Pierre knew from the tone that Cesar was serious and that the image print was real—but he still found himself diving up the passageway toward the star image telescope control post. He floated in, quickly checked the filter settings, then flicked the switch that opened the direct view port. The light beamed in from overhead and down onto the white frosted table top in the center of the room. He drifted over and hung above the glaring image and adjusted the strobe controls until the spinning image in the center of the table slowed down and finally stopped rotating. He found the symmetric flowerlike diagram.
Pierre looked up as the others came up the passageway. “The diagram is now complete,” he said.
They gathered around the table and looked down at the image as Pierre whispered softly, “It is not only complete, there are no extra lines. There can be no other logical explanation. Whatever that is, it was made by intelligent beings!”
“Intelligent beings!” Seiko exclaimed. “That is impossible! The surface gravity of that star is 67-billion gees and the temperature is 8200 degrees! Any being that existed on that star would be a flat glowing pancake of solid neutrons.”
“They wouldn’t be made of neutrons,” Pierre replied. “My measurements show that although the interior of the star is made of neutrons, the outer crust has a density more like that of a white dwarf star, and its composition is quite complex, with most of the same atomic nuclei that we have in the Earth’s crust, only much more neutron-rich and without the electron clouds around them.”
Pierre was perplexed. They had a mission here at Dragon’s Egg. The mission was to get as much scientific data as possible from their vantage point only 400 km from the neutron star. His problem was that the magic gravitational elevator that had put them down into this orbit a few days ago would soon finish its complicated interlaced orbital pattern and would be returning to take them away again. They had only a limited amount of time—what should they do?
Abdul spoke. “I don’t really come onto shift for over an hour. Why don’t I try to generate some kind of signal to send down in case there really is some form of intelligent life there, while the rest of you keep up with the science time line.”
“Fine,” Pierre said. “We have finished with the laser radar mapper on this hemisphere, so you can use that. If you need anything else, let me know. I am sure we can reschedule an experiment for later on in the program.”
Abdul pushed his way to the communications console. Soon a simple one-two-three … dot-dash number series was beaming down to the surface, followed by a crude diagram of Dragon Slayer inside the six tidal compensator masses over the sphere that was Dragon’s Egg. It was a dot-dash pattern, 53 by 71 dots on a side.
Trek
TIME: 07:54:43 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Commander Swift-Killer fixed her attention out toward the horizon. Each of her eight watch eyes reported back that the shallow arc of a needlelike dragon tooth could still be seen, held at guard position by one of the perimeter guards. She left the watch eyes at their automatic duty and scanned her other eyes around the camp where the rest of her troopers were relaxing. Most were still eating, but a few had paired off and were now enjoying each other over in one corner of the camp. She looked at them enviously and was tempted to pass over the watch to her second-in-command, go get her favorite fun-partner and join them, but the last contact with the barbarians had only been a turn ago, and they must stay at full alert.
Frustrated in her bodily pleasures, Swift-Killer turned to her other personal form of recreation—trying to figure out why things work. She paused, concentrated for a moment, and her body pushed out some pseudopods. She then grew some articulated crystallium bones under the protrusions of tough, muscular skin to form manipulators. The bones in the manipulators were small, not like the ones that she grew to hold her shield and sword in battle. Still keeping her watch eyes on the horizon, Swift-Killer glanced with the remaining eyes at the four extremities, made a minor change to one of them, then reached through the sphincter of a carrying pouch in her body and pulled out her “experiments.”
One experiment was an old one that she had come upon in the last campaign. Their pursuit of the barbarians had taken them into strange territory where the crust was not smooth, but had suffered a recent shaking. In that region, the crust did not have its usual fibrous plasticity, but was almost as hard as dragon crystal. The quake had shattered the crust into many flat plates, their cleaved surfaces glinting with the reflected image of the God Bright that hung motionless over the south pole. Her mind always active, Swift-Killer had collected several plates and had played with them, turning them first one way, then the other, to bring the image of Bright to each of her eyes in turn. She had even held one well up above normal eye level (it had taken most of her bone-forming crystallium to support the plate against Egg’s tremendous gravity pull) and had actually looked at her own topside. It looked weird to her, what with the deep red color, the reddish-yellow lump of her brain nodule near the middle, and the smaller lump of a forming egg next to it. She had hastily withdrawn the plate and had glanced around quickly to reassure herself that no one had seen her examining her own topside. Unless it was your lover trying to get you in the mood, no one ever talked about one’s topside, much less looked at it.
As a troop commander, she had found an excellent use for the mirror plates. A “glancer” was now standard battle equipment on the eastern front. With careful aim of the mirror to reflect the image of Bright in the right direction, messages and commands could be sent over great distances to other squads without alerting the barbarians. They still used the old code patterns for the commands, since the limitations of the glancer communication system were similar to the old technique that used synchronized thumps of the treads of a trooper squad on the crust. With this new communication technique, the element of surprise that they had gained over the barbarians had decreased their losses by significant factors.
Swift-Killer placed her collection of equipment on the crust. Along with the glancers, there was another of her discoveries, the flares. The fact that certain types of crust would glow when pod juice dropped on them had been known since ancient history. Swift-Killer had been intrigued by this effect, and everywhere she went in her service to the Leader of the Combined Clans, she had always sacrificed a few drops of her daily ration of pods to the crust to see how brightly it would glow. She had recently come across a very reactive portion of crust. A drop of pod juice would make a blue-white flare of light almost too bright to look at. She had carefully used a slicer to extract some long, fibrous rods out of the crust; these were her flares. She had visited a chemist at the base hospital, and soon her enthusiasm persuaded him to use his ancient arts to separate the various components of a large batch of pod juice, until she had a small vial of cast dragon crystal with the concentrated essence of the factor in the pod juice that made the flares glow.
Swift-Killer tested out the flare by holding the vial above the end of the stick and letting a few drops of fluid fall on the end. The eyes on that side of her body popped reflexively into their skin pouches as the brilliant blue-white glare of light burst forth. Swift-Killer noticed with pleasure the murmur of startled treads vibrating through the crust to her.
“The Commander is at it again … now what is she up to?”
Remembering her prime duty, she turned her attention to her watch eyes, and again assured herself that each one still had a distant dragon tooth firmly fixed in its vision. She noticed that one or two of them also had a fuzzy spot off to one side, where they had picked up the momentary glare of the flashing flare. However, true to their assigned duties, they had not ducked into their skin pouch at the bright glare.
With the flare ready, she then turned her attention to her latest discovery, the “expander.” She had come upon it not long ago when she had been out visiting the perimeter guards. Normally that task was the duty of one of the squad leaders, but since her favorite at that time had been one of the guards, she took the op
portunity of an inspection tour to get a few moments alone with him. Of course, being on guard, he had to remain at alert with his eyes on the horizon, while giving stiffly formal responses to her queries. Although her questions followed the usual routine of an inspection of the guard, her actions took advantage of the fact that he was not allowed to break his at-alert condition.
“Who approaches?” boomed the crust as his tread rippled at her approach.
“Troop Commander Swift-Killer,” she replied.
“You may approach,” he said. So she did … and got closer and closer and closer until her body was pressed up right next to his and had flowed around in a crescent that nearly enveloped his periphery. Her cool dark-red eyes stared right into his, while he dutifully kept his gaze fixed on the horizon.
“Report!” she commanded, but instead of using solid talk, she whispered it with an electronic tingle that sent thrills through his frustrated body.
“Guard to the east under observation and secure. Guard to the west under observation and secure. No unknown objects on the horizon. All secure, Commander Swift-Killer,” boomed his muffled report in formal solid talk. She then felt a soft electronic whisper as he added, “But I seem to be under attack from Bright-side.”
“At Alert!” she barked, and felt his body stiffen.
“What is this I see,” she said, as her eyes went up on stubs to look at his topside.
“Dirt!” she said severely; and reaching out a soft muscular pseudopod, she proceeded to brush imaginary specks of dirt off his topside, making sure that she had touched all of his sensitive spots in the process.
“Just for that, Squad-Leader North-Wind, after you have been relieved of your post, you shall report to me for extra duty,” she said, with a mixture of solid talk and electronic whisper that trailed off into a pure whisper at the words “extra duty” that left no doubt in his mind what that duty would consist of.
Commander Swift-Killer slowly slid her body along North-Wind, who kept his outer perimeter in the prescribed circle and his eyes on the horizon. Then drawing herself back into proper traveling form, she went off to visit the next guard on the perimeter, leaving an emotionally frustrated North-Wind at his post, his eyes and body at attention, but his mind full of things other than non-existent barbarians.
“He does not have too much longer before the change of the guard,” she thought as she moved off to inspect the next guard. “But by that time, will he be ready!”
The next guard had always been one of her problem troopers. She had never really learned discipline. Although Easy-Mover had never given any trouble when under direct supervision, she did not have the proper spirit of a real needle trooper, and would not discipline herself to act always in the manner of a trooper even when there was no superior officer nearby. Unfortunately, the lonely duty of perimeter guard gave her plenty of opportunity to become lax, and she had been caught so many times that she had never been able to keep any of her promotions for very long.
“She is at it again,” Swift-Killer said to herself as she approached the guard and felt a telltale grinding noise in the crust beneath her tread. Her eyes carefully surveyed the guard, but there was not one sign of motion in the body of the guard or the arc of dragon tooth that jutted out towards the horizon. A challenge replaced the grinding noise as the guard noticed her approach.
“Who approaches?” boomed the guard.
“Troop Commander Swift-Killer,” she replied.
“You may approach,” came the formal reply.
Swift-Killer flowed to one side of the rigid trooper and barked, “Move here in front of me!”
There was a moment’s hesitation, bad enough in itself, and then the trooper swiftly flowed over and resumed the formal guard position. Swift-Killer went to the spot that the guard had vacated, formed a manipulator and picked up the two plates of broken crust that lay there. The plates were placed one on top of the other; as Swift-Killer took them apart, a dusty powder of ground-up crust fell to the surface. Bored with guard duty, Easy-Mover had been holding her outside surface at alert, but had been absent-mindedly rubbing one plate against another under her tread. This was not the first time she had been caught doing something like that, so it didn’t surprise Swift-Killer.
“You are already down to trooper, so I can’t demote you any further,” Swift-Killer barked at the now rigid form of Easy-Mover. “But until you learn that troopers on guard duty are to remain at full alert at all times, you will have to make do without recreation periods. Since this is not your first offense, it will be a dozen turns this time!”
Swift-Killer thought she detected a quiver of protest, but fortunately for Easy-Mover, she recovered rapidly with her reply.
“Yes, Commander,” she said.
Swift-Killer then took the guard through the remainder of her formal report and left to inspect the rest of the perimeter, taking the two plates with her to remove temptation from the scene.
“A dozen turns with no recreation is not only going to be hard on her, but also on about three males that I know of,” Swift-Killer thought as she flowed off. “I don’t know how she keeps them all happy. One lover at a time is enough for me.”
The offending plates had been tucked away in one of Swift-Killer’s carrying pouches and she had forgotten about them until their shape got in the way during her fun and games with the eager North-Wind. She had put them to one side and had attended to more important business, such as thinning herself down and slithering under the hot kneading tread of North-Wind as their eye-stubs entwined softly about one another. They took turns kneading each other’s topside with their treads, concentrating on their favorite spots. Then with their eye-stubs firmly intertwined to pull their very edges together, their mutual vibrations raised in pitch with an electronic tingle adding an overtone of spice to the massage. Finally, in a multiple spasm of their bodies, a dozen tiny perimeter orifices just under North-Wind’s eye-stubs opened—to emit a small portion of his inner juices into the waiting folds around Swift-Killer’s eye-stubs.
Swift-Killer felt the tiny globules of North-Wind as they were carried by her automatic reflexes to the egg case. She slowly gathered herself into her more normal shape and slid from beneath the still thinned and exhausted North-Wind. She left him lying there and began to pick up the various things she had laid aside from her carrying pouches. As each item was tucked away, she became less and less Swift-Killer the lover. Finally, as she placed the four-button symbol of her rank into a holding sphincter on her side, she turned back into Troop Commander Swift-Killer.
As she came to the last few items, she picked up the crustal plates that she had taken from Easy-Mover. The plates no longer had flat surfaces; instead one was slightly hollow and the other was slightly rounded. Some of the shiny aspect of a freshly cleaved surface was gone, but it was still possible to see a reflection in them. Always inquisitive, Swift-Killer looked at the two curved plates and was amazed to see that in one of them her eye looked smaller than normal, while in the other, it was larger.
She reached out a soft pseudopod and wiped the dust off the surfaces. This improved the image some. Now completely absorbed in trying to understand the strange behavior of the curved plates, Swift-Killer the inventor forgot her lover and her command duties while her mind wandered off into thought.
For many turns Swift-Killer spent her spare time with the curved plates. She talked to Easy-Mover and found that she had been carrying those plates for many turns and had used them to relieve her boredom on many tours of perimeter guard duty. Swift-Killer duplicated her grinding process and soon had several expander and shrinker mirrors. She found that if she did not apply much pressure in the later parts of the rubbing, the mirrors could be made very shiny, almost as good as the cleaved surfaces of the original plates.
She spent a long time on one set of plates to see how curved she could make them, for she had found that the more the mirrors were curved, the more they would expand or shrink the image. Finally she obtained one
pair where something amazing happened; not only was the image of her eye expanded, it was also turned upside down! She found that if she put her eye very close to the mirror it would appear right side up and expanded, but as she moved back it would get bigger and bigger, finally filling the whole mirror with a distorted image, then would finally appear again upside down.
Swift-Killer now held one of those expander mirrors. She knew that a flat mirror would reflect the light from her flare, and she wanted to see what the expander would do. Perhaps it would expand the light and make it brighter.
Swift-Killer formed her body around in a crescent, with her four free eyes moved around so that they were concentrated on the inner part of the crescent where they could observe the experiment. Aware that the light would be quite bright, she had them tucked under their protective folds of skin and had closed the fold until each was only watching through a narrow slit. Carefully she held the vial of pod juice extract above the flare and adjusted the little crystal valve until a thin stream of liquid fell down on the end of the flare. Soon she had a continuous bright arc going. Light flared over her body and up into the sky. Using her manipulators she brought the expander mirror up near the arc. Instead of reflecting the light off in all directions like a flat mirror, it seemed to collect it and make it smaller. She moved the mirror back and forth. She first found a point where the light seemed to go off in a straight beam from the expander. She then found that there was a position in which the light was focused into a spot on the crust. She reached out with a pseudopod to touch the bright spot.
“OW!!!”
The whole camp came to alert as they heard the agonized t’trum of their Troop Commander on the crust. Swift-Killer, her burned spot sucked into the interior of her body where it was quickly enveloped in soothing liquid, stopped the flow of pod-juice from the vial, waited until the flare stopped glowing, and then put her experiments back into her carrying pouches as her eyes glared around the camp. In short order, all the troopers were very busy.
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