Mass assured him. “Guaranteed leakless.”

“I think managing a Web Construction Company project is going to be the easiest job I ever had,” Steel-Slicer said. “Let’s ripple treads.”

“The elevator seems to be moving very slowly,” said Steel-Slicer. “Is it because of the weight of the power plant parts?”

“No,” said Power-Pack. “Cliff-Web programmed the elevator controls for maximum energy extraction rather than maximum safe descent speed. As we offload Eagle, the elevator motors will recharge the energy accumulators. Cliff-Web always liked to find ways of lowering the cost of projects.”

“In this case, he may have saved our hides,” said Steel-Slicer. “He certainly was a remarkable engineer.”

“Yes, he was,” Power-Pack agreed. The elevator deck remained silent for the rest of the ride down.

When they reached the crust, Power-Pack slid aside the low gate and moved back. Steel-Slicer paused, then glided off onto the crust of Egg.

“I have returned,” Admiral Steel-Slicer declared softly into the warm, yellow-white crust. He paused as the others flowed off the elevator to surround him on all sides, awed by their return to their homeland. Then he spoke.

“Call me Admiral Steel-Slicer no longer,” he said. “I used to be called Star-Glider, but from now on call me Crust-Crawler. For I am tired of space, and I am tired of rejuvenations. I shall stay here until I flow.”

Letter-Reader was tending one of his remaining food Slinks, which had been acting sick. He pulled in his normal, dark red eyes and allowed only his three pink eyes to scan the creature. The ultra-red glow from one side of the food Slink indicated a problem. Thankful that his speckle-vision had saved another of the herd, he held it down, reached into one of its feeding pouches, and took out a number of small pebbles that the stupid creature had mistaken for ground nuts. Then he set the food Slink back to grazing.

Thereupon he heard the strangers far off in the distance. They were very noisy. Letter-Reader flattened himself down behind a crust-rock, pulled down his eye-stubs, and let his tread do the seeing. He was glad his hide had some speckles; that made him harder to see.

It was too early for the arrival of the dothbute takers from Bright Center. Besides, they rode Swifts, and even off their mounts they never would have made as much unnecessary noise as these cheela.

He listened carefully and could make out a few voices. The accent was clipped, and he didn’t understand a lot of the words.

“Eagle really plowed a furrow in the crust when we came down,” Otis-Elevator said as they pushed single file through the disturbed crust dust raised by their passage.

“I see something up ahead,” said Lieutenant Star-Counter. “It has black stripes.”

“It must be one of the herd animals.” M.D. Len-McCoy looked at her scroll. “I prepared a list of the types of animals and plants that were said to have survived the starquake.” She rolled quickly through the scroll and stopped. “Here it is. It is a food Slink. The stripes go through to the meat inside. The dark meat has the taste of groundnuts, while the white meat has the flavor of singleberries.”

“My pouches are juicy already,” Star-Counter said. “Let’s capture it and take it back to base.”

“I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble,” said Otis-Elevator. “It doesn’t seem to be moving. But let’s surround it anyway.”

Letter-Reader pushed one eye up. The strangers had found one of the food Slinks that had died when the flying star landed. They moved cautiously, as if they thought the food Slink were still alive. The animal was obviously dead, since there was no pulsing in the crust from the creature’s fluid pumps. There must be something wrong with the treads of the strangers if they couldn’t feel that.

Len-McCoy approached the motionless black and white striped food Slink, then finally saw the large wound on the topside where a falling piece of crust had struck it on the brain-knot.

“It’s dead, Captain.”

“Good. Let’s cut it up and haul it back to base.”

Len-McCoy removed her medical bag from her carrying pouch, and soon a surgeon’s scalpel was serving as a butcher’s slicer.

“I wonder what food the Slinks eat?” Star-Counter pouched a large chunk of food Slink. “I don’t see much except those prickly-looking shrubs.” His manipulator was dripping juice and he stuck it in an eating pouch to suck it clean. “Mmmm. Delicious! Tastes like groundnuts.”

“That plant is a groundnut shrub,” Len-McCoy told him. “These food Slinks have been bred to dig up the crust near these plants and feed on the nuts.”

“We ought to take some of them home, too,” said Otis-Elevator. “While the doctor is cutting up the meat, the rest of you can be digging for groundnuts. They will make a good dressing when mixed with white meal-mush from the food generators.”

“Anything would be better than plain meal-mush,” said a spacer as he started to dig.

Letter-Reader finally felt that he had to do something. After all, it was his job to protect the herd for the clan, and it looked as if the strangers from the flying star were going to take the Slink away and eat it. A lot of hungry younglings back in the clan camp could use that food. He finally unflattened himself and moved to the top of the rise that had kept him hidden. He didn’t try to keep his movements silent, but still the strangers didn’t sense him. He readied his herder’s pike and loosened a bag of tread-pricks in one of his pouches in case they tried to chase after him.

“Greetings, great strangers,” he said, announcing himself. They didn’t hear him.

“GREETINGS,” he said, louder. One of them finally saw him.

“It’s a native,” said Otis-Elevator. “Gather back here and let’s talk with him. This is probably his food Slink we’re cutting up. How did he sneak up on us? Keep some eyes looking around. There may be others.”

“Greetings, great strangers,” Letter-Reader said. “If you are from Bright Center you are early for your dothbute. I am sorry for the loss of the animal, but it was damaged by your new mount that moves with the stars.”

Otis-Elevator was relieved that he could understand most of what the youngling was saying. The tread accent was broad and drawling, and he didn’t get some of the words. The phrase “Bright Center” must refer to the central portion of Bright’s Heaven, while “mount” used a root word that implied that someone rode on something; although there were no machines to ride here. He didn’t understand the word “dothbute” at all.

“Greetings. I am Otis-Elevator,” said the captain. “We are not from Bright Center. We are from the near stars. The ones that do not rotate.”

“I am Letter-Reader,” the youngling replied. “I have read that there were cheela living on the near stars, but I never believed it until now. If you are not from Bright Center, then you cannot take the Zebu Slink. The Taker from Bright Center will be angry with you for taking his dothbute.”

“Who is the Taker?” Otis-Elevator asked. “And what is a dothbute?”

“Each 72 turns the Taker for the Emperor comes from Bright Center and commands us to gather the clan herd. We then give them a dothbute for the Emperor and they leave with the animals. They give us 144 more food Slink eggs of the type that they want for the next harvest, and we tend them until the next taking.”

“They take a dozeth of your herd and don’t even pay you?” Otis-Elevator was incredulous.

“No,” Letter-Reader replied. “We get to keep a dozeth of their herd if we have taken care of them properly.”

“Why don’t you raise your own herd?” asked Otis-Elevator.

“We have no Slink eggs,” said Letter-Reader. “The Emperor does not allow us to have animals that might eat his groundnuts. We ourselves must only harvest groundnuts in the hilly areas where the food Slinks are not allowed. I am afraid the clan will go hungry this great of turns. We lost six Zebu Slinks to wild Swifts, then your machine killed two, and six were scattered and lost. The meat you have belongs to the Emperor. The Taker for the Emperor will be angry that it is not fresh.”

“Tell the Taker that we will pay for the food Slink,” said Otis Elevator. “Right now we need food, but by the next dozen turns we will have plenty of food. The Taker and all your clan can come and have as much as you want.”

“You do not tell the truth. You cannot grow food in a dozen turns.”

“We make the food,” Otis-Elevator said. “We use a machine. It makes foods with many different flavors. Come in a dozen turns and taste them.”

He reached into a pouch, pulled out a glow-jewel eye-ring, placed it on the ground, and moved back away. “That is a present for you. We are sorry that our flying machine scared you and your herd Tell your clan leader we will not let the clan go hungry.”

Letter-Reader was not looking at the glow-ring. Instead four of his eyes were looking at the silvery metal scroll that Len-McCoy was still holding.

“Is that a scroll?” asked Letter-Reader.

“Yes,” said Len-McCoy.

“With letters and words on it?”

“Yes, and some pictures, too.”

“The ring is very pretty, but I would like something new to read,” said Letter-Reader. “I would trade you my scroll for your scroll.” He reached into a pouch and pulled out a soiled and wrinkled scroll. “It is old, and not shiny like your scroll, but you can still read the words on it.” He held it out eagerly.

“I’ll give it to him,” said Len-McCoy. “I can have the computer print out a new list when we get back to base.”

The trade was made, with the captain adding the glow-ring to the bargain. He looked carefully at the ancient scroll.

He unrolled it until he came to the personal sign at the bottom. “It is a portion of a daily log. It was written by Qui-Qui!”

“We must find out where he got it!” whispered Len-McCoy.

“Later. Right now we have to get a gravity catapult activated, make sure that a clan doesn’t starve, and somehow make friends with a dictatorial Emperor that seems to own every last food Slink and groundnut on Egg.” He stopped his electronic whisper, and his tread moved again as he spoke once more to Letter-Reader.

“Who is this Emperor you speak of?” Otis-Elevator asked.

“He is the Mighty One, the Terrible One, the Unforgiving One. The cheela that never flows—Attila-the-Speckled,” said Letter-Reader, his speckled tread trembling at the name.

Meanwhile, back at the base, Engineer Power-pack was setting up the power plant that would give them the energy they needed to survive.

“We are about twenty centimeters from base,” he said. “That should give us enough separation so that crust cracks developing about the power plant won’t interfere with the foundations for the gravity catapult, while the stray gravity fields from the gravity catapult don’t disturb the power plant My crew will set up the bore rig here and start drilling.”

“You have enough hole liner pipe to get started,” said Engineer Delta-Mass. “By the time you get down six centimeters my crew will have made the first dozen centimeters of liner for you. After that we can make it faster than you can drill.”

“We will see,” Power-Pack said. “That antimatter-jet drill that Cliff-Web designed will poke through this crust like a black hole through a human.”

Delta-Mass returned to base, traveling slowly as she planned the route for the power lines that would have to be run over the twenty centimeters between the site of the power plant and the base. By the time she arrived at the base, her crew had the mass separator operating and were feeding it with ground-up loads of crust. Most of the crust emerged from the machine as dust, which was piped away to a dumping site. Rare elements and useful metals and compounds were collected, while the high-strength metals were combined into a strong alloy and extruded as a large diameter pipe.

“The first three centimeters are done,” Delta-Mass told her crew as the end of the long pipe fell to the crust with a ringing clang. “Let’s take an early break for turnfeast. My eating pouches are wet from thinking about the food Slink that is waiting for us. Groundnuts and singleberry together in the same chunk of meat. I can hardly wait.” She led her crew off while the finished pipe was lifted onto cargo-gliders by a transportation crew and hauled off to the distant power plant site.

Delta-Mass stopped at the outskirts of the base to ask directions. In the turn that she and her crew had been getting the mass separator into operation, the base construction crew under the direction of Metal-Bender had nearly dismantled the cargo and living platforms on Eagle and had reassembled them on the crust as a walled living compound.

“Do you have the eating area made yet?” Delta-Mass asked.

“It’s the first thing we built,” replied Metal-Bender. “Go through the east gate in the outer wall, then straight through to the center. That is the combined eating and meeting area.”

“Great!” Delta-Mass started to lead her crew to the east gate.

“You’ll enjoy the food Slink,” said Metal-Bender.

“I hope you and your crew of Swifts didn’t devour it all,” Delta-Mass replied.

“No, the food-service crew wants to make the food Slink last, so they only give you a small piece after you have eaten a big portion of meal-mush.”

The mention of meal-mush brought groans from the treads of the crew. The artificial food generators were quite versatile and could produce a great variety of flavors and textures, but after dozens of greats of eating nothing but artificial food, their pouches ached for something that was different.

The antimatter drill moved rapidly through the crust, and the hole went down millimeter by millimeter as Power-Pack’s drilling crew developed a rhythm. They finally approached the magma layer. The temperatures, pressures, and densities were so high that the outer casing of the drill began to show evidence of transmutation by neutron drip from the surrounding near-fluid of excess neutrons.

“Lower the last section of liner and put a pressure seal on the top,” said Power-Pack. “Then put an antimatter bomb on the end of the drill string in place of the drill and lower it. We are going to make a volcano—a tame volcano.”

The antimatter bomb was lowered to the bottom of the hole, and the drill string was removed. Set off by a coded pulse of acoustic waves, the bomb fractured the remaining few centimeters of crust and the high pressure neutron fluid in the mantle pushed upward to the surface. As the fluid rose into regions of lower pressure, some of the neutrons decayed into electrons and protons, releasing energy and lowering the density of the fluid, so that it rose even faster.

“Here it comes!” Power-Pack shouted over the deep rumble in the crust. “Open the valve to the power generators.”

The high speed, high density, high pressure, high temperature nucleonic fluid rose up through the drill hole and whirled through the power generator where its free thermal, kinetic, and nuclear energies were extracted. The resulting warm crust dust was piped to a nearby depression, while the power extracted from the bowels of Egg flowed over the transmission lines to energize the machinery at the base some twenty centimeters away.

Admiral Steel-Slicer, now Crust-Crawler, met with the senior staff. “We’re on our way,” he said. “But we still have a long way to go. What is next on Cliff-Web’s schedule?”

“The gravity catapult needs a power plant two dozen times more powerful than the one we just got into operation,” said Power-Pack. “My seismic survey team has found a promising upwelling of energetic magma forty centimeters to the Bright-west. We have moved the drilling rig there and are already down a meter on the first hole, but we will need a power plant built.”

“My crew has finished with the living quarters at base,” said Metal-Bender. “We’ve also installed magnetic barriers around the perimeter to keep out wild Swifts. We’re now ready to build the power plant. We have plenty of computer controlled robot welders, nibblers, and cutters for the precision parts, but we need a forge for the larger components. We are ready to go as soon as we get enough metal.”

“The mass separator has been generating plate for the last few turns,” Delta-Mass told them. “But we will have to shift back to liner pipe at the rate Power-Pack’s crew is going. Perhaps the first thing you should build is another mass separator.”

“You’re right,” Metal-Bender replied. “I’ll get my team busy on that.”

“Anything else?” asked Crust-Crawler.

“Don’t forget that I promised the nearby clan we would give them food once we had power,” said Otis-Elevator. “We have visited them a number of times in the past turns and know them pretty well now. It is obvious that they are living at a subsistence level. We have taken them samples of various flavors of meal-mush. They call it the ‘food of the gods.’ “

“Good,” said Metal-Bender. “Let’s trade them a mush-maker for a herd of food Slinks.”

“They won’t do that,” said Otis-Elevator. “They let us have the ones we killed during the landing, but the herd belongs to the Emperor. In fact, I think I notice an increased anxiety in the leader of the clan as the time comes for the arrival of the Taker to take the herd.”

“What did the leader say?” Crust-Crawler asked.

“She won’t talk about it. But every time the subject comes up, I notice a strange twitch in her eye-wave pattern. Of course, it could be my imagination. The clan leader, like a number of the clan elders, is missing some eyes. The old injuries could be causing the twitch.”

“We must certainly keep our promise,” Crust-Crawler said. “Let’s start off by inviting them here for next turnfeast and turn it into a real feast.”

“It will certainly be a pleasure feeding someone that appreciates my food,” said Chef Pouch-Pleaser. “If the engineers can arrange a power pack, I can give the clan one of our food generators and teach them how to operate it.”

“I’ll give them a glider,” said Power-Pack. “They can use it to transport the mush-maker back to their compound, then use the power pack on the glider to run the food machine. When the power pack gets low, they can just glide back here and recharge it.”

“I’ve gotten to know the clan pretty well,” said Otis-Elevator. “They are very proud and will insist on bringing food to the feast.”

“Good!” said Pouch-Pleaser. “I want to learn all about the native foods. Not only how to prepare them for serving, but the best way to grow them. Anything to stop the groans at turnfeast.”

“You are right, Chef,” said Crust-Crawler. “We can’t live on artificial food forever. Don’t forget, our main objective is to become natives of Egg once again.”

“I will invite the clan to the next turnfeast,” said Otis-Elevator.