Marooned

06:58:07.3 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

The hunger-twinges in Speckle-Top moved from one eating pouch to another. They got so bad she began to think about the old days in the dump when the garbage sleds from the centertown eating places would come. It was long past turnfeast and she had to get something to eat. The trouble was, the crust around her was too quiet. The clankers would hear her for sure when she pushed the rock away from the end of the tunnel. So she moved to the tunnel entrance and stuck one eye through a crack between the rock and the wall.

“Bright’s Curse!” she whispered as she pulled her eye back in—a clanker was out there. But there was something wrong with her. Putting her eye back out to watch the reaction of the clanker, she moved the rock slightly. A rasping sound radiated out through the crust, but the clanker didn’t move. Growing bolder, she pushed the rock aside and flowed out into the still sparkling atmosphere.

Keeping her eyes half-shielded under their flaps, she went over to the clanker. The large body had flowed into a wide oval. A few dull yellow-red eyeballs hung out over their fleshy eyeflaps and the large clanker badges had fallen from their holding sphincters.

“Too tender to stand a little crustquake, you slink-treading egg-sucker?” Speckle-Top picked up a clanker badge and stuck it onto her decorationless hide. The badge was heavy, but felt good.

“It looks better on me than you, you eye-ball-sucking father-lover,” she said as she flowed up on the carcass of the clanker and took the rest of her badges. In one pouch she found an electronic lash. Speckle-Top’s hide had tasted the lash the first time she had been caught and had been foolish enough to try to run away. Ever since, the just let the clankers lead her away when they caught her doing something wrong. She flowed off the dead clanker and turned on the lash. High voltage currents flickered across the crust. She swept the lash under the tread of the clanker. The first sweep produced some reflex reaction in the edges of the tread, but even that stopped as the lash played its aura over the dead body.

“Just let any clanker try and get me now!” she bragged, waving the lash around. “I’ll fry their treads and eat them for a ’tweenfeast snack!” She pouched the lash and moved on toward the center of town, the huge badges almost dragging in the crust. The silence bothered her. Ever since she had hatched in the dump on the other side of town, her tread had felt the constant rustle of tread and hum of machine coming through the crust. Now there was nothing, not even the high-pitched whine of the Jump Loop. She finally thought to look up to where the Jump Loop should be, hanging in the sky. It was no longer there.

“That must have been a slider of a quake!” she whispered to herself as she moved slowly on, her street-wary tread alert.

When turnfeast came again, she was no longer hungry. She had loaded her pouches full of strange-tasting foods taken from shops guarded by flowed shopkeepers. Her stuffed hide now glistened with badges of every kind, including the two-star admiral badges she had stolen from the space-trooper. Her speckles were covered with splotches of fluorescent body paint inexpertly applied, and around each eye-stub was one or more expensive glow-jewel eye-rings stolen from a jewelry shop. Her tread felt a sound off in the distance.

“A clanker!” She moved quickly to a narrow alley between two store compounds. Once in the alley, she took off the heavy badges, hid the eye-rings in a pouch, and listened carefully with her tread. There seemed to be only one thing moving and it sounded like a Slink. Feeling a little lonely, she moved off to find the source of the noise. As soon as she started to move, the noise changed direction and headed straight toward her, moving rapidly. Soon, down the road, she could see a Slink, moving as fast as its tread could ripple.

“Hello, Fuzzy-Pink.” Speckle-Top greeted the Slink as it came up to her, its furry top turning reddish-white from exertion. Speckle-Top liked animals and she formed a tendril to reach out and pat the fuzzy hide. The Slink dropped a small scroll on the crust and, avoiding her pat, moved off away from her and waited, its eyes looking first at her, then at the scroll. Speckle-Top moved by the scroll to pat the Slink, but it circled around behind her, picked up the scroll, and put it down next to her tread again.

She gave up trying to pat the Slink and used her tendril to push down on the scroll as she had seen done on the video in the holovid shop displays. The scroll flattened out on the crust. There was some writing on it. A few of the words she knew, like “IN” and “OUT,” but the rest she couldn’t read. The Slink moved restlessly back and forth as she tried to decipher the message. Suddenly she recognized another word. It was “HELP.” She paused. Whoever she helped would probably wonder where she got all the expensive body paint and call the clankers.

“Sorry, Fuzzy-Pink,” she said, letting the scroll roll up on the roadway. “Get someone else. I got to take care of me.”

She started off to enter a food shop along the road. The Slink picked up the scroll, raced ahead of her and put it down in her path, its twelve eyes looking intently at her every motion. She tried to go around, but the Slink moved quickly to block her way. She stopped to rumble a laugh into the crust and reached out again to pat the animal. It dodged and started making quick trips off down the road in the direction it had come, stopping to see if she followed, then running back to repeat the motion. It made anxious little chirps in the crust as it moved.

“All right, Fuzzy-Pink, I’ll come.” She followed the Slink off down the roadway, her tread alert for the sound of a clanker.

The Slink led Speckle-Top toward centertown. When they came to an entrance of a large compound it entered one of the gates in the compound walls. Speckle-Top hesitated, because this was where all the big-badge thinker types worked. A few times she and her gang had thought of sneaking in to see if there was something to steal, but the clankers had kept them out. Seeing her pause, the Slink came back to fetch her, its chirps becoming more and more anxious sounding. She moved inside the compound and heard a faint voice off in the distance, calling. Something was wrong. The voice sounded as if it were coming from inside the crust. She scrubbed her tread hard and waited for the next call. The direction to the voice was definitely downward. Feeling very insecure, Speckle-Top followed the Slink toward the voice until it stopped some distance ahead and intensified its chirps. They were answered by a voice.

“Rin-Tin-Tin! You’re back!” Zero-Gauss said as she spotted the pink ball of fuzz at the top of the ramp. “I do hope you found someone to give the message to.” She placed part of her tread against a side wall and raised the level of her tread vibrations. “Hello out there! Help! I’m trapped in a hole! Help!! Help!!!”

Rin-Tin-Tin raced away and soon was back. This time a young cheela eyeball was peeking over the back of the Slink. The eyeball quickly retracted.

“Bright’s Spew-hole!” Speckle-Top said as she drew her eye in under its flap and tried to forget the terrifying image. With the rest of her eyes she looked at the nice flat crust all around her and tried to calm herself. She tried to talk to the grown-up in the hole but found her tread was clenched tight to the crust. She loosened her tread and, keeping her eyes from looking too often at the missing place in the crust, she finally was able to answer.

“Hello, there,” Speckle-Top said, her tread still shrill from tension. “How did you get down in that hole?”

“By elevator,” Zero-Gauss replied.

“Elevator?”

“It is a machine for going up and down. But it won’t work without power, so I guess I’ll have to stay here until they get the power fixed. Could you please tell your creche-teacher or some adult I’m down here and have them send some help?”

“I don’t have any spew-wiping creche-teacher.” Speckle-Top said in an annoyed tone of voice. “I take care of myself!”

“I’m sorry.” Zero-Gauss was a little shocked at the vulgar language. “I couldn’t see you, and I thought you were a youngling. I’m stuck down here with some hungry research animals and I need to get power restored to my elevator in a hurry. Could you please find a peace officer or someone to notify the authorities?”

“I’m not finding no spew-licking clanker for nobody,” said Speckle-Top. “Besides, they’re all dead. Everybody is dead. You and Fuzzy-Pink are the only things alive I’ve seen anywhere in Bright’s Heaven.”

As they talked, Speckle-Top slowly lost her fear of heights and moved over to one corner of the square hole in the ground until she and Zero-Gauss could see each other while they were talking.

“You are a youngling.” Zero-Gauss felt her protective instincts rising as she saw the skinny, besmirched young cheela. “What happened to you? You are all covered with paint. Are any of your clan left to take care of you?”

Speckle-Top hesitated a little before answering. “No.”

“Then I’ll be responsible for you until we can find a member of your clan. My name is Zero-Gauss. I am a professor at the Institute. But first we’ve got to get me and the animals out of here. They are getting awfully hungry, and I don’t want them eating my research plants.”

She ducked back under one of the massive leaning roof-plates and came back with an empty animal cage. Then she pushed her body up the sloping ramplike intersection between two fallen roof plates at one corner of her devastated underground laboratory and added the cage to the row already there. Holding onto the cages with part of her tread, she stretched herself out until she had one eye perched up above the top of the hole right next to Speckle-Top. Now that she was close enough, she could see that Speckle-Top was one of those dump-hatchlings from West-heaven. That explained the filthy language. Rin-Tin-Tin pushed its way between them to get a pat, now that it had done its duty.

“I can’t get any more than one eye up here,” said Zero-Gauss. “I’ve tried and tried for the last two turns, but I can’t get enough of me out to pull the rest of me up. I need more cages or something to climb on. You should be able to find more cages in that compound over there next to the elevator building.”

“I don’t know.” Speckle-Top patted the top of the Slink and drew it close to her for a hug. “It sounds like a lot of work.”

“Rin-Tin-Tin’s friends are getting awfully hungry,” said Zero-Gauss as she pushed the bottom portion of her tread through some cage bars and poked Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottonball, and Poofsie to make them chirp.

“Well,” Speckle-Top said reluctantly. “Can’t let Slinks starve. Come, Fuzzy-Pink. Show me the cages.”

Zero-Gauss and the animals were up on the crust before the next turnfeast. Zero-Gauss found the laboratory food supply for the animals and reluctantly agreed to let Speckle-Top feed the animals while she explored the compound of the Inner Eye Institute and the surrounding city. It was worse than she had thought. Not only were all the rest of the cheela dead, but all the plants and animals, too. She had gone to the zoo and visited the cages of the giant north hemisphere Flow Slows and Swifts. All dead. The only Flow Slows and Swifts left were her hybrid miniaturized pets. She found a few seeds in some gardening stores, but wondered if they had survived the blizzard of penetrating radiation that seemed to have cooked everything else. Fortunately, the packaged food in the food stores was edible. They and the animals could survive on that until they could get some crops planted and harvested.

When Zero-Gauss returned to the Inner Eye Institute she found that Speckle-Top had arranged the cages and some boxes to make a compound for the animals and was happily playing with them.

When the big-badge professor came back, Speckle-Top’s sharp eyes noticed that she had taken off the cheap plastic badges she had been wearing in the hole and had replaced them with expensive metal ones. Speckle-Top shook off the pile of Slinks that had been clambering all over her and, shoving back an inquisitive mini-Swift, she left the compound she had made. The eye-waves on the big-badge grown-up had a twitch that showed she was worried about something.

“Whole species gone. Wiped out!” said Zero-Gauss. “All we have left is the collection from my laboratory, and it is so limited”

“Looks to me like we got lots of everything,” said Speckle-Top. “The stores are full of food, and when we want something special, we can eat one of your food Slinks. What is the taste of the striped ones?”

“No!” Zero-Gauss was nearly panic-stricken at the thought. “We must not eat them. They are the last ones on Egg. I must breed them to keep the species alive. The plants, too. They are the only ones left. I have to save the plants, too.”

She went to the edge of the hole and looked down at the dozens and dozens of plants many millimeters below. They would survive there for a time, but they or their seeds must be laboriously hauled up on the crust if they were to be available for future generations, if there were any future generations.

Speckle-Top had come up beside Zero-Gauss as she peered down the hole at the plants. The feeling of the immature body next to hers caused the collapse of Zero-Gauss’s last defenses against the Old-One syndrome. She spread out a hatching mantle and covered the scarred, paint-smeared, speckled topside of the ugly youngling.

Speckle-Top had seen adult cheela do many strange things, but it was a new experience for her when the professor developed a long ridge just underneath her eyeflap bulges. The ridge became a sheet that slid up over her speckled topside.

A strange feeling came over her. It wasn’t the intense feeling she got when playing eye-ball games with Crumpled-Tread, but a relaxed, warm, safe feeling. She could finally relax the eternal vigilance that had kept her alive since her first terrifying days in the dump with the wild Slinks hunting her.

Someone was now taking care of her. Someone was now watching out for her. She pulled all her eyes in under their eyeflaps, contracted her body into a small egg-shaped ball under the hatching mantle and rested. She liked the professor and the professor liked her. She liked the animals and they liked her. She wondered if this was what it was like being part of a clan. She decided she would stay if the professor wanted her to.

06:58:08 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

The last place Qui-Qui checked was the Rejuvenation Center. As she expected, everyone was dead there, too, even the “dragon plants,” snapped off at their roots. The large rods of dragon crystal that had supported the plants now lay glistening on the crust. She moved past a motionless robotic body on her way out and stopped as she felt an electronic tingle.

“Emergency! Emergency!” a metallic voice whispered. She moved closer to the robot. The body of the robot didn’t move, but the electronic tingle became stronger.

“Emergency! Emergency!”

“The emergency is over,” Qui-Qui’s tread vibrated through the crust. The robot continued its alarm as if it hadn’t heard her. She switched to whispering herself.

“The emergency is over,” Qui-Qui whispered, using her body to set up oscillations in the sea of electrons around them.

“Emergency! Crustquake! Activate Plan Two! Call Doctor!” said the robot.

“Stop!” commanded Qui-Qui, who owned a dozen personal robots. “Emergency Over! Restart! Report Condition!”

“Three-greths functional,” said the robot. “I must report to a medical doctor. A failure has occurred.”

“Stop! Restart! Emergency over! Tell me how to activate communications links to Bright’s Heaven.”

“I must report to a medical doctor,” said the robot. “You are not a medical doctor.” It fell silent.

Qui-Qui was puzzled. The robot’s eyes were useless. How did it know she wasn’t a medical doctor? She went back to the main offices, found the remains of M.D. Sabin-Salk, pulled off his ornate badges, and replaced her glow-jewel decorations with badges. She went back to the robot, but didn’t get too close. She could have done a good imitation of M.D. Sabin-Salk’s tread accent, but she had never heard him whisper. She did the best she could.

“Tell me how to repair the communication links to Bright’s Heaven!” she commanded.

“Open box,” said the robot.

Qui-Qui was bewildered. She looked around, then saw a large metal box in one corner of the room. The room wall had suffered a large dent where the box had slid into it. She went over to the box and read the badly faded label. It was another robot! According to the label, it was a maintenance robot for the next bank of enzyme machines that were due to be sent to the rejuvenation center. She undid the latches and slid off the heavy lid. Twelve glassy eyes raised up from a Slink-sized dome and looked around. The top of the dome had the design of a cleft-wort plant.

“Energy!” it said. The end of the box fell away and the robot glided out on its undulating underside. It paused by the damaged robot to exchange information, then moved into the enzyme machine room, where it found a partially full accumulator and reenergized itself. Qui-Qui followed it. The robot ignored her and started to lift an enzyme machine back onto its base.

“Stop!” she said. “Repair the communication links to Bright’s Heaven.”

“That is not my function,” said the robot. “My function is to maintain the Rejuvenation Center in operational condition.”

“Reset!” she commanded. ’The Rejuvenation Center cannot operate without doctors. All the doctors are dead. You must get new doctors. The doctors must be called from Bright’s Heaven. You must repair the communication links to Bright’s Heaven so the doctors can be called.“

The robot paused in its repair of the damaged enzyme machine. It moved to the main offices, found one of the video link consoles, and opened it. It carried out a few tests, then moved to the next console. Since none of them were operational, it then took out a part from one console, other parts from another console, more from a third, and put them in a fourth. It left the room for a while and came back with a small energy source to power the console. It went through its testing routine again.

“The communication link is repaired. Bright’s Heaven does not respond.” It returned to its work of fixing the enzyme machine.

Qui-Qui tried the video-link console. She had made so many long-distance calls in her life that she knew all the screen blotches and tread murmurs that indicated the condition of the various portions of the links. The call probably made it to the central exchange at White Rock City, but the fibers were dead from there to Bright’s Heaven. She tried to get the robot to go to White Rock City to fix the central exchange, but it refused to leave its assigned duty station and the enzyme machines. She finally gave up and set out for White Rock City herself to pick up her flyer.

As soon as the flyer was activated, the acoustic coupler to the deck vibrated the floor with a recorded message.

“Qui-Qui! Respond on channel 36. Qui-Qui! Respond…”

The communications set was already on channel 36 so she activated the transmitter.

“Qui-Qui here,” she said. After two long grethturns there was an eager reply.

“Lieutenant Shannon-Capacity here, Qui-Qui. Are you all right? I’m switching you right over to the admiral.”

The harsh voice came rasping through the deck. The admiral sounded even more harassed than the first time.

“Your behavior is inexcusable!” said Admiral Hohmann-Transfer. “From now on I want you to make contact every turnfeast and midturn. Do you understand? Where have you been?”

“I was trying to find somebody else,” said Qui-Qui. “I was not successful. Were you?” She then went through another long wait.

“No,” said Hohmann-Transfer. “What am I going to do? We are doomed!” There was another long pause. “If only we had someone else than a stupid entertainer.”

The link to the admiral clicked off. Qui-Qui was about to turn off the power when she heard Shannon-Capacity again.

“There is someone else who wants to talk to you,” he said.

“…Hello? …is this Qui-Qui? …” came the voice. “I…ah…I met you some time ago…didn’t really meet you really…I saw you when you were going through the Rejuvenation Center…my name’s Cliff-Web…run a construction company…or used to.”

Qui-Qui had been through this before. Another male overflustered by her large eyeflaps.

“I remember you” she said in her best stage tread. “The doctor said you needed to do some extra exercises. I didn’t think so. You looked fine to me.” After another long wait, Cliff-Web replied. He had regained his composure.

“You looked fine to me, too,” he said. “And I bet you’re looking even better now after rejuvenation.”

“…I wish we had video,” Shannon-Capacity interjected.

“It’s been twenty turns since the starquake,” Cliff-Web continued. “And you’re the only one we’ve been able to contact. I’ve talked to the few people here on the space station who know you and I’ve done some research in our library, limited as it is. You produce your own performances, manage your own finances, control dozens of personal staff including a dozen robots, and pilot you own flyer. You are not stupid.”

He hesitated before continuing, “Do you think you can become an engineer?”

“Sure,” she replied. “With the right teacher and enough time. Why?” The answer from Cliff-Web came two grethturns later.

“The admiral is basically right. We’re stuck up here. We don’t have any spacecraft that can land on Egg under its own power without crashing. We can’t build a lander because we have no tools and no raw materials to work with. We need something to ‘catch’ one of the spacecraft we have. The jump loops are down, but it might be possible to reactivate one of the gravity catapults if they aren’t too badly damaged.”

“My plan is to use the robots on Egg,” Cliff-Web explained. “With the two grethturn communications delay from synchronous orbit to the surface, it will be impossible for us to direct them from up here. But if you can help control them, we can send down the information needed for them to make repairs to the catapult. First, however, we have to find those robots and gather them at one of the poles. Can you do that?”

“I’ve already found some,” said Qui-Qui. “They are just as dead as everyone else. Except for one. I found him in a box at the West Pole Rejuvenation Center. He works perfectly, except he only wants to work on keeping rejuvenation machinery fixed. I tried all the robot control tricks I could think of, but the best I could do was make him fix the video link machines. Unfortunately, it was the only functional robot I saw. I’m afraid we can’t use robots to repair the gravity catapults.” Although disguised by the squeaky sound caused by the gravitational time shift, Qui-Qui could hear the overtones of dejection when Cliff-Web’s voice finally returned.

“I’ll have to think of something else,” said Cliff-Web. “Well, goodbye for now.”

“Goodbye, Engineer Cliff-Web,” Qui-Qui said in her most pleasant tone. “It has been a real pleasure talking to you. I hope to see you in person real soon.”

She spent the next two grethturns thinking of the many greats of turns she faced being all alone.

When Qui-Qui’s gravitationally red-shifted voice finally reached Cliff-Web, it had been lowered from her normal contralto range to a slow, husky tone normally only heard in the privacy of a love-pad room. Cliff-Web stammered a reply. “…ah…Yes. I’ve really enjoyed…been a pleasure…talking with you…ah…Qui-Qui…really nice…” The link went dead.

Two turns later Qui-Qui returned to the Rejuvenation Center wearing a full panoply of M.D. badges. The maintenance robot had repaired the auxiliary power generator and had gotten one enzyme machine working. Once that was done, it had allowed itself to work on lower priority items and had cleaned out all the bodies and tidied up the place. It was now trying to get a second enzyme machine working. She slipped into the main office and tried to read the files to find out how the Center worked so she could do a better job of playing a doctor. There was no power to the memory banks, so she went back and complained to the robot. It took him two turns, but he finally got the main office memory powered and running.

She then found that the memory files were blank. They had been erased by the radiation during the quake. She went into M.D. Sabin-Salk’s old office compound and took down a few scrolls from his scroll wall. Except for some very faint markings at the very center of the scroll, they were blank too. She reported her findings to the West Pole Space Station.

“Why are you still at the West Pole?” Hohmann-Transfer was annoyed. “You should be out looking for robots or something useful!” Her harassed voice changed to one of near panic as Shannon-Capacity told her the bad news. “I could expect computer files to go, but scrolls, too?”

“Even taste-plates,” said Qui-Qui. “There used to be an ornate taste-plate sign in the crust at the entrance to the Center. It’s now tasteless.” The delayed reply back from Hohmann-Transfer was worse than useless.

“Civilization is destroyed! What shall we do?!?”

Qui-Qui didn’t bother to reply. She turned off the communicator and returned to her battle of wits with the robot. First she got it to reconstruct most of the files for the operation of the rejuvenation center from its internal memory. She then read those and figured out a way to get the robot to recharge the accumulators on her flyer. She ordered it to bring the accumulators in from the flyer as “urgent cargo” and put them next to the accumulators that were used as standby power to the enzyme machines. She then sent it off on a “repair” in the main office while she switched cables and charged up the accumulators. Then she made the robot haul the “urgent cargo” back to the flyer. She was now ready to go anywhere on Egg. But there was nowhere to go.

06:58:09 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Heavy-Egg finally came to his senses. He dimly remembered the shrieking pain in his eye-balls. It now was a dull ache. He stretched his eye-stubs to make sure his eyes weren’t hidden behind their eyeflaps, but he could see nothing. He listened with his tread, trying to figure out where he was. All was silent around him. The only sounds were the thumping of his fluid pumps and faint rumbles from deep inside Egg.

Pieces of memory started to return. He remembered blindly wandering around on the top of the East Pole mountains, mad with pain. Finding the drop chute. Creeping, falling, sliding down through the darkness. New pain as he hit a broken section of the chute. Cries for help into the crust until his tread was raw, but no help came. Then the hunger pains grew stronger than the burn pains. He had finally found food. A chunk of food was in his manipulator, ready to go into his eating pouch. He was starved. But for some reason he had not eaten.

He felt something underneath his tread. It was the body of another cheela. He moved his tread around, feeling the dead body—it was a large female. There were long slashes in the body torn by a crude blade. The sharp piece of metal that had caused the slashes was in one of his manipulators. The chunk of food was in another. He formed a set of tendrils and reached out to touch the food. It was smooth and round and soft and leathery…

“An egg!!!” he cried, his tread grating the crust with its vibrations. “I nearly ate an egg!!!”

He went mad again.

Eye-stumps waving erratically, he put the egg back in its mother, then stumbled across the deserted street. He found a store with an open door. It was a pulp-bar. Pushing his way past the body of the barkeeper he found the cache of pulp-bags. He couldn’t read them, but after sucking a few bags dry he didn’t care. The dull pain in his eyes went away. He felt good. He loaded his carrying pouches with as many bags as he could carry and weaved his way back out into the street.

“Hello!” he called. No answer.

“Got to keep on moving. Got to find somebody.”

He moved his overloaded body laboriously down the street and found another open door. This one led to a repair shop. Maybe he could find a good knife. He found lots of tools, but no knife. He picked up a tool from its holder next to the mechanic’s work-pad. It was a welding torch. It used tanks of liquids that were mixed to produce an ultra-hot flame. The torch was on automatic and it immediately formed a long flame that flickered toward Heavy-Egg’s hide. He screamed in insane panic as he felt intense heat once again. His pouches vomited bags of distilled pulp, and he dropped the torch which licked at a bag that burst into a bright violet-white ball of flame.

“I can see!!” Heavy-Egg said as the singed end of one of his eye-stumps gave a weak response to the intense flood of light. Entranced by the light, he madly added bag after bag of pulp to the growing blaze. The equipment in the shop caught on fire and drove him out into the street. Then the tanks of welding liquid blew up in a tremendous explosion.

The next time Qui-Qui checked in on the communicator, there was some good news.

“Staring-Sensor at the East Pole Space Station has detected a large fire and explosion in Swift’s Climb at the base of the East Pole mountains,” said Lieutenant Shannon-Capacity. “It could be a signal or it could be a delayed reaction to the starquake. So far, it is the only sign of life on Egg.”

“Then it is our only hope,” said Qui-Qui. “I’m heading for Swift’s Camp. I’ll take the flyer, but I’m not going to fly, it wastes too much power. I’m going to travel close to the surface where the gravity repulsors have plenty of mass to push against. In that mode I could travel around Egg a couple of times without emptying the accumulators.” She paused, “Sure seems like a terrible waste though. Here I have this terrific toy that can fly about in the sky and I have to use it as a dull crust-glider.”

Leaving the robot tending its rejuvenation machine, Qui-Qui lifted the flyer on a low altitude, minimum energy flight profile, and headed for the East Pole. Meter after barren meter passed under the flyer as she traversed the glowing yellow-white crust.

Avoiding the wreckage of the Jump Loop spread over the crust, she brought the flyer down in a flat space in the outskirts of Swift’s Climb. Finding nothing to tie it down to, she made sure that the machine was left far from anything solid in case there was another crustquake. Before leaving the flyer she made a call to the East Pole Space Station floating overhead and waited for the reply.

“The blaze occurred in the eastern section,” said Staring-Sensor. “It’s the old section of town right at the bottom of the superconducting chute that was used by the Web-Con workers on the Space Foundation project. Just find an east-west road and head for the mountains.”

Just then another voice entered the communication link. It was Hohmann-Transfer.

“At all costs you must protect our flyer,” the admiral warned. “The fire may have been caused by looters. You are to take weapons with you and report in every dothtum.”

“I have no weapons, and it will take me two dothturns just to get to the east side from here,” said Qui-Qui. “Besides, one fire does not a band of looters make. I will report in when I get back.”

Qui-Qui did begin to feel a little uneasy as she made her way through the deserted town. She moved quietly and stopped often to listen. Finally she heard a voice. It had the high tenor pitch of a male tread. The voice sounded drunk and off-key. As she moved along the streets, tracking down the voice, she recognized the tune. It was her song, “Twine Thine Eyen About Mine.”

She came to an intersection and looked down the street. Wandering blindly from slide-walk to slide-walk was a filthy, drunken, heavy-set male. Where his eye-balls should have been were oozing sores on the ends of stumps. Shreds of skin hung from his blistered hide. Shocked by his condition, Qui-Qui stood still in the middle of the intersection as he weaved his way closer. Her first reaction was that of revulsion. It changed to pity as she realized the pain and suffering he had gone through even to survive, while she flitted around in a luxurious flyer. He was coming to the third verse in the song, and she softly blended her deep contralto voice into his.

“…Be my friend, by my lover, Be my tread, be my cover. Twine thine eyen about mine.”

The male’s voice trailed off as hers became louder.

“I must really be going mad!” he said out loud to himself, throwing the half-finished bag of cheap pulp juice into the street.

“No. You’re not,” said Qui-Qui, moving toward him.

“Is this the way you die?” he said, still not sending his tread vibrations in her direction. “All my life I have longed for Qui-Qui. Now I imagine she is here.”

“I am here,” said Qui-Qui in her unmistakable voice, “I am really the Qui-Qui you have longed for and I have come to take care of you.” She moved alongside Heavy-Egg, gently twined three eye-stubs about his wounded stumps and led him off to a hospital she had noticed a few blocks away. As they moved along side-by-side, she sang to him.

At the hospital she cleaned his hide, anointed his blisters, bandaged his eye-stumps, and filled his eating pouches with decent food. Then she made love to him.

She concentrated on the bulk of the body of the male and ignored the lack of eye-balls. His tread massaged her topside with quivering delight, while his twelve eye-stubs wound tighter and tighter around hers until they were coupled eyeflap to eyeflap. The orifice at the base of his eye-stubs opened and droplets of fluid from his body fell into her waiting eyeflaps. A long yearning in each of them was finally satisfied. Qui-Qui relaxed under Heavy-Egg’s limp body as the droplets made their way through her body to her eager egg-case.

06:58:11 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Pierre’s hands and feet had been pulled through the water and slammed against the walls of the tank by some unimaginable force as the viewscreens had turned dark. For three long seconds alarms had rung throughout Dragon Slayer as the computer tried to repair its damage and return to operation. The multiple screens built into the walls of his tank finally lit up again.

“Report status,” he said.

“Starquake on Dragon’s Egg,” the computer responded. “Systems suffered damage from gamma rays and gravitational waves. Status 82% operational.”

“We have received a significant dose of radiation,” said Cesar from his portion of the multiple screen. “Those of us in the tanks have received 120 rems. Half-fatal dose is 500 rems.”

“Amalita!” Abdul shouted. “Amalita! Answer me!”

There was no answer.

“Something is wrong,” said Abdul. He started to purge his tank.

“I am the doctor,” said Cesar. “I will check on her.”

“The surface of Egg has suffered severe damage,” Seiko said. “All activity has ceased. I have activated the scanners.”

“All communications with Egg are gone,” said Jean. “We do have contact with the East Pole Space Station.” Her face on the multiple screen was replaced by that of a flickering cheela, checking in every tenth of a second.

“Any life below you in Bright’s Heaven?” Staring-Sensor asked.

“No,” said Seiko. “Saw thermal flare at East Pole.”

“We know,” said Staring-Sensor.

“High energy vehicle from West Pole to East Pole,” said Seiko.

“We know.”

One of Seiko’s screens showed a flashing circle overlaid by the computer on a scanner display of Bright’s Heaven. “Patch of new vegeta…”

“Where!?!” Staring-Sensor interrupted.

“Inner Eye Inst…”

Seiko stopped talking. The cheela had gone.

“Doc!” said Pierre. “Have you found Amalita yet?”

“Yes,” said Cesar. “She’s dead”

“I don’t think we’d better take a ride with Otis until we get things straightened out here.” Pierre commanded the computer to cancel the planned change in trajectory for the deorbiter mass. It would be nearly a day before the asteroid worked its way around to where they could call it again.

06:58:20 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Qui-Qui reported in at the flyer. She had brought Heavy-Egg along with her. She could have traveled faster alone, and gone back to pick him up in the flyer, but neither wanted to be separated from the other.

“Where have you been!” Hohmann-Transfer exploded when the call from the flyer was transferred to her. “I was worried sick that you’d done something stupid, and we’d lost our only operational vehicle on Egg. What took you so long?”

“I found a survivor, Admiral. He needed medical attention. His name is Heavy-Egg. He was a shift supervisor on the Space Fountain project. He would like to talk to Cliff-Web.”

“I want to tell him I’m sorry we lost the Fountain,” said Heavy-Egg.

After the long wait, it was Cliff-Web’s voice that answered. “I’m glad to hear another one of the crew survived. As soon as we get down from here, we’re all going to start building the Fountain again. It is sure a relief finding an experienced construction worker on Egg. We’ve got a lot to do. The first thing is to have you look at the gravity catapults at the East Pole and tell me their condition. Then we can start working on repairs.”

Qui-Qui let him handle the reply.

“I wish I could, Boss,” said Heavy-Egg. “But I don’t have any eyes left.”

“Heavy-Egg was the only one left alive in Swift’s Climb,” Qui-Qui explained. “So far there are only two of us.”

“There may be more,” said Staring-Sensor. “The humans reported a patch of vegetation at the Inner Eye Institute in Bright’s Heaven. The Polar Orbiting Space Station has now confirmed the report. It has been decided that you should try there next.”

“And this time keep in touch!” It was Admiral Hohmann-Transfer. “The constant worry has aggravated the chronic inflammation in my eating pouches. You are going to let the engineer be the pilot for the flyer now, aren’t you Qui-Qui?”

“I’m blind, Admiral,” Heavy-Egg reminded her.

Qui-Qui shut down the communications link and raised power on the flyer. Then she glided above the road that led directly west to Bright’s Heaven. The broad highway had buckled in many places and was littered with the remains of glide-cars. She knew Bright’s Heaven well and brought the flyer to a landing close to the Inner Eye Institute. Side-by-side, holding eye-stubs, they glided onto the Institute grounds. Plants were everywhere.

There was every possible variety of plant one could imagine, but only a few of each type. Qui-Qui picked a few of the ripe fruits, and they both enjoyed the fresh taste after turns of packaged food. The plants obviously had been freshly transplanted, for the trays they had been in were stacked nearby. They both listened with their treads, but could hear nothing but some food Slinks in a distant pen. As they moved by a low-walled office compound, Heavy-Egg came to a halt, his sensitive tread having detected something.

“There is someone muttering nearby.”

They made their way into the office compound and found someone busy at a writing pad. She was old and wore a circle of scientist badges around her body. Qui-Qui couldn’t quite remember what the symbols stood for.

“Hello?” Qui-Qui said tentatively.

“Let me finish this line.” The scientist finished her writing and then turned the attention of her eyes to them.

“I am Zero-Gauss, Doctor of Magnetics here at the Institute. I’m glad to see someone has finally come to get things running again. We are in terrible shape here. Did you know that all the scrolls and molecmems in the library are blank? I have been doing what I can, trying to reconstruct all my research notes, but what with taking care of the plants and animals I just don’t have enough time. I’m so tired. All I want to do is tend eggs and hatchlings until I die.”

“You can’t do that!” said Qui-Qui.

“Why?”

“Not yet, at least. We three are the last ones left alive on Egg,” Qui-Qui explained. “If the race is going to survive we will have to lay eggs, many eggs.”

“I’m too old and tired for egg-laying,” said Zero-Gauss. “Besides, we are not the only ones left. There is one other.”

Zero-Gauss’s tread sent off a directional call. “Speckle-Top, darling. Please come here. We have company.”

07:02:06 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Now that things had settled down into a routine, Qui-Qui was only supposed to check in on the communicator every dozen turns. Hohmann-Transfer was in a meeting when she called this time, so Shannon-Capacity transferred the call to Cliff-Web.

“We just had another hatchling last turn,” said Qui-Qui. “That makes eleven now. Pretty soon Heavy-Egg can start education classes to train the junior engineers you need. Zero-Gauss is finally resigned to the fact that she had to give up working on her research notes to tend eggs. She still thinks it’s obscene hatching her own eggs, but being a genetics expert she understands the importance of having as diverse a gene pool as possible, so she does ‘her duty’ as she calls it and still lays eggs as well as hatches them.”

Qui-Qui giggled before she continued with her next sentence. She still felt embarrassed using the obscene words in polite conversation. “She is also keeping track of the ‘mothers’ of the hatchlings, so we can avoid inbreeding as much as possible.” She giggled again. “No problem identifying Speckle-Top’s ‘children.’ Her speckles sure breed true.”

“Speckle-Top is a genius with the animals. She can just look at the animals and tell how they are feeling. The herds are multiplying rapidly, and Zero-Gauss finally let us have some fresh meat four turns ago. I’m getting pretty good at tending the plants. The grounds of the Inner Eye Institute are now full of fruit and nut bearers, and I am starting wild patches outside the city.”

“I’ve got some good news, too,” said Cliff-Web after the long wait. “We were finally able to establish contact with the rejuvenation robot at the West Pole Rejuvenation Center by sending commands with a tight X-ray beam from West Pole Space Station. The robot has been unable to restore more than one enzyme machine, but within five greats there should be enough enzyme collected for the rejuvenation of a male or a small female.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Qui-Qui. “I can take Heavy-Egg there and get his sight back. Then you’ll have someone who can tell you what is wrong with the gravity catapults, and I’ll have someone to help share the burden of tending plants.”

07:03:32 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

This time Qui-Qui activated the communicator early. Her voice was solemn. “Heavy-Egg has just flowed. I guess the strain on his body was too much.”

“Our last engineer gone! We are doomed!” came the wail from Hohmann-Transfer. “We might as well give up.”

“I’m not giving up,” said Qui-Qui. “Let me speak to Cliff-Web. I want the next assignment for Heavy-Egg’s beginning engineering class.”

As she waited for Cliff-Web to respond, she mentally began to go over the parentage of the oldest of the younglings in the creche-school. If they were to keep the small group on Egg growing until the females became old enough to lay eggs on their own, she and Speckle-Top would have to start teaching the older males something other than reading, computing, farming, and engineering.