Starquake

by Robert L. Forward

  "Successes?"

  "Not many, I'm afraid," Lovely-Eyes said. "I have spent most of my life trying to find some means to prevent the eventual starvation of the humans. I have studied human medicine to find some method like deep sleep to keep the humans alive without food. I have studied expanded matter science to find a way to make food with the equipment the humans have on Dragon Slayer. I have studied inertial and gravitational engineering to find a way to return the distant asteroid sooner. I was unsuccessful.

  "I went into politics, became leader of the fourth segment, pushed through the funding to form a special task force to solve the human starvation problem, then left the legislature to run the task force. I had the brightest minds, both cheela and robotic, working on the problem for two generations. They were unsuccessful. When the funding for the task force

  was terminated I gave up and came here. I have no successes to tell the younglings about. I'm afraid I wouldn't be a good choice for that job."

  "No," Creche-Master/71 agreed. Her tread was manipulating her touch screen. "One egg available for hatching in 18 turns."

  "I'll take it!" said Lovely-Eyes.

  The driven soul of Lovely-Eyes was, at last, at peace. The egg had produced a near-perfect hatchling, exactly as the geneticists had predicted. The hatchling had the official name of White-Rock/207891384, but Lovely-Eyes, recalling an old story he had read in his humanology studies, called him Grandest-Tiger.

  Grandest-Tiger was dodging in and out from under Lovely-Eyes' hatching mantle, playing peek-and-chase with its robotic hatchling-mates. While Grandest-Tiger played, Lovely-Eyes picked up one of the hatchling's learning toys. It was quite expensive for such a simple toy, but the hatchling psychologists felt it was important for the young ones to have experience with the paradoxical phenomena early in their life.

  The toy was a simple ring. It came with a dozen tiny metal spheres. When a sphere was pushed through the hole in the ring, it didn't come out on the other side immediately. Depending upon which side the ball was put through, it would come out at some different time, either in the past or the future. Right now there were six spheres lying on the crust. Idly, Lovely-Eyes picked up five of the spheres and poked them, one at a time through the ring. There was a long pause, then the five spheres popped out again.

  Suddenly, Lovely-Eyes pulled back his hatching mantle and rushed out of the pen, leaving a bewildered Grandest-Tiger behind. The robotic hatchling-mates diverted the attention of Grandest-Tiger from the disappearing Old One while they sent emergency messages to the creche-master for a replacement.

  03:55:03 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

  The screen on the communications console flashed on to show the image of Sky-Speaker. Above the electronic chitter

  of data being transferred there came a calling signal. Seiko went to the console, and the image of Sky-Speaker started talking as she approached.

  "You read fast," the image said.

  "You listen slow. Read."

  The image was replaced by text that scrolled rapidly up the screen, keeping in pace with the scan of her eyes. Seiko didn't know how the cheela had done it, but they had taken over control of the communications console display program.

  "Pierre," said Seiko, still reading. "They are going to try to rescue us."

  "Did they find a way to move Oscar?" he asked, floating over next to her.

  "No," she said. "They found a way to move us." Pierre read the screen along with her, then said to the rest of the crew, "Everybody get into the high-G protection tanks," he said. "The cheela are going to take us for a ride."

  04:02:35 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

  Neutrino-Maker/84 watched as his swarm of robotic workers approached the gigantic viewport window at the south pole of the human spacecraft. They stopped a few meters away from the hull and set up three neutrino generators that flooded the interior of the spacecraft with beams of neutrinos at carefully selected frequencies. He then took his crew around to the other side where they set up a dense array of neutrino detectors. Each robot had the ancient cleft-wort symbol of Web Construction Company emblazoned on its back.

  "One more imposs-proj for Web-Con," said the engineer proudly. Once the detectors were in place, a computer generated holo-image slowly began to build up in the display.

  "Air, water, humans, steel, all like vacuum," said Neutrino-Maker/84 as he waited impatiently for the image to build up. If they had done a neutrino scan on a decent density object, the image would have formed almost instantly.

  After a half-turn, the image was good enough for him to see that the humans were all in their tanks and the last of the air was being replaced by water.

  Neutrino-Maker/84 switched his console to communicate with Void-Maker/111. An old and experienced Web-Con disinto engineer, she had been assigned the delicate job of re-

  moving the laser communicator from the human spaceship while leaving it in operating condition. The communicator was going to be delivered to another group of Web-Con engineers to calibrate some machines that would allow the ultra-dense cheela to power and control the tenuous human equipment without damaging it.

  "Humans in tanks," said Neutrino-Maker/84. "Proceed."

  "Proceeding," Void-Maker/111 replied as she set her crew of disinto robots to work.

  The communicator had two connections through the hull to the electronics inside Dragon Slayer. One was an electrical power cable for the laser power supply, and the other was a fiber-optic modulator cable that carried the information. Moving carefully, the disinto robots formed microthin fans of disintegration rays and cut the two cables right at the connectors. Being careful to avoid the free ends of the cables as they waved slowly back and forth in the variable gravity fields outside Dragon Slayer, the disinto robots then attacked the mechanical support structure. The laser communicator came loose.

  Void-Maker/111 rubbed her tread screen, and the image of another Web-Con engineer appeared. It was Graviton-Maker/321. His engineering badges had a circle for gravity instead of a triangle for disinto.

  "To you," said Void-Maker/111.

  "To me," replied Graviton-Maker/321. "Next to electromagnetic-makers."

  "Don't touch!" chirped Void-Maker/111 at the screen.

  "Nor you," said Graviton-Maker/321 as the screen went blank.

  Graviton-Maker/321 set his crew of gravity robots in the path of the slowly tumbling laser communicator. His job was to get the laser under control and bring it to a halt. He had to catch it without touching it, for the fragile human instrument could not stand the lightest touch by any cheela machines.

  His squadron of Web-Con gravity robots were specially designed for this job. They were spherical in shape, and each had a small black hole in the center. The black hole provided the basic gravity field that the robot used. The hull of the robots contained powerful gravity exchangers and diverters that modified the shape, strength, and even the direction of the gravity forces coming from the black hole. Staying care-

  fully off at a distance, the robots pushed and pulled at the tumbling laser communicator until they brought it under control. They then took it out through the whirling ring of compensator masses to a safe place where the electromagnetic-makers could try to operate it.

  Electromagnetic-Manager/1 was waiting patiently for the arrival of the laser communicator from the Slow Ones' orbital position. He had his team of electromagnetic engineers ready. There were young ones who would provide the drive that they needed and experienced ones who would provide the caution, for they were treading on new crust when they tried to couple their ultra-dense nucleonic machines to the expanded matter electronic machines that the humans used.

  The electromagnetic-makers were a strange breed. It took a perverse type of personality to specialize in a field like electromagnetic engineering where there was almost no opportunity to practice the craft. In general, electromagnetic engineers just talked to themselves, devised exotic experiments involving electromagnetic conductors that stretched hundreds of m
eters across the surface of Egg to measure the ultra-long electromagnetic waves coming from space, and worked on improving the instructional programs in the Master Teacher Program in case some other student was strange enough to want to become an electromagnetic engineer, too.

  This was the first time there had been a need for the management of a team of electromagnetic engineers and Electromagnetic-Manager/1 was the first of his profession.

  Graviton-Maker/321 and his crew of robots brought the laser communicator to a halt near the electromagnetic-makers' strange machines floating in orbit some distance away from Dragon Slayer. He stacked up most of his robots, but left a few at the job of keeping the laser communicator in place. Electromagnetic-Manager/1, his team of engineers, and their hordes of specialized robots were waiting for him.

  "To you," said Graviton-Maker/321.

  "To me," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  "Don't ..." started Graviton-Maker/321.

  "... touch," chirped a chorus of treads from the team of electromagnetic-makers.

  The power cable for the laser was brought near an electron generator. It was difficult for the electromagnetic engineers to generate large currents at such low voltages, but soon four amperes of electrons at 500 volts were shooting from one

  end of the electron generator and four amperes of positrons from the other end. The Web-Con electromagnetic robots steered the beams with the electric and magnetic fields emanating from their bodies and directed them at the conductors in the cut end of the cable.

  "Laser photons detected from end of human instrument," said Electromagnetic-Maker/32, who was monitoring the response of a long-wavelength photon detector in one of his robots that he had positioned in front of the laser communicator.

  "Positron erosion?" asked Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  "Ten picometers per methturn," replied Electromagnetic -Maker/25.

  "Good," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. The technique for extracting the electrons from the return conductor seemed to be working. A set of ultraviolet generator robots kept the return conductor illuminated with ultraviolet photons which knocked electrons out of the metal. The electrons billowed up in a cloud over the end of the positively charged conductor where they were annihilated by the stream of positrons. Most of the annihilation gamma rays were scattered by the electron cloud, but some high energy photons reached the metal and caused the loss of copper ions.

  "Wire temperature?" Electromagnetic-Manager/1 asked another engineer.

  "Stablized at 352 K," said Electromagnetic-Maker/28. "Electromagnetic cooling working." His team of robots were monitoring detectors that estimated the detailed spectrum of the heat photons excited in the surface of the metal where the beam of electrons penetrated. The electron beam was then modulated to produce heat photons that had the same estimated spectrum but with the phases reversed, so that on the average, the new photons would tend to cancel the old photons. Being a statistical technique, it didn't work perfectly, but it did keep the wires well below their melting point.

  "Modulation!" ordered Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  Electromagnetic-Maker/55 tapped his control console, and his 20,736 robots each started emitting long-wavelength infrared radiation from their bodies. The robots were arranged in a 144 by 144 array, and their infrared output was phased so that it focused down into a narrow waist just as it entered the optical fiber in the cut end of the communications cable.

  "Modulation detected," Electromagnetic-Maker/32 reported.

  "Good," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. He was now sure that the cheela could find a method of getting information on and off the human electrical wires and optical fibers. He contacted Graviton-Maker/321.

  "Turn laser toward St. George ..." said Electromagnetic-Manager/ 1.

  No reply was needed. Graviton-Maker/321 proceeded to manipulate his crew of robots by treading touch-blocks on the sides of his touch-taste screen.

  "... and ..." continued Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  "... and?" queried Graviton-Maker/321, puzzled by the verbosity.

  "Don't ..." started Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  ". . . touch!" rumbled Graviton-Maker/321, greatly amused.

  St. George was far away from the dangerous neutron star in a 100,000-kilometer orbit a third of a light-second away, so it took three turns before Electromagnetic-Manager/1 established contact with the computer on St. George using the laser communicator taken from Dragon Slayer. Once the computer realized that it was communicating directly with cheela instead of the slow-thinking humans, it rapidly repeated the message that it had been sending. The image was that of a female human with yellow hair bound into a single long braid over one shoulder. It reminded Electromagnetic-Manager/I of a ridiculous type of inbred pet Slink that had hair so long that the pet needed a robot attendant to hold its hair up, out from under its tread when it wanted to move. His console computer link identified the human as Carole Swenson, the Commander of the Dragon's Egg expedition.

  "Dragon Slayer! Your last laser communicator is dead. Switch to alternate links! Dra ..."

  Electromagnetic-Manager/1 thought for a while about answering the anxious human in order to reassure her that the crew was in no immediate danger. But by the time she had finished saying the word "Dragon Slayer," he would have obtained permission to proceed with the rest of the mission and he could tell her the better news that the cheela were going to try to return the crew to the command ship, St. George. He erased the image of the human from his screen

  and set up a call to the Administrator of the Slow One Transport Project.

  Two turns later, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 received an in-person visit by the administrator of the Slow One Transport Project. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 didn't like working with the Ancient One, who insisted on being addressed by his archaic egg-name, instead of his position.

  "I am Lovely-Eyes," said the administrator. The wrinkled hide and erratic eye-stub motion contrasted with the intense gleam from the dark red eyes.

  "Coupling experiments successful," reported Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

  "Excellent!" said the administrator.

  "Excellent!!" the administrator said again, unnecessarily repeating himself.

  "Excellent!!!" said the administrator once again.

  Electromagnetic-Manager/1 began to be concerned. The eye-stub wave pattern on Lovely-Eyes accelerated, and his hide changed color as his emotions reached the breaking point. His tread started to move again.

  "Pro . .." Suddenly four eye-balls fell sightless to the deck. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 immediately realized that the ancient one had suffered a stroke affecting one of the tri-lobes of his brain-knot.

  "Lovely-Eyes!" Electromagnetic-Manager/1 rushed over to assist the Ancient One. His tread 'trummed an emergency call into the deck as he moved.

  Eight, intense, dark red eyes stared him to a halt. They were not "lovely eyes," they were fanatical eyes.

  "Pro ... Pro ... ceed with project." The treading was weak, but distinct.

  "Lovely-Eyes," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. "I stay until medicos come."

  "Go!" came the reply. "And call me Lovely-Eyes no longer. Call me Human-Savior."

  The great wrinkled hide shuddered and collapsed. The body of the Ancient One flowed in all directions. When the medical robots tried to enter, their way was blocked.

  After checking with Manager-Director/5, the Web-Con supervisor of the Slow One Transport contract, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 returned to the laser communicator. The human, Carole Swenson, had finished her sentence and was

  now looking wide-eyed at the screen as she read the message from the cheela. There wasn't time to wait for the human to react, so Electromagnetic-Manager/1 left a long message for the St. George computer and a shorter one for her.

  "Dragon Slayer will be disintegrated. Six Eyes of Bright will be collapsed. Return for crew in six months." He turned off the laser communicator, gathered his engineers and their robots, and headed for Dragon Slayer.


  Void-Maker/111 arranged her robotic crew with care around the periphery of the large viewport window in the south pole of the human spacecraft. When she received the signal from Manager-Director/5 she activated her console and the robots disintegrated the hull around the window. The viewport blew away as the air emptied out of the ship. She touched her tread screen and the image of another Web-Con engineer appeared. It was Graviton-Maker/321.

  "To you," said Void-Maker/111.

  "To me," replied Graviton-Maker/321.

  "Don't . .."

  "Won't." Both of their screens rippled with laughter.

  Graviton-Maker/321 set his crew of gravity robots in the path of the slowly tumbling plate of glass. This piece of high-strength glass was one of the many parts of the spacecraft that the expanded matter scientists wanted to examine. As soon as his robots had the viewport under control, he sent some of them off with the window while he and the rest of the crew returned to Dragon Slayer. By the time he had returned, Void-Maker/111 had cut a large circular sample out of the spacecraft hull. The task of capturing the circular piece of hull was so similar to the task of catching the viewport that Graviton-Maker/321 did not even bother to monitor the robots. They were faster thinking and more intelligent than he was when it came to doing their job.

  Electromagnetic-Manager/1 and his team had arrived and Graviton-Maker/321 joined them as they entered the hole where the viewport had been. They all felt a little uneasy as they entered the dark interior of the ship. Not only was the friendly glare of Egg gone, but they could no longer see the sky.

  "Human Protection Tank 6 ahead," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1 to his team as they floated into the center of the cylindrical room. "Take over control."

  A team of electromagnetic engineers brought up their generators. Each team was assigned a disinto engineer whose crew of robots were used to clear a path through the walls and cut the cables. In a few dothturns they had cut free Tank 6 containing Abdul from the main hull, had replaced the ship's power to the tank with their own, and had inserted their own optical link in the fiber optic connection to the rest of the tanks.