Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  TIME: 2000 A.D.

  The blinking, radiating, spinning neutron star was now one-tenth of a light year from the Sun. After a half-million years the star had cooled, and its spin speed had slowed to only five revolutions per second. It still sent out pulses of radio waves, but these were but a weak remembrance of its brilliant earlier days.

  In a few hundred more years the neutron star would pass by the solar system at a distance of 250 astronomical units. Its gravity would perturb the outer planets, especially Pluto, way out at 40 AU from the sun. But Earth, snuggled up to Sol in its orbit of one AU radius, would scarcely notice the passage. The star would then leave the Solar System—never to return.

  By now the life forms on Earth had invented the telescope, but even this was inadequate to see the tiny pinpoint of light in the vast heavens unless one knew exactly where to look.

  Would it pass unseen?

  Pulsar

  TIME: THURSDAY 23 APRIL 2020

  Jacqueline Carnot strode over to a long table in the data processing lab in the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Research Center at CalTech. A frown clouded her pretty face. The cut of her shoulder-length brown hair and her careful choice of tailored clothing stamped her at once as “European.”

  Her skirt, blouse and clogs were her only items of clothing. It was not that she did not own stockings—and purses—and makeup—and rings—and perfume—and other “women’s things;” it was just that she was in too much of a hurry in the morning to bother with them, for she had work to do. The French government had not given her a state fellowship to study at the International Space Institute so she could spend all morning getting dressed.

  The slender woman swiftly cleared the table of its accumulated scraps of paper and tossed down a long data record at one end. The cylinder of paper rolled obediently across the table, then obstinately off the end and five meters across the floor before it finally stopped. Jacqueline left the roll on the floor and started to analyze the data. This menial task would normally have been handled by a computer. Unfortunately, computers now insisted on a charge number for everything, and when Jacqueline had logged on this morning she had found that the meager balance that she had been saving out of Professor Sawlinski’s allocation for her thesis had been swallowed up by another retroactive intercurrency account readjustment. She knew that Sawlinski had plenty of rubles in his research budget; but, without his budget authorization and his personal approval to the computer (by the crypto-password that she knew, but dared not use), she was reduced to waiting and hand-processing until he returned.

  Actually, it was fun working with the numbers in this personal way. With the computer doing the analysis, the numbers would be crammed into digital bins whether they were real data or noise, and right now there was a lot of scruffy noise on the graph.

  The data Jacqueline was analyzing came from the low frequency radio detectors on the old CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe that was the first major cooperative effort between the Soviets and Europeans. Back in the early days of the race to the Moon, the Europeans had supplied the first Soviet lunar rover with laser retroreflectors. Then, after a disastrous experience with the Americans in which one of America’s four precious Shuttle spacecraft and Europe’s only SpaceLab had exploded on the launch pad, the Europeans had turned back to the East for cooperation. The Europeans built the instrumentation for an Out-of-the-Ecliptic spacecraft that was launched by one of the giant Russian launch vehicles. The craft first traveled five astronomical units out to Jupiter. But once there, instead of taking pictures and going on to other planets as previous spacecraft had done, it went under Jupiter’s south pole- to shoot straight up out of the plane formed by the orbits of the planets.

  As the spacecraft climbed up out of the ecliptic plane, its sensors began to see a new picture of the Sun. The magnetic fields that blossomed out from the sunspots at the middle latitudes of the Sun were now attenuated, while new effects began to dominate the scene.

  The data from the CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe had been thoroughly analyzed by many well-funded scientific groups early in the mission. The information gathered had shown that the Sun had a case of indigestion. It had eaten too many black holes.

  The scientists found an extremely periodic fluctuation in the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field. The magnetosphere of the Sun had many variations, of course. Each sunspot was a major source of variability. However, sunspots were irregular in time and were so strong in the middle latitudes that they dominated everything. It was not until the OE probe was above the Sun, sampling data for long periods of time, that the finely detailed, highly periodic variations in the radio flux were found and interpreted as periodic variations in the Sun’s magnetosphere. It was finally concluded that the Sun had four dense masses, probably miniature primordial black holes, orbiting around each other deep inside the sun. These disturbed the Sun’s normal fusion equilibrium by gnawing away at its bowels. The effect of the black holes on the Sun would become serious in a few million years, but all they did now was bring on an occasional ice age.

  Although the human race realized that the Sun was not a reliable source of energy for the long term, there was little they could do about it. After a short flurry of national and international concern over the “death of the Sun,” the human race settled down to solving the insoluble problem in the best way that they knew—they ignored it and hoped it would go away.

  It was now two decades later. Miraculously, one of the two communication transmitters on the satellite and three of the experiments were still running. One of them was the low frequency radio experiment. Its output was sprawled across a table and clown a computation-lab floor, slowly being marked up by the swift, slender fingers of a determined graduate student.

  “Damn! Here comes the scruff again,” Jacqueline muttered to herself as she slid the long sheet across the table and noticed that the slowly varying trace with the complex sinusoidal pattern began to blur. Her job for her thesis was to find another periodic variation in that complex pattern that would indicate that there were five (or more) black holes. Failing that, she needed to prove that there were only four. (At least she had been able to get her peripatetic advisor to agree that a well-documented negative result would be an adequate thesis.)

  However, she was worried. The scruff was blurring the data, ruining a good portion of it. It wouldn’t have made much difference if the good part had shown some new pattern and she could have ferreted out a new black hole to add to the Sun’s problems. However, it was now pretty obvious that she would have to be content with a negative thesis, and this noise was going to make it difficult to convince the examining committee that there were only four black holes in the Sun. She stared at the noisy portion as her arms rapidly slid the long sheet of paper across the table.

  “I shouldn’t complain about this antique spacecraft,” she said. “But why did it have to start stuttering now?”

  She moved along the trace. The scruff got worse, then slowly faded away. When she got to the clear section, she started to measure the amplitude averages again. In a way it was good that the computer was not blindly working on this data. She had enough sense to ignore the noisy parts, and thus end up with a very clean spectrum. But if the computer had been handling the data, it would have folded the scruff in with the good data and the resulting spectrum would have had a lot of spurious spikes that would have given the examination committee plenty of ammunition. Jacqueline finished her data analysis late in the evening. She looked at the neat figures in the notebook.

  “That is the hard way to analyze data,” she said to herself. “Tomorrow it gets worse, when I have to read it all into the computer. I hope old Saw-face has loosened the purse strings by then.” Jacqueline glanced wearily at the long tumbled ribbon of paper on the floor and, swirling it around, finally found a loose end and started to roll it up.

  “Up and down with a double hump, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff, then up and down with a double hum
p, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff …” Jacqueline stopped her semiautomatic mouthing of the pattern on the roll. She quickly gathered up the whole pile of paper and carefully carried it to one end of the long room and stretched it out on the floor. She then went to one end and strode rapidly along it, looking for the noisy portions. “The scruff is periodic!” she exclaimed.

  The noise seemed to have a period of about a day, and, as she went from one end of the roll to the other, it slowly drifted with respect to the more regular periodic bumps that were the meat of her thesis. She had previously thought that the noisy portions were due to random malfunctions of the spacecraft, but now the periodic nature of the scruff made her look elsewhere for the cause.

  “It could be that the spacecraft develops an arc in the transmitter for a few hours every day, but that doesn’t sound very likely,” she said. She finished rolling up the paper and, carrying the roll with her, went into the communications lab. The first thing she looked up was the spacecraft log. Fortunately, that information was in the general library file and the computer would let her look at that without charging her. She flashed the log backwards, page by page. Most of the entries had her name entered:

  J. CARNOT: ESA: ACCOUNT SAW-2-J: LFR DATA DUMP

  “I seem to be the only one using this satellite,” she said.

  Finally she came to an engineering note. Once every few days or so, during slack periods, the spacecraft engineers at the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Network communications center would take the spacecraft through its engineering check list.

  POWER 22% NOMINAL

  X-BAND DOWN-LINK 80% NOMINAL

  K-BAND DOWN-LINK DEAD

  ATTITUDE CONTROL DEAD

  SPIN RATE 77 MICRORAD/SEC

  FUNCTIONING EXPERIMENTS

  LOW FREQUENCY RADIO

  SOLAR IR MONITOR

  X-RAY TELESCOPE (STANDBY)

  “Only two experiments on,” she said. “The engineers must have turned off the X-ray telescope since the last time I checked.” She looked at the number for the spin rate, flipped the computer terminal into compute mode, and made a quick calculation.

  “Seventy-seven microradians per second comes out to be a little more than one revolution per day—about the same period as the scruff. The scruff must be caused by the effect of the solar heating on the transmitting antenna or some other solar effect.”

  She logged off the terminal, took the roll of paper, and headed back through the pre-dawn hours to her room. The roll would join the many other rolls that lay stacked in a pile on her bookshelf, while she joined the rest of Pasadena in sleep.

  TIME: FRIDAY 24 APRIL 2020

  In her sleep, Jacqueline was flying. No, not flying, but drifting through empty space. She looked down and finally realized where she was. Below her was the bright globe of the Sun. Spread out before her was the whole Solar System as seen from above. Her astronomically trained mind had placed the dream planets in their proper positions and she could almost imagine faint lines tracing out the nearly circular orbits that gave the Solar System the appearance of a bull’s-eye target from this perspective. She found the tiny double-planet system that was the Earth-Moon pair and was straining to try and make out detail on the Earth when the slow, inexorable rotation of her body dragged her eyes away from the scene. Unable to turn her head around any further, she was forced to gaze upwards away from the Sun, her arms and legs outstretched in the form of an X. “Just like the low frequency radio antennas sticking out of the OE probe,” she thought.

  Soon the rotation brought her body around again and she admired the view. She finally concentrated on looking at the north pole of the Sun. She had no trouble looking at the Sun despite its brightness, and she searched for any variations on the nearly featureless surface. As she stared, she saw nothing with her eyes, but she finally began to notice weak pulsations in her arms and legs. A double pulse, triple pulse, pulse …

  “I’m picking up the complex radio signal of the orbiting black holes!” she thought, as her body continued to revolve. Soon she could no longer see the Sun, but she could still feel the pulsations in her arms and legs. Then, while staring out at right angles from the Sun, she felt a rapid tingling sensation building up in her right arm. It became stronger and stronger, nearly blotting out the slower, rhythmic pulsations. “The scruff!” she exclaimed, and then began to laugh at herself …

  “Nothing like getting yourself so wrapped up in your thesis work that you dream you have become the spacecraft yourself,” said Jacqueline as she sat up in her room. She looked at the bustling noonday traffic out her window and rubbed the prickles out of her right arm, restoring the circulation it had lost while trapped under her exhausted body.

  She was halfway through her belated breakfast when the dream surfaced again in her mind. Although she knew the spacecraft’s operational characteristics almost as well as she knew the operating characteristics of her own body, it did seem strange to her that in the dream the scruff came when she was looking away from the Sun, not toward it.

  She thought about it for awhile, then went to her bookshelf and got down the roll she had been working on the previous night and an older one from several months ago. She unrolled a section from each of them on the floor, one above the other, and slid the old one back and forth until the slowly varying complex pattern caused by the orbital motion of the black holes was matched up on the two rolls. She then looked along both sheets and came to the noisy portions. They were different. First of all, the scruff a few months ago was significantly weaker (although that could be explained by a degrading piece of equipment or insulation), but there also seemed to be a definite shift in the position of the peak of the scruff activity with respect to the position of the Sun. She got out an even older roll, and checked it. The scruff was very weak now. In fact, she remembered that the computer had had no trouble obtaining a nice, clean spectrum from this data since the spectral energy in the noise had been so small. Again, however, there seemed to be a delay in the position of the peak intensity of the scruff.

  “Well, this is one time when the number-crunching objectivity of the computer is orders of magnitude better than the highly subjective human hand and eye. It is back to the computer for you, Jacqueline,” she said to herself. “But first you have to get some more computer time from old Saw-face.”

  Jacqueline walked across the CalTech campus to the Space Physics building. The huge edifice, built in the days when space budgets were a significant fraction of a nation’s budget, was now the Space Physics building in name only. Only the basement computer room and the first floor offices contained space research activities. The remaining floors of the building had been taken over by graduate students of the Social Sciences department. If the CalTech-Jet Propulsion Laboratories combine had not been able to talk NASA, the Europeans, and the Russians into combining their dwindling national space budgets into supporting one international space research center with a single Deep Space Network, then there would be no deep space research at all.

  After the Americans had given up sponsoring deep space probes and the European Space Agency had broken into squabbling factions after the loss of SpaceLab, the Russian planners, without visible competition, had lowered their priority for deep space research to almost zero and concentrated their funding on manned and unmanned Earth orbital ventures. The cold war was still on, but it had degenerated into an almost automatic name-calling at the United Nations. The Russian standard of living rose, and as it did, the party planners found that they had to give more and more attention to a no-longer docile population and could not justify a separate deep space program.

  Jacqueline walked down the almost deserted corridors of the Space Physics building to Professor Vladimir Sawlinski’s office. Jacqueline hesitated, then knocked.

  “Da?” said a gruff voice.

  Jacqueline opened the door and walked in. A thin, middle-aged gentleman swiveled away from a computer screen filled with text in Cyrillic characters and turne
d to look at her. Jacqueline’s Russian was good enough that she could tell that he was reading a science news article about the supposed discovery of a magnetic monopole in some iron ore in Nigeria.

  Sawlinski’s clothing was unusual for a Russian. It was a tailored suit in the latest European style. Its very presence on his spare frame advertised that the wearer was a multi-cultured world traveler who was given significant freedom and even more significant financial reimbursement by a worldly wise Russian government that expected great things from him. The man’s balding head bent forward as he peered over his reading glasses at the young woman.

  “Jacqueline!” Sawlinski said, his face beaming with pleasure. “Do come in, young lady. How is your thesis work coming? Have you found another collapsed sub-stellar object?”

  Jacqueline grinned inwardly at the Russian’s refusal to call them miniature black holes. Unfortunately, the Americans and Englishmen who had first popularized the concept of black holes were not aware that the phrase “black hole” had a context in the Russian language that was not used in polite company.

  “I have used up my account and the computer will not talk to me anymore,” she said. “I thought I had plenty of computer time left, at least for another month of work, but a retroactive intercurrency adjustment canceled it out.”

  Professor Sawlinski flinched. He had been afraid of something like that. His budget from the Soviet Academy was quite limited, but worst of all, it was in rubles. Now that the Chinese and Russians were heating up the border war in Mongolia again, the Russian ruble had been falling fast in the international money markets. He had been glad to have Jacqueline working for him, for she came free. As one of its few full-time graduate fellows, ESA paid all her expenses. When he had come to America to work in the International Space Institute, he had despaired of being able to afford any graduate student help, so getting Jacqueline had been a lucky break. She was smart (and pretty besides).