Most of the crew had the decency to busy themselves elsewhere as the commander of the Visit expedition settled himself onto the skimmer. The spherical shell of the skimmer was only slightly larger than his body, so there was only one way that he could fit on it. With the controls at his front, his food intake orifice was situated near the tube from the mush tanks, while his elimination orifice was over the disposal grid.
Clear-Thinker formed some crystalline bones within his body, conformed them into manipulators, took hold of the controls and raised power.
“Never has a nickname for a spacecraft fit so well,” thought Clear-Thinker, as the “Flying Toilet” rose from the main expedition spacecraft and moved over to the left viewing port where it stopped—just a bit less than a meter from the tip of Pierre’s nose.
TIME: 22:30:17.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Pierre watched Amalita drop and tightened his grip on the hand-holds to keep himself from following her down to that end of the cabin. He turned his head toward the window as a small glowing speck pushed through the main cloud that stayed a number of meters away, came up to the window, and stopped outside the glass—about an arm’s length away. Pierre looked out at the tiny incandescent sphere. It was slightly larger than a mustard seed.
Clear-Thinker stared up at the ghostly human face hanging in the air above him. The face was a half-dozen times larger than the highest mountain on Egg. The only thing he could see easily was the huge skull illuminated by the deep violet color of the soft X-rays emitted from the X-ray arc. There were the gaping holes for the eyes, each as large as the caldera of the Mount Exodus volcano. Between the eyes was a cavernous slash for the nose cavity, and below that were the two rows of dense teeth, like two mountain ranges, one stacked up on top of another. As a very faint blue-white outline surrounding and covering the skull, Clear-Thinker could see the flesh and hair reflecting the UV radiation from the arc, and thought he could see Pierre’s eyes staring down at him.
“Well—there is no time for a long speech,” Clear-Thinker said to himself. He activated the communication link control and spoke to the human.
“Hello, Pierre,” he said, his undertread rippling a carefully modulated acoustic wave into the pickup. It was not much of a greeting, but he had hoped he had made it a personal one with a carefully practiced French accent on the “Pierre.” With the greeting off on its way through the Comm computer, where it would be parceled out to Pierre in slow phonemes over many turns, he shivered himself, took the mush tube into his intake orifice, and got himself ready for the long, self-imposed ordeal.
He first formed a crystallium stiffener inside each eye-stub to keep his eyes steady. “No need to make it thick under this reduced gravity,” he reminded himself. “I will need the crystallium for the rest of the structure.”
He concentrated and soon the eye-stubs were braced with an interlocking network of crystalline bones that would keep him from moving too much. This last technique was a new one to him, since like most cheela he had always limited his internal bone-growing repertoire to manipulators, eye-stubs and pulling bars. However, the medical scientists, having learned much about the capability of the cheela organism from a religious sect that had developed extraordinary control over their body functions, had taught him the interlocking technique.
With his preparations ready, he set the skimmer on automatic control, sipped a little mush, and settled down for the Visit with his gargantuan friend.
“Well—so you are Pierre Carnot Niven—are you?” he murmured up at the motionless skull. “All right, Pierre, let’s see who blinks first.”
TIME: 22:30:18.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Pierre focused his eyes on the tiny white-hot speck floating in front of him on the other side of the deeply tinted glass. The skimmer itself was an iridescent sphere about five millimeters in diameter. Almost covering the hemisphere on the side toward him was the opalescent body of Clear-Thinker. The various portions of his body changed color like an incandescent drop of liquid crystal, as the hot internal fluid currents and cooler radiative surfaces varied their temperature. Spaced around the periphery of the flattened ellipsoidal body were a dozen red pinpoint eyes glowing like tiny coals around a tiny campfire.
“Like a flattened miniature scallop on the half-shell,” Pierre thought. “Although scallops don’t have manipulators and their eyes are blue.”
As his eyes and the humming automatic cameras took in the sight of Clear-Thinker patiently enduring his vigil outside the viewport, the speaker on the communication console spoke Clear-Thinker’s greeting.
“Hello, Pierre.”
As the echo of the last syllable floated across the console room, there was a flash of light and the incandescent speck was gone, leaving only a yellow-green afterimage on Pierre’s retina. It was only after the gravity pull had lifted that Pierre finally realized that his nose ached from being squashed up to the window at three gees.
TIME: 22:30:19.3 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
The mush was gone, the holding tank stank, and it was time to say goodbye.
“You win—my friend,” Clear-Thinker spoke up to the ghostly apparition that had not moved during his long vigil. At that, Clear-Thinker had done better than he had thought he would—six whole turns without moving more than a ripple. Isomorphic exercises had helped to keep his innards from clogging up, but his skin felt as if it would crack if he moved it. He moved—and it didn’t crack—so he moved some more; then, with a delighted dance that almost lifted him off the skimmer with its nearly negligible gravity field, he dissolved the crystalline bones that had kept him stationary, grabbed the controls, and flew the “Flying Toilet” back to the main spacecraft.
After a decent meal and some clean-up, Clear-Thinker was back in command of the expedition. It was time to pack up and go. The specialists were still busy taking long-distance pictures of Pierre and were reluctant to leave. However, the supplies were getting low, and at last they too wound down their activities and started to bring their equipment back.
Actually, of course, it was the shipboard computer that handled the motion of the instrument spheres while it monitored the flight paths of the individual fliers. The gravitational self-attraction of the spheres made navigation quite tricky, even when the pilots had reflex velocities that approached the speed of light.
Unfortunately, no one had bothered to inform the computer that the modified X-ray illuminator that had been used to treat Amalita’s cancer had been firmly connected to the very large power source that had been used to drive it. Therefore the computer saw nothing wrong with choosing a return path for the illuminator that took it close to the viewport window. As the illuminator, dragging the power supply, passed by the window, the intense gravitational tidal forces from the massive power supply ripped a large jagged canyon out of the three centimeter thick laminated window. Huge chunks of glass as large as mountains fell toward the power supply. They were crushed into powder as they fell, and then disappeared in a flash of light as they impacted the surface of the shell.
TIME: 22:30:20.0 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
The acoustic micrometeoroid detectors in the frame of the viewing ports sensed something wrong and slammed the outside metallic shields across the windows. Amalita blinked, then stared at a tiny scratch in the glass.
“… One-thousand-ten,” she said.
The Visit was over.
TIME: 06:13:54 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050
Leaving Amalita talking to Sky-Teacher at the communications console on the main deck, Pierre dived smoothly through the hole in the floor to the lower deck and pulled himself over to the library console. He moved carefully, for between two fingers he was carrying a precious HoloMem crystal containing all the wisdom of the cheela that had accumulated during the past thirty minutes. He carefully placed the crystal in its scanner cavity in the library console, fitted the brilliantly polished corner segment into place, and closed the cover.
According to their conversations with the robot che
ela communicator, this latest HoloMem crystal had a large section on the internal structure of neutron stars. Pierre had the computer jump rapidly through the millions of pages until he found a detailed cross section of the interior of Dragon’s Egg. The diagram showed that the star had an outer surface that was a solid crust of nuclei; neutron-rich isotopes of iron, zinc, nickle, and other elements in a crystalline lattice, through which flowed a liquid sea of electrons. Next came the mantle—two kilometers of neutrons and iron nuclei that became more neutron-rich with depth. The inner three-fourths of the star was a liquid ball of superfluid neutrons and superfluid protons. At the very center was a small core of esoteric elementary particles whose normally short lifetimes were lengthened by the extreme pressures and densities inside the star.
Pierre looked carefully at the symbols for the elementary particles. Most were known to him, but there was one that he had never seen before. He looked at the legend to one side and saw that the symbol referred to an “Elysium” particle. The cheela had found an elementary particle inside their star that the humans had not yet seen in their atom smashers! Pierre quickly keyed the library console to search through the HoloMem crystal for more information on the Elysium particle. In a fraction of a second, his screen flashed:
PROPERTIES AND USES OF ELYSIUM PARTICLE—FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS PARTICLE IS ENCRYPTED. THE KEY IS THE MASS AND LIFETIME OF THE FIRST EIGHT ELEMENTARY PARTICLES (INCLUDING THE ELYSIUM PARTICLE) TO FIVE SIGNIFICANT FIGURES.
The rest of the section was gibberish.
Pierre mused. The cheela could have told the humans about the particle, but had decided not to. The human race was going to have to find that particle by itself and learn enough about its mass and lifetime so that they could decrypt the section and read what the cheela had learned about it.
Of course, if the humans did their research correctly, they would know practically everything that was now hidden behind the gibberish, but if they had gotten off on the wrong track, then the knowledge the cheela had left would correct them before they went on to learn more about the universe that they lived in.
“Just like a good teacher,” Pierre thought. “You give the students a start by letting them know there is something interesting to learn in a certain area, let them learn about it on their own, then finally check over their results and give them any correction necessary.”
As he flipped back to the section on neutron star interiors, he mused that a cryptogram with only sixteen five-digit numbers could probably be broken by a large computer in an exhaustive search, but he figured that the human race would be too proud to peek.
His console screen returned to the original diagram of the interior of Dragon’s Egg. Pierre scanned the next page. It was a photograph of a neutron star, but it wasn’t Dragon’s Egg. He could tell it was a real photograph, since he could see a portion of a cheela on a space flitter in the foreground. His eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very dense stars that were almost black holes to large bloated neutron stars that had a neutron core and a white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans.
“But the Crab Nebula pulsar is over 3000 light-years away!” Pierre exclaimed to himself. “They would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in the past eight hours!”
A quick search through the index found the answer.
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI.
There then followed a long section of gibberish.
In near shock, Pierre turned off the console and slowly floated over to the nearby lounge. He was not surprised to find everyone except Amalita there. They were all sitting in the low gravity on the soft circular seat and looking down past their feet out the view port below them. Pierre jumped up to the top of the lounge and held onto the handle in the hatch door leading to one of the high-gravity protection tanks. He too looked down and out the one-meter diameter port set in the bottom of the spacecraft. The electronically controlled density filter had been set to blacken the port thirty times a second as each of the six glowing compensator masses passed in front of the window five times a second. The only light that entered the port was the single point of intense brightness that was the sun—their home—2120 AU away.
Pierre broke the silence. “It’s nearly time for us to leave,” he said.
Jean looked up, her perky nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “I thought the plan was for us to stay down here for at least another week,” she said.
“With the cheela doing all the mapping and measurements for us, there is really no need for us to stay any longer,” he explained. “You should have read the detailed description of both the exterior and interior of Dragon’s Egg in that last HoloMem crystal I brought down.” He straightened out and swung down to hold himself in the doorway to the lounge.
“I had the computer reprogram the herder probes to move us into the path of the deorbiter mass. In about half a day we will be in proper position to be kicked out of this close orbit back up to St. George. Then we can be heading for home instead of looking at it.” He looked up at the clock readout on the lounge wall.
“Time to change HoloMem crystals again,” he said. He flexed his knees preparatory to leaping up the passageway to the main deck. He flashed his smile through his beard at them and said, “Come on, there is a lot of work to do to get this ship ready. Amalita and I will finish off the last of the HoloMem crystals, but the rest of you had better start buttoning up the ship; the gravity fields from that deorbiter will turn anything loose into a deadly missile.” He jumped upward to the central deck and the others swam out the lounge door and spread out through the ship.
Pierre swung over to the communication console and looked at Sky-Teacher over Amalita’s shoulder. The robot cheela was patiently explaining something. Pierre stared in fascination at the image. With the million-to-one time differential, it had not surprised Pierre that the cheela would develop a long-living intelligent robot that could take over the demanding task of talking to the slow-thinking humans. What amazed him was that the robotic creature was so highly developed that it had a personality. It was not robotlike in its mannerisms at all. In fact, it acted very much like a patient, old-time schoolmaster. One could almost hear the friendly smile and the greying hair in the voice. It was a relief to the humans to have Sky-Teacher to talk to. They no longer felt as if they were wasting a good portion of someone’s life if they made a mistake or hesitated for a moment.
“We shortly will have filled up all your available HoloMem crystals,” Sky-Teacher’s image said, its halo of robotic eyes doing a perfect imitation of the traveling wave pattern in a real cheela. “I am afraid that you will find most of this material is encrypted, since we are now the equivalent of many thousands of years ahead of you in development.
“Yet, if it had not been for you, we would still be savages, stagnating in an illiterate haze for thousands or even millions of greats of turns. We owe you much, but we must be careful how we pay you back, for you too have a right to grow and develop on your own. For your own good, it is best that we cut off communication after this last HoloMem crystal is full. We have given you enough material to keep you busy learning for thousands of your years. Then we will both be off on our separate ways, seeking truth and knowledge through space and time. You in worlds where the electron is paramount, and we in worlds where the neutron dominates.
“But please don’t despair. We may live much faster than you, but there are only a finite number of fundamental truths to learn about the Universe, so eventually you will catch up to us.”
A tone sounded and a small message appeared on the screen.
HOLOMEM CRYSTAL
FULL.
“You are on your own now,” Sky-Teacher said, hearing the tone. “But we have one last present for you. You will need tens of thousands of years to develop fully, and minor nuisances like ice ages on your planet would slow you down. While we were exploring the interior of your Sun, we found five small black holes. There were the four that you already know about and a much smaller one. Since they were disturbing the fusion reactions in your Sun, we removed them for you. Now the Sun will stay stable while you are learning from the HoloMem crystals.”
“We thank you,” Pierre stammered, awed by the power implied by the simple statement.
“And we thank you,” Sky-Teacher said. “But it is drawing near the time for you to leave. Goodbye, my friends.”
“Goodbye,” Pierre said as the screen blanked.
He turned to Amalita. “I’ll put away the HoloMem crystal, and you start checking out the acceleration tanks,” he said. “It’s time to go home!”
Technical Appendix
The following sections are selected extracts from the 2064 Edition of Del Rey’s Science Encyclopedia, published by Random House Interplanetary, New York, Earth.
DRAGON’S EGG
Dragon’s Egg is a nearby neutron star. It has a mass of about one-half that of the Sun but a diameter of only 20 kilometers. It is spinning at 5.0183495 revolutions per second, has a gravitational field at its surface of 67-billion gees, and a magnetic field of close to a trillion gauss. As is shown in Figure 1, the star has four poles. In addition to the normal north and south spin poles, it has “east” and “west” magnetic poles that lie almost on the equator. The lines drawn from the east magnetic pole in Figure 1 are the lines of magnetic longitude. The actual magnetic field is three-dimensional, and extends for some distance out into the region around the star.
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