Electromagnetic-Manager/1 monitored the video transmission channel and looked once again at a human as seen in their own region of the visual spectrum. This human was very different from Carole, the Commander of the human expedition. The hair on top of this human's head-lump was short and black instead of long and yellow. But instead of the ridiculously long thick braid coming out of the top of the head-lump, this human had a ridiculously long string of hair in the middle of the head-lump. The face was dark colored, and the pupils of the eyes seemed very wide open. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 wondered if the look of the human was due to the breathing mask that the humans had to wear under water, or whether something else had caused it.
04:02:39 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
"I lost power for a second!" said Abdul, just short of panic. "What's going on?"
"The cheela have breached the hull and are wandering around inside Dragon Slayer," said Pierre.
"I sure hope they know what they are doing!" Abdul replied.
04:02:40 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
Manager-Director/5 set up a conference link with her team leaders.
"All tanks separated," said Void-Manager/18.
"All tanks powered," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1.
"All samples obtained," said Science-Manager/23.
"Monopole generators ready," said Monopole-Manager/4.
"Inertia pushers ready," said Graviton-Manager/53.
"Proceed," said Manager-Director/5. She returned to the
task of braiding the long hair on her prize-winning Slink. She could have had robots do it for her, but Rapunzel deserved personal care.
"Cut away," Void-Manager/18 told his team of engineers.
Void-Maker/111 and her robots sliced off the science tower at the north pole of Dragon Slayer, and it floated upward in the residual gravity tides. There it would be held in place by gravity robots while the disinto robots reduced it to stored energy.
"To you," said Void-Maker/111.
"To me," said Graviton-Maker/321. He paused, waiting for the next phrase from Void-Maker/111. There was a long pause.
"Touch," said Void-Maker/111, holding off her disinto robots for a while.
"Touch!" said Graviton-Maker/321. He sent his personal flitter directly at the gigantic structure. He pulled his eyes in under their eyeflaps to avoid the glare as the cold metal turned into a hot plasma as it was torn apart by the strong gravity field surrounding his spacecraft. There was a breeze of ionized gas that rapidly settled to the deck and he was through to the other side.
"Touch!" he hollered again on his screen as he swooped his flitter around and dove once more at the mountain of nothing.
Soon, most of the engineers had put their crews of robots on automatic and joined in the fun. Manager-Director/5 was notified of the disruption by the contract performance program, but she did nothing about it. The robots would probably get the rest of the job done in half the time, now that the cheela engineers were out of the way having fun.
It took five long seconds to reduce Dragon Slayer to five spherical steel tanks, bobbing gently in the center of the ring of six condensed asteroids. The cheela electromagnetic engineers brought back the laser communicator, attached it to Pierre's tank, and set it up so it was pointed out to St. George.
04:02:45 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
"Am I glad to see you!" Carole Swenson said as Pierre's face appeared on her screen. "Is everyone okay?"
"So far," said Pierre. He reached to his control panel and set up a split screen display format that combined the images of the remaining crew members of Dragon Slayer with that of Carole.
"I'd sure like to see what those busybodies are doing to us," said Abdul. "But the monitor cameras went with the rest of the ship."
"We have the large telescope trained on you," Carole told him. "At this distance, each of your acceleration tanks is just a blob, but we can resolve the compensator asteroids easily. We can even detect the activities of the cheela. Although they and their machines are too small to see, they are white-hot and we can get a lot of information from speckle interferometry. Except for a few machines near you, they seem to be concentrating out at the asteroid ring. Let me transfer a picture."
The screen blanked and a visual image overlaid with computer graphics appeared on the screen. The computer had strobed the picture at the rotation rate of Egg so the asteroids looked as if they were standing still.
"One of the asteroids is smaller than the others," said Jean.
"According to the plan they left with me," Carole explained, "they are going to shrink all the asteroids by dumping magnetic monopoles in them. Then they are going to shrink the radius of the ring until the asteroids coalesce into a solid rotating ring of magnetically charged, ultra-dense matter. I don't like that. The tides from the gravity field of the ring are going to get orders of magnitude larger than the tides from Egg. I don't think even your acceleration tanks are going to help you survive that."
"You forgot the augmentor masses," Seiko told her.
"What are those?" asked Carole.
"The augmentor masses were well covered by the cheela in their briefing to us, Commander Swenson," said Seiko. "I'm sure the information was in your briefing."
"I just scanned it quickly," admitted Carole.
"The augmentor masses are dense masses just like the compensator masses, but there are only two of them. Instead
of being placed in a ring around the point to be protected, they are placed above and below the place to be protected. In that position the two masses add to the tides of the neutron star."
"But that would just make the tides worse," said Carole.
"Not in this case. When they shrink the size of the ring of compensator masses, the tides from the ring get stronger than the tides from the star, so the star tides have to be 'augmented' by the augmentor masses."
"The cheela are bringing them now." Cesar was looking out the porthole in his acceleration tank. The augmentor masses were modest-sized, old-fashioned cheela spaceships about the size of a softball. They had black holes in the middle of them to provide enough gravity to keep the cheela in their condensed state.
"Looks like we each get two augmentor masses," Abdul said as he watched the activity outside his porthole. "I thought there would be two big ones."
"Because of the way that tidal forces add," said Seiko. "They can do a better job if they null out the tides for each one of the tanks individually."
"The asteroids are now tiny dots," said Jean.
"And the ring is starting to shrink," Pierre added.
"I'll never complain about a mere 200 gees per meter again," said Abdul. "Hey! The ultrasonic pressure drivers have started. This is getting serious!"
"The ring of asteroids is now at 50-meters radius and has coalesced into a solid ring," said Carole. "Things seem to have halted."
Suddenly the screens blanked and a message appeared on all their screens.
NEXT PHASE STARTS IN 10 SECONDS.
DRAGON SLAYER CREW WILL RETURN IN SIX
MONTHS.
The ten seconds passed slowly. The next two milliseconds were full of activity. Each tank was jerked upwards away from the center of the ring. The ring was collapsed until it was only a few meters in diameter. As it shrank, its glowing surface turned redder and redder, finally turning into a deep, dark, impossible black. It did not even reflect the yellow-white light from Egg. Then, one by one, the tanks were
thrust through the hole in the center of the invisible ring. The heavy steel tanks distorted visibly as they passed through. They did not come out the other side.
04:03:01 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
Pierre screamed as his arms slammed against the creaking walls of the heavy steel tank. Just as he thought that his fingers were going to be pulled off his hands, it was over. He coughed up some water he had inhaled, cleared his mask, and tried his control panel. The video display was dead, so he looked out his porthole.
He could make out
the presence of three of the other tanks from the light coming from their portholes. Egg and its ever-present glare was gone.
Most of the sky was black and starless. In the distance was a small elliptical patch with a few dozen stars in it. The stars in the patch of sky were blue to ultraviolet in color. What was most confusing was that the patch of starlight seem to be rotating, while he and the rest of the tanks were standing still.
"That was a Kerr space-warp!" Pierre said out loud.
"That is correct," came a voice. The image of Sky-Speaker was on the screen.
"That can't be!" said Pierre. "I remember from my gravitational engineering courses that a Kerr ring with the mass of a sun would have a one-kilometer hole. The compensator asteroid masses are orders of magnitude less massive than the sun. The biggest ring they could make would be less than a micron in diameter. According to Einstein, that was impossible. ..."
"Einstein was intelligent, but human," said Sky-Speaker. "He failed to combine gravity and electromagnetism. We have. The unified theory agrees with Einstein for large masses. For very small masses, the diameters of magnetized space-warps are larger than Einstein predicted."
While Sky-Speaker was talking, Pierre noticed that the string of free-floating spheres was being moved. The tanks with their clouds of robot-tended equipment had moved back under the rotating patch of sky. The cheela robots formed the tanks into a circle and accelerated them until they were mov-
ing in the same direction as the whirling patch of sky above them. The acceleration continued.
"We're moving in time," said Pierre.
"Yes," said Sky-Speaker. "The rate is one month normal galactic time per ten minutes proper time for your crew. You will return through space-warp in one hour. Six months will have passed in normal space. The asteroid Oscar will have returned."
The cheela robots now had communication links set up between all the tanks, and Pierre could see each of the remaining crew members on one of his miniature screens.
"Is everyone okay?" he asked.
"Yes," said Abdul. "But I'm not looking forward to going back through that meat grinder again."
"The engineering check program indicates a problem," said Jean.
"I'm surprised it is still functional after the drastic changes the cheela made," said Seiko.
"What's the problem?" Pierre asked.
"There is a leak in Tank 6," Jean replied.
"Whose tank is that?" asked Pierre.
"Mine," replied Abdul. "She's right. I've lost some pressure. The water must have frozen and plugged the leak, though. The pressure seems to have stabilized."
"The tank must be repaired!" Cesar said. "It surely cannot withstand another trip through those extreme tidal forces."
"The cheela can work miracles. But I don't think they can weld the mist we call steel. I'll just have to risk it." Abdul paused, looking puzzled, then turned away from the video pickup and put his hands against the back wall of the tank.
"Hey!" he said. "I feel little tiny tugs of gravity near the wall. They keep zipping back and forth."
"I can see some activity outside your tank," Seiko told him. "It looks like an electric arc. I think they are attempting to weld the leak shut."
"I hope it holds," said Abdul.
05:06 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
(00:01 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)
"Ten seconds to reentry," said Sky-Speaker. Pierre saw the view outside his porthole tilt and shift as
the circle of tanks turned into a line of tanks that swooped away from the patch of sky in a large arc, then dove headfirst through the Kerr-warp at high speed. The next few milliseconds passed too quickly for the tortured humans to follow.
As Oscar neared the space-warp the five tanks popped, one by one, out of the flat circle of black. After the passage of the second tank, the diameter of the ring expanded a little, then shrank just as the third tank passed through. The oscillations in the ring grew larger, and the fourth tank was highly distorted by the tides of the contracting ring. The cheela obviously hadn't expected this instability. They managed to slow the last tank down so that it wasn't trying to get through the ring at its minimum radius, but it wasn't enough. The tank ruptured, spewing a human being and gobbets of water into the vacuum of space.
The cheela robots assembled the remaining four tanks in a line just below the periapsis of the plunging asteroid, Oscar. The asteroid passed rapidly over the tanks, and one at a time its gravity field jerked the tanks upward in a high trajectory that took them quickly away from the tides of Egg.
The cheela attempted to help the remaining human. They moved a piece of tank to shield him from the radiation from Egg. They kept him from being torn apart by the gravity tides by making a miniature compensator ring of dense spacecraft that circled around him. However, they couldn't prevent him from being dragged back toward the massive space-warp. His eyes temporarily protected from the vacuum of space by his underwater mask, Abdul looked up and waved goodbye to his departing comrades. Then, pushing off from the heavy piece of steel tank, he dove headfirst into the whirling black ring to join the atoms that had once been Amalita. Just before he reached the ring his body was momentarily surrounded by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash and he was gone.
05:15 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
(00:10 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)
The four tanks were met at the top of their trajectory by a flitter from St. George that took them in tow. While one spacesuited figure secured the tow line, another came over and peered in Pierre's porthole. It was Commander Carole
Swenson. He saw a big grin on her face as she put her helmet against the outer wall of the tank and hollered a greeting.
"That's the last time I let you have a spaceship to drive," she said. "Did you get the license number of the truck?"
She knew Pierre couldn't talk underwater except through his throat mike, so she shouted one more message and pushed back to the flitter for the ride in.
"I've got a surprise for you," she said. "See you in the air lock."
Pierre couldn't understand why Carole was so happy. Perhaps it was because at least four of the crew of Dragon Slayer made it back. All Pierre could think of, however, was that two of them didn't. They had been his responsibility, and now they were dead. He dreaded what he had to do next. He would have to let their families know. How do you tell someone that their loved ones had been torn to atoms?
05:50 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
(00:45 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)
The four tanks were crowded into the cargo air lock on St. George, and soon the lock was full of balls of water and sloppy, wet, sobbing people.
"I'm sorry about Amalita and Abdul, Carole," Pierre said as he took off his mask. "If only there was something I could...."
"Hush...." Carole was smiling happily. "Come! I want you to meet a couple of friends of ours." She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor to the communications room. The room was empty except for the communications operator. Pierre was completely baffled.
"Hello, Pierre." It was Amalita's voice.
"Did you have a nice ride up from Egg?" Abdul's voice asked.
Pierre whirled around to face a communications screen at one end of the room. He saw video images of Amalita and Abdul in two segments of the screen.
"Surprise! Surprise!" Abdul yelled.
"It really is us," Amalita said. "Or at least all of us that counts."
"I even have a moustache to twirl." Abdul lifted his hand to twirl the end of his long moustache. "And it feels like the
real thing even though it's made of software instead of hardware."
Carole squeezed Pierre's arm in reassurance as she spoke. "The cheela scanned them thoroughly just before their bodies were destroyed," she said. "Their intellect patterns now reside in cheela supercomputers."
"But Amalita was irradiated and frozen," Pierre protested.
"I admit I have a lot of miss
ing memories," said Amalita. "But the basic personality is still there."
"Yeah!" said Abdul. "She's just as bossy as ever."
"Hush!"
"See?" said Abdul, raising his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders. "She'll be even more bossy when we get into those walk-around bodies they're building for us."
"We have slowed ourselves down so we can say goodbye to all of you and our families," said Amalita. "Then we had better get back up to normal cheela rates if we are going to stay up with what is going on down here...."
"Doc! Seiko! Jean!" Abdul called. "Over here on the screen."
Pierre turned around to see astonished looks on the remainder of his crew as they came into the communications room. His chronometer chimed the hour, and he looked down at it. He started to reset it to make it agree with the clock on the wall, but decided against it. Not many people lived on a time-line six months shorter than the rest of the universe.
06:00 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
The long day was over.
Technical Appendix
The following sections are selected extracts from the book, My Visit With Our Nucleonic Friends, by Pierre Caraot Niven, Ballantine Interplanetary, New York, Earth and Washington, Mars (2053). This is the only book to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula, and Moebius prizes in the same year (2053).
DRAGON’S EGG
The home star of the cheela was given the picturesque name Dragon's Egg by the humans because it is a star right-at the end of the constellation Draco (the Dragon), as if the Dragon had left an egg behind in its nest. The cheela coincidently also called their home Egg because it is the source of lifegiving heat and light, and glows warmly like the eggs they lay.
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