“It is up in the northern sky,” she said. “But it is not where we thought it was. Because the neutron star is so close, there is a difference of over five degrees in the angle from the spacecraft to the star and from the earth to the star. No wonder the radio astronomers could not find it. We told them the wrong direction.”
She went over to a star chart on her wall and carefully made a tiny cross. She turned and, with a wry grin on her face, remarked, “And the reason it was never picked up in a sky survey is that it is right next to Giansar, the fourth magnitude star right at the end of Draco, the Dragon constellation. It would take a good telescope to see the neutron star image in that bright glare.”
She drank down the rest of her coffee.
“Let’s go wake up old Saw-face,” she said. “We’ve got a paper to publish.”
TIME: FRIDAY 22 MAY 2020
In two days the paper was prepared and accepted into the Astrophysical Letters computer. The next day it was on the astrophysical information net, along with a note from the radio astronomers that very weak 199-millisecond pulsations had been detected from a region in the northern skies right at the end of the constellation of Draco. Shortly thereafter, the new ten-meter telescope in China found a faint speck in the sky, and pictures of “The Egg of the Dragon—Sol’s Nearest Neighbor” appeared in Sinica Astrophysica. The popular press copied the picture—along with the picturesque Chinese name, and soon people were peering up at the night sky, vainly trying to catch a glimpse of “Dragon’s Egg,” resting just off the end of the constellation Draco, as if the star were a recently laid egg.
TIME: SATURDAY 13 JUNE 2020
It was Saturday evening. Donald and Jacqueline sat on the grass of the Griffith Observatory and talked. They were much more relaxed than they had been for months. Jacqueline’s thesis was completed, and her formal oral defense the day before had been a mere formality, what with the world-wide scientific acclaim and video-news publicity being made over the discovery.
“I still don’t understand why Sawlinski is doing the video-news interviews,” Donald said with a frown. “You were the one who discovered the neutron star first, not he.”
“That is not the way science works,” Jacqueline explained. “A Professor starts a research project hoping to discover something new. The student sometimes makes the discovery, but without the Professor’s research project, the discovery would not have been made. Since the Professor gets the blame if the project is a failure, he should get the benefit from any successes. Besides, it doesn’t upset me—after all, my career is off to a great start!”
Donald only felt a greater admiration for the woman of whom he had become so fond. He kept silent and continued to look upward at the stars.
After a long time, Jacqueline spoke. “I wonder if we could ever go visit Dragon’s Egg. At the speed it is traveling, it will be gone from the Solar System in a few hundred years. I wish I could go myself, but I guess maybe it will be my grandchild or great-grandchild.”
“We may be going sooner than you think,” Donald said. “The latest news on the Nigerian magnetic monopole discovery is that they have used the first monopole in a large magnetic accelerator to generate other monopoles, and some of those have already been used as a catalyst for a deuterium fusion reaction. The JPL engineers are excited about the fusion results. They are already starting to design fusion-rocket concepts for interstellar spacecraft. I don’t think a ship will be ready soon enough so that you and I could go for a visit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in twenty or thirty years, one of our children will be looking down at Dragon’s Egg from a close orbit.”
And inevitably, the years passed …
TIME: SUNDAY 15 AUGUST 2032
Quick-Mover was getting tired. He only hoped the Swift was tiring faster. The Swift was much quieter than he, but its brain was slow, and it never seemed to learn from its repeated failures to catch him. This particular beast had been harassing his clan for the last three turns of the sky, and the clan had been forced to retreat to a cluster of boulders that blocked the Swift’s rush. There was nothing they could do until the huge beast tired and went away, or else caught one of them out in the open—like Quick-Mover—who was now beginning to regret his attempt to get a food-pod from a nearby plant.
He watched carefully with six of his eyes as the Swift laboriously moved in the hard direction until it figured it was directly east or west of its intended prey. Once there, it would start accelerating, swiftly slithering toward him as its long narrow body twisted across the crust. As it neared, the great, glowing maw would open, and out from under each of the five eyes ringing the gaping mouth would spring a long, sharp fang of crystal.
Quick-Mover knew how sharp those fangs were, since he had one stored in a tool pouch in his body. He had retrieved the fang from the mangled carcass of a Swift that had been the loser in a mating duel and had used it to cut up the drying carrion that he and his clan had enjoyed as a supplement to their food-pod diet.
The Swift launched its rush. Quick-Mover waited until the Swift had committed itself to its attack; then, thinning his flexible, opalescent body down, he pushed into the hard direction with all the speed that his muscles could command. The Swift was now moving so rapidly that it could not change its course, but it was close. One of Quick-Mover’s trailing eyes winced when a fang nicked its thick support stub.
As the Swift slowed its rush and turned to attack again, Quick-Mover became desperate. Soon one of those sharp fangs was going to slash a large hole in him, and the next time the Swift made its rush, it would catch him.
Then suddenly, Quick-Mover had a thought. He had a fang too! He watched the Swift shift position off at a distance and begin its rush. He quickly shaped a section of skin into a short tendril and, reaching into the tool pouch orifice, pulled out the fang. He enlarged the tendril into a strong manipulator, backed up with a thick crystal bone core, and pushed the rest of his body into the hard direction again. This time, he left a portion of his body out in the path of the Swift. It was the thick manipulator holding the fang. Quick-Mover felt a jar, then his eyes glowed as he saw the Swift stumble to a halt, fangs snapping at its flank, where the glowing vital juices poured out onto the crust.
Quick-Mover looked in awe at the fang held in his manipulator. Both were covered with dripping gobs of glowing juice. He sucked them clean, enjoying the unaccustomed taste of fresh juice and meat. He moved over to the still-thrashing Swift. Carefully keeping well off in the hard direction, he watched the Swift as it grew weaker. Finally, feeling bolder, he moved the manipulator with its fang over the center of the long thin body and struck downward. The sharp point sank deep into the body. The Swift, struck in its brain-knot, shivered and flowed into a fleshy pile.
Quick-Mover raised the fang and struck once more.
It felt good.
He was mightier than a Swift! Never again would one of these beasts terrorize his people!
The fang struck again and again and again …
TIME: FRIDAY 5 NOVEMBER 2049
Pierre Carnot Niven floated in front of the console on the science deck of the interstellar ark, St. George. The thin young man pulled thoughtfully at the corner of his carefully trimmed dark brown beard as he monitored the activities out in the asteroid belt surrounding the still-distant star, Dragon’s Egg.
“It’s still ‘Mother’s Star’ to me,” Pierre thought as he recalled his childhood years, lying in his father’s arms out on the lawn to watch the first interstellar probes go out to explore the neutron star his mother had found.
There had been some whispers of “favoritism” when he had been picked to be Chief Scientist of the Dragon’s Egg exploration crew, but those who whispered had not been as driven as he. He had felt his mother had received too little scientific recognition for her discovery, and his whole life had been spent rectifying that supposed wrong. He had not only made himself the world’s expert on neutron-star physics, but had also taught himself to be a popular science write
r so that everyone—not just a few scientists—would know of the accomplishments of the son of Jacqueline Carnot. Pierre had been successful, for his ability to communicate science concepts at every level had led to his being chosen leader and spokesman for the expedition. Now the talking and selling and explaining were through, and the scientist in Pierre took over.
The expedition was still six months away from Dragon’s Egg, but it was time to start the activities of the automated probes that had been sent ahead by St. George. There would be a lot of work to do in preparation for their close-up view of the star. Now that they had found and identified the asteroidal bodies around the neutron star that they would need, the work could be done as easily by robot brains as human ones.
The largest of the probes was really an automated factory, but its single output was very unusual—monopoles. It had some monopoles on board already, both positive and negative types. These were not for output, but the seed material needed to run the monopole factory. The factory probe headed for the first of the large nickel-iron planetoids that the strong magnetic fields of the neutron star had slowed and captured during its travels. It started preparing the site while the other probes proceeded with the job of building the power supply necessary to operate the monopole factory, for the power that would be needed was so great that there was no way the factory probe could have carried the fuel. In fact, the power levels needed would exceed the total power-plant capability of the human race on Earth, Colonies, Luna, Mars, asteroids, and scientific outposts combined.
Although the electrical power required was beyond the capability of those in the Solar System, this was only because they didn’t have the right energy source. The Sun had been—and still was—very generous with its outpouring of energy; but so far the best available ways to convert that radiant energy into electricity, either with solar cells or by burning some fossilized sun energy and using it to rotate a magnetic field past some wires in a generator, were still limited.
Here at Dragon’s Egg, there was no need for solar cells or heat engines, for the rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star was at one time the energy source and the rotor of a dynamo. All that was needed were some wires to convert the energy of that rotating magnetic field into electrical current.
The job of the smaller probes was to lay cable. They started at the factory and laid a long thin cable in a big loop that passed completely around the star, but out at a safe distance, where it would be stable for the few months that the power would be needed. Since a billion kilometers of cable was needed to reach from the positions of the asteroidal material down around the star and back out again, it had to be very unusual cable—and it was. The cables being laid were bundles of superconducting polymer threads. Although it was hot near the neutron star, there was no need of refrigeration to maintain the superconductivity, for the polymers stayed superconducting almost to their melting point—900 degrees.
The cables became longer and longer and started to react to the magnetic field lines of the star, which were whipping by them ten times a second—five sweeps of a positive magnetic field emanating from the east pole of the neutron star, interspersed with five sweeps of the negative magnetic field from the west pole. Each time the field went by, the current would surge through the cable and build up as excess charge on the probes. Before they were through, the probes were pulsating with displays of blue and pink corona discharge—positive, then negative. The last connection of the cable to complete the circuit was tricky, since it had to be made at a time when the current pulsating back and forth through the wire was passing through zero. But for semi-intelligent probes with fractional-relativistic fusion-rocket drives, one-hundredth of a second is plenty of time.
With the power source hooked up to the factory, production started. Strong alternating magnetic fields whipped the seed monopoles back and forth at high energies through a chunk of dense matter. The collisions of the monopoles with the dense nuclei took place at such high energies that elementary particle pairs were formed in profusion, including magnetic monopole pairs. These were skimmed out of the debris emanating from the target and piped outside the factory by tailored electric and magnetic fields, where they were injected into the nearby asteroid. The monopoles entered the asteroid and in their passage through the atoms interacted with the nuclei, displacing the outer electrons. A monopole didn’t orbit the nucleus like an electron. Instead, it whirled in a ring, making an electric field that held the charged nucleus, while the nucleus whirled in a linked ring to make a magnetic field that held onto the magnetically charged monopole.
With the loss of the outer electrons that determined their size, the atoms became smaller, and the rock they made up became denser. As more and more monopoles were poured into the center of the asteroid, the material there changed from normal matter, which is bloated with light electrons, into dense monopolium. The original atomic nuclei were still there; but, now with monopoles in linked orbits around them, the density increased to nearly that of a neutron star. As the total amount of converted matter in the asteroid increased, the gravitational field from the condensed matter became higher and soon began to assist in the process, crushing the electron orbits about the atoms into nuclear dimensions after they had only been partially converted into monopolium. After the month-long process was complete, the 250-kilometer-diameter asteroid had been converted into a 100-meter-diameter sphere with a core of monopolium, a mantle of degenerate matter of white dwarf density, and a glowing crust of partially collapsed normal matter.
After the first asteroid had been transformed, the factory turned to the next, which had been pushed into place by a herder probe that had started its task many months ago. The process was repeated again and again until finally there was a collection of eight dense asteroids circling the neutron star: two large ones and six smaller ones, dancing slowly around each other as they moved along in orbit. They were kept in a stable configuration with thrusts from the probes, which used the magnetic fields from a collection of monopoles in their noses to exert a push or pull from a distance on the hot, magnetically charged, ultra-dense masses.
The probes, herding their creations along, now waited patiently for St. George to arrive. As the humans approached the neutron star, the herder probes became more active. They pushed, pulled, and nudged the two larger asteroids until they approached one other. As the ultra-strong gravitational fields of the two asteroids interacted, they whirled about one another at blinding speed and then took off in opposite directions on highly elliptical orbits that would meet again many months later at a point much closer to the nearby neutron star.
Volcano
TIME: 14:44:01 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050
Broken-Petal flowed his elongated body down through the ragged rows of petal plants, anxiously feeling the swellings of the ripening pods on the underside of each plant with his tendrils. He subconsciously counted the pods as he went along, but not in terms of numbers, since his total mathematical knowledge consisted of: one, two, three—many.
Although Broken-Petal could not count, he was very good at equating large numbers. He knew that, sometimes, what seemed to be many pods was still not enough to feed the clan—for there were many in the clan and all were always hungry. As he moved and felt, the many pods in his mind grew and, as the number grew, his anxiety for the many in the clan became less and less. He found his undertread adding a youthful t’trum pattern to his smooth flowing motion as he came to the end of the last row. He let his opalescent body resume its normal flat, ellipsoidal shape and looked at the crop with pride. The petal plants were tall. He would have liked to have seen them all, but he was content to rest at one end and look with only three or four of his dozen dark red eyes down between the rows that he had struggled so hard to get the clan to dig.
Broken-Petal remembered the time, many turns of the stars ago, when he came across proud old Dragon-Flower with a stub of a broken dragon crystal in her manipulator.
“What are you doing, Aged One?” Brok
en-Petal asked.
“I’m tired of having to wander in the wilderness to find a petal plant that has not already been stripped of all of its pods,” she said. “I’m going to have my own plants, right here outside my wall.” She left the dragon crystal sticking in the crust, and flowed back to let him see what she had been doing. As she did so, the strong crystalline bones in her manipulator dissolved, and the muscle and skin that had covered the thick, articulated appendage shrank back into her body until her surface was smooth again.
“Why are you digging those holes, Aged One? How will that get you your own petal plants?”
She replied, “I may be old, but I still see well and remember well. The last time the young ones came back from a hunt, they had traveled so far away they had found some petal plants that had never been picked. They brought home as many pods as they could carry. There were many delicious ripe ones and some that looked all right, but, when opened, were runny and the seeds inside were hard. Naturally, being an Aged One, I got the overripe pods. I ate all that I could—the taste is not bad once you get used to it—but the seeds inside were too hard to crack, so I rolled them outside.”
“I remember that hunt,” Broken-Petal said. “We never did find a sign of a Flow Slow or even a Slink, but that patch of untouched petal plants made up for it all.”
Dragon-Flower continued, “One turn I noticed that one of the seeds had rolled into a crack in my wall. It had a little petal growing from it. I watched it turn after turn as it became larger and larger. It grew into a petal plant! I was happy, I would have my own petal plant right near my door. I would dream of picking the pods whenever I wanted, without having to go far distances. Maybe I could even wait and have a ripe pod to eat all by myself, as I did in the old times when I was a young warrior and went on hunting expeditions.”
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