Amalita looked around the equator of Dragon Slayer until she could see one of the laser communication dishes. She fixed her eyes on it, then stabilized her personal up and down. She told her eyes to ignore the bright objects whirling through her peripheral vision; activating her magni-stiction boots, she stepped out onto the hull.
As Amalita stood up, she could feel the play of pulsating residual gravitational forces through her body. In addition to the pulsating fields, there were slight variations in the overall compensation, since the spacecraft was slowly shifting its orbital position from the east pole to a position over the mound formation on the star’s surface. Sometimes she was pulled outward with a fraction of a gee, and sometimes pushed inwards.
Amalita made her way carefully to the nearest laser communication dish. She detached the coaxial cable that brought the modulating voltages from inside Dragon Slayer, then the power line to the laser, and finally she started working on the mounting bolts. It was a well-designed system, with the bolts staying captive in the frame, so there was no chance of having them float away in free-fall. She held onto one strut of the bulky piece of apparatus and plodded her way carefully back over the curve of Dragon Slayer’s hull.
“Start de-spinning the science turret, Doc,” she called through her suit radio. “I’m clear of the control jets.”
As she moved over the curving hull, she could see the spinning turret slowly come to a stop while the control jets flashed on Dragon Slayer’s hull to throw off the excess momentum.
As she approached the stationary turret she glanced upwards along the three-meter length and found the laser radar. The radar dish was tucked under the huge mirror that brought a one-meter diameter image of Dragon’s Egg directly into the star image table.
She was getting far from the air-lock, so she fastened a secondary safety line to a ring at the base of the turret. She then stepped carefully off the spherical hull of Dragon Slayer onto the cylindrical turret. She allowed herself a few seconds to readjust her personal up and down; then, still holding the bulky laser communication dish, she ascended. As she climbed further and further from the center of Dragon Slayer, the accuracy of the tidal compensation fields became poorer. Halfway up the turret she found that the play of gravitational fields over her body became too strong to ignore. She felt as if her suit were haunted by tiny elves that pushed and pulled at various sections of her anatomy. The overall tidal compensation was also off, and the laser communication dish began to pull ahead as it gained weight while they made their way up the column.
The increased weight was not much, but it was significant enough so that Amalita stopped at each step to move her safety lines from ring to ring behind her. She finally reached the laser radar and looped the lanyard attached to the communication dish to a nearby ring and let the ring support the burden. She fastened another lanyard from her belt to the laser radar.
Firmly anchored to the column with magni-stiction boots and a pair of short safety lines, she started to remove the laser radar. Fortunately the laser power supply line and the modulator coaxial cable connectors were the same for the two laser systems. All they had to do was switch the cable on the inside from the pulsed modulator used in the laser radar to the video modulator in the laser communication console. Unfortunately, the bolt patterns for the two laser systems were incompatible and she could tighten only one bolt. However, she had been prepared for that problem and had brought some quick-setting vacuum epoxy to fasten the laser communication dish onto the laser radar mount.
“What I need is four hands,” Amalita said as she reached into a pouch for the epoxy. The twin tube had been designed for use with her clumsy gloves and even had a tear-off top. But in her hurry to get the job over, Amalita made a mistake.
The mistake was a very innocent one for someone who had been living in free fall for many years. All she did was to park the laser radar in space alongside her while she opened the epoxy. While she was busy with the glue, the laser radar slowly floated outward, gaining speed. When it reached the end of its lanyard, it jerked cruelly at Amalita’s middle. She found herself pulled off the turret. There was a quick second of panic, then Amalita came to the end of her two safety lines and rebounded. She felt a rip as the weaker joint in the equipment ring holding the laser radar came out of her safety belt, while the two stronger personal safety loops held. She looked down to see the laser radar module head outward away from the ship. It gathered speed rapidly in the strong attractive gravitational fields from the dense masses in the tidal compensator. She lost sight of the module as it whipped out to join the whirling ring of ultra-dense asteroids.
“We have trouble, Dragon Slayer,” she said into her suit microphone. “I lost the laser radar module to tidal forces.”
Amalita pulled herself hand-over-hand back up the safety lines to the turret and proceeded to bolt and glue the communication dish to the empty mount and then hook up the power and modulation cables.
She quickly climbed down off the turret and signaled to Cesar to start up the turret again. She watched, staying out of the way of the control jets, until the huge cylinder was again spinning around at five revolutions per second. She then glanced up to see an elongated glob of crushed and extruded glass and metal come whirling back toward the hull of Dragon Slayer. The sharp points of metal on the glob were emitting a blue corona of electric discharge built up from the rapid motion through the strong magnetic fields of the star.
Amalita was appalled. If that ever hit the hull of Dragon Slayer they would be dead. Cursing herself for having been so careless, Amalita knew that this was no time to play it safe.
“Emergency! Emergency!” she called. Without waiting for a reply, she began a move-by-move description of the problem and her efforts to solve it.
“Laser radar module loose and moving at high velocity in vicinity of ship. I am jettisoning safety line and will use jet-pack to try to catch it.”
Amalita unhooked her safety line, moved her left hand to the jet-pack controls on her chest, and took off to capture the deadly missile.
As she swooped around the curve of the hull, she spotted the module above the turret. It had slowed down as the tidal forces had pulled on it. The module had looped slowly in a large arc and was now headed back again toward Dragon Slayer. She would have to catch it while it was moving slowly if she were going to hold onto it, so she jetted straight up to meet it.
As she flew past the spinning turret, her body began to feel the tidal pressures. She tried to hunch in her head and draw up her feet to cut down her length and relieve the forces, but it was hard work holding them in against the strong outward pull. It was worst on her head. Her ears and nose felt as if they were being pounded twenty times a second, while the top of her head felt as if she were being scalped by a savage with a dull knife.
Despite the pain, she continued upward to meet the module that was slowly gaining speed as it fell again toward Dragon Slayer. This is where her two seasons as captain of a free-ball team on L-5 would pay off. Her left hand played quickly over the jet control keys on her chest. She slowed, whirled about, and then accelerated again to match speed with the now rapidly falling chunk of metal. As her head changed orientation, the tidal pressures changed also. Her nose, now jerked viciously outwards, began to gush ellipsoidal globules of blood. Peering anxiously through her red-stained visor, Amalita found a short section of lanyard in front of her and grabbed it with her right hand while her left flicked over the jet controls. The laser radar module continued on its hyperbolic path downward past the hull of Dragon Slayer and then outward along the belt line. Slowly Amalita got it under control and dragged it down to the hull. Within seconds after her boots had clicked onto the plates, she had both herself and the distorted hunk of metal attached by shortened lines to safety rings on the hull.
Her voice was hoarse from the running commentary she had kept up during the chase. “All secure,” she croaked. “I will need some help getting this inside.”
“Are you
hurt?” came a concerned voice over her suit speaker.
“I’m sore all over, Doc, but the only real damage is a bloody nose,” she replied.
Amalita was making her way back to the air-lock, moving her bruised body slowly from one safety ring to another when she saw a suited figure rising from the air-lock to help. She was only too glad to hand over her problems to the welcome crew mate.
“I am sure glad to see you,” Amalita said. “Even if only through a red haze. Here—you take what’s left of the laser radar module. Watch out for it—when it got mashed in the tidal forces of those asteroids several sharp spikes got extruded—they could nick your suit.”
“I’ve got it,” Jean said. “Now you get in that air-lock and cycle through. Doc is waiting on the other side with a warm wet compress for that nose. And in case you were wondering, the laser communication link is working fine. The first messages have gone down, and we have already received a reply back through the ultraviolet scanner.”
Interaction
TIME: 08:42:05 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Swift-Killer moved slowly through the compound of the Inner Eye Institute in Bright’s Heaven. She was getting old and did not bluster her way directly into the hard direction as she had used to. Instead, she slid obliquely along, letting the bulk of her still huge body do the work against the “lines of magnetic force” that one of Pierre’s early science books had taught them about. She made her way to the Sky-Talk Library. It was still under construction, with workers busily assembling low walls with storage bins for the knowledge that had been beaming down from the sky for almost two generations now. There were smaller bins for the tally fringe strings that were the method of recording the pictures early in her job as Keeper of the Sender, and larger ones for the new tasting plates that could accurately record the high resolution, multihued “television” images that the humans were now using.
The taste-plates had also been one of Swift-Killer’s many inventions. She had begun to despair over accurately recording all the subtle nuances of the human television signal in the form of knots of various shapes and sizes. She had happened upon the new technique when she had been on inspection after they had broken camp and were moving on to a new station under the westward-drifting human spacecraft. She had flowed through the remains of the kitchen for the camp and her tread moved across an abandoned mixing plate, stained with meat juices and spices. Her ancient hunting senses had sprung into action, attempting to extract every item of information from the complex chemical spoor that it found under her tread. Swift-Killer had experimented and found that her tread could “taste” with higher resolution and comprehension using her ancient spoor-tracking senses than it could feel with her high-sensitivity tactile senses. After a little experimentation to find the most pungent and long-lasting spices, the knowledge of the humans was soon being stored on long-lasting, apparently featureless plates, that burst into a detailed, “full-colored” image as a trained tread flowed onto it.
Swift-Killer approached Sky-Beams, one of her apprentices, who was busily staring upwards at the rapidly blinking Inner Eye, a set of trained tendrils in front of him, shooting drop after drop of spice onto a fresh plate.
Leaving half of his eyes devoted to the recording task, Sky-Beams turned the others toward his mentor. “What are you doing here, O Keeper of the Sender?” Sky-Beams said, his correctly formal address scarcely concealing his annoyance that the Old One was interrupting him.
Swift-Killer knew exactly what was wrong with the youngster. He was ready to become the new Keeper of the Sender, and she was still around. However, it didn’t bother her any longer. As she grew older, she grew more mellow and now was actually looking forward to tending eggs and hatchlings. What stories she would tell them!
“I came to bring you good news, Sky-Beams,” she said. “The advisory council of the Inner Eye Institute has agreed with my recommendation, and you are now the new Keeper of the Sender.”
Swift-Killer flowed over toward him as the tendrils on the younger one hesitated. She started to form a pseudopod to stroke his topside as she had done many times in the past. He seemed perfectly willing, but she found that she was just not interested in sex anymore. She wanted to get to the eggs that were waiting for her. She gave him a friendly brush anyway, then said, “Stay vigilant, Sky-Beams. The work may be tedious at times, but one never knows but what the next page will bring a new truth to our people.”
“I will, my teacher,” Sky-Beams said, and turned all his eyes back to the sky as Swift-Killer flowed away in the easy direction, heading for the egg-pens on the east side of Bright’s Heaven.
Pierre looked up at the flash in the corner of his screen.
LINK FROM JEAN—LIBRARY
“Accept link!” he said.
PULLED SECTION ON MATH AND PHYSICS.
IT IS NOW CUED IN COMPUTER AFTER YOUR BOOKS.
CONCENTRATED ON PHYSICS OF NEUTRON STARS.
SLOW GOING, HOWEVER.
WHAT NEXT?
# # # # JEAN
Pierre thought for a moment. Jean was right. If they spent time searching through the extensive ship’s encyclopedia for useful knowledge on the HoloMem crystals, then dumping those sections into the communication computer and out the laser communications console, it would take them forever and a day. A day for the humans and what would seem like forever to the neutron star beings.
“Amalita!” he bellowed, and soon a bloody handkerchief with two eager eyes above it was peering down through the passageway. “Can we hook up the library HoloMem reader directly into the communications console?”
There was a slight pause as Amalita flicked circuit diagrams through her nearly eidetic memory.
“Sorry, Pierre,” she said. “The HoloMem crystal reader is hardwired into the library computer. However, the communications console does have the capability of reading or recording a single HoloMem crystal at a time.”
“It does?” Pierre said, surprised.
Amalita floated over to the communications console where Abdul was monitoring the latest transmission and flipped open a small door in one side. She reached in and carefully removed a three-sided object. When she pulled it out, Pierre could see the bottom was missing and the interior was a corner cube of brilliantly polished mirrors.
“This is one-half the scanner cavity,” Amalita said, “and here is the HoloMem crystal itself.” She pushed a button and a clear crystal cube about five centimeters across sprang out of the door, twirling slowly as it floated into the room. The corners and edges of the cube were jet black, but through the clear faces Pierre could see the rainbowlike reflections from the information fringes stored in the interior. Amalita deftly plucked the cube out of the air, her thumb and forefinger grasping it at opposite corners.
“This has been storing everything that has gone through the console since we started,” she said. “It is exactly the same size as one of the encyclopedia HoloMems and we can put one of them in place of this one and read the encyclopedia down one crystal at a time. It will take about a minute to switch crystals and check the scanner adjustments, and about half an hour to read out each one of the 25 encyclopedia crystals, but that should still be faster than shoving all those bits from the library computer through the communications computer to the console.”
“Good!” Pierre said. “Go get the first encyclopedia crystal and start with that.”
“A to AME, AME to AUS, AUS to BLO, BLO to …” muttered Amalita as she twirled down through the passageway to the library, her trained legs and feet propelling her as efficiently as her hands, which were still busy holding the HoloMem crystal and the corner of the laser scanner cavity.
“A complete education, from Astronomy to Zoology,” Pierre mused. “Alphabetical order may not be the best way to teach someone, but in this case it is the fastest.”
TIME: 11:16:03 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Suck-the-Crystal pressed the pores of his tread to the page—absorbing again the revelation that had come drip
ping across from the neutron-depleted plates. His thrums of joy and surprise pounded the page. From the page they were transmitted to the floor and thence to the entire courtyard of the Sky-Talk Library—raising admonishing taps from the librarians and scholars. The taps were soon followed by slower waves emanating from the methodical approach of his friend, mentor and (unfortunately at this time) Chief Librarian—Seek-the-Sky, who arrived saying, “Have you lost your senses or is it only that you’ve drained your nuclei dry trying to read those depleted plates of crystal and have gone into convulsions?”
“I am sorry, Seek-the-Sky. It is just that I absorbed a piece of knowledge that made my previous studies come together into one coherent piece. Here—try it.”
Seek-the-Sky flowed onto the dusty, well-tasted crystal plate as Suck-the-Crystal flowed off. From the heading on the plate the librarian noted that it was an early plate from the human encyclopedia, HoloMem 2—AME to AUS. It was a table in the section on Astronomy.
“So?” Seek-the-Sky said. “This plate has been tasted so often that there is hardly a neutron left on it, much less any information that has not been correlated and cross-correlated and cross-cross-correlated by the Old Ones many turns ago. What do you find here that I don’t? This seems to be a brittle, tasteless table of stellar nebula.”
As he flowed off the plate he stamped, “What is so important about this that you should disturb the scholarly researches of the entire library staff?”
“But, please,” Suck-the-Crystal said quickly, “it was an entry in the table that suddenly cross-correlated with some new plates that I helped prepare and catalog just this turn. A few milliseconds ago, over at the Comm Input, I had prepared the crystal plates from the turn’s batch of data transmitted by the humans, and had proof-tasted them carefully with the vibrations from the acoustic delay line as any apprentice should. Now-most of the apprentices don’t really care what is on the plates, just as long as they agree with the delay line vibrations—but I like to taste them and do preliminary correlations and pretend that I am the Keeper of the Comm.”
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