“Now for the fun part,” Helium-Two said. “We are going to inject a small chunk of pure carbon into the zero gravity region and see what happens.”
Helium-Two turned to the crew and initiated the sequence of events. Super-Fluid watched as a short stubby cylinder started to rise up out of the crust right under the distortion. He could feel powerful hydraulic pumps complaining as the top of the cylinder started to approach the edge of the oval-shaped region.
“That last little bit of distance is going to take some time,” Helium-Two said, as the hydraulic pumps labored under the strain. “Moving those few microns from our normal gravity to the zero gravity in the gravimotive-effect region is equivalent to going straight up off our neutron star into outer space. Not much distance to travel, but it takes a lot of energy. We are going to stop the cylinder just as it gets to the inner edge, and fire the carbon pellet from a gun built into the piston.”
The vibration of the hydraulic pumps finally stabilized and began to beat with the rising whine of the antigravity generator pumps that kept the distortion activated. Helium-Two turned a few of his eyes toward his engineers and his undertread rumbled an order through the crust: “Inject!”
Super-Fluid watched as a tiny speck rose from the center of the piston and floated to the center of the distortion, brightly illuminated by lights that flooded the central region with X-rays. As he watched, the speck grew, and by the time it had reached the center and hung there, it had grown to be almost as round as he was wide.
“Why doesn’t it fall out of the zero gravity region as the atmosphere did?” Super-Fluid asked.
Helium-Two replied, “Those X-ray lights are not just for illumination, they are also coupled to a servo control system. We use X-ray pressure to keep the carbon speck centered in the zero gravity region.”
“As it gets bigger, it gets harder to see,” Super-Fluid said, watching in awe and amazement as the tiny speck of degenerate crystalline carbon slowly came apart. Once the material had been released from the tremendous gravitational pressures exerted by the neutron star, the nuclear repulsive forces took over and the nuclei moved further and further apart. Now that there was space between the nuclei, the electrons, which had been packed into a superconductive fluid coursing through the close-packed array of carbon nuclei, began to evaporate from the fluid to take up orbits around the nuclei, further isolating the nuclei from each other. Soon the tiny speck had grown a hundred times larger in each direction while its density dropped by a million.
“I can’t see it anymore,” Super-Fluid said.
“I can, and it’s beautiful,” Helium-Two said, waving one of his eyes after another. “At least with some of my eyes. I think I can fix things so we can both see it without having to move around.” He went to the servo control console and talked to the engineer there.
He returned. “I had the engineer set the servo control so that the crystal would rotate while staying in place.”
They both watched as the seemingly empty space suddenly sparkled into a brilliant flash of light—then winked off again.
“You wouldn’t think that something with a density of only a few grams per cubic centimeter would be visible at all—much less be so brilliant,” Helium-Two said.
“It is because the crystal structure reflects the X-rays when the atomic planes of the crystal are at just the right angle between one of the lights and one of our eyes,” Super-Fluid explained. “I have been watching the pattern carefully as it rotates. If I am not mistaken, that is a crystal with a cubic lattice structure. What did you say the seed material was?”
“Carbon,” Helium-Two said.
“I think that is what the humans call a diamond,” Super-Fluid said. “They were right—it is pretty.”
TIME: 20:30:00 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
The chimes rang again and again, insistently. Pierre woke up grudgingly, his red-lined eyes peering at the numbers on the clock.
2030, the numbers indicated.
“I missed my shift!” Pierre exclaimed, slapping the release and running an index finger down the sealing seam of the sleeping sack. As his brain became more active, he realized that shifts no longer counted, but he still should be awake and helping.
“Six hours,” he groaned as he rubbed his face. “Six hours—and three-fourths of a millennium. I wonder what is going on?” He quickly bathed, and, still holding a food-stick, swung up the passageway to the back of the communications console.
Abdul looked up as he came in. “Glad to see you, Pierre,” he said in a concerned voice. “Did you get some sleep?”
“Yes,” Pierre replied. “Enough to keep me awake for the rest of my shift. Thanks for standing in for me.”
“No problem,” Abdul said. “It has been interesting watching the cheela civilization develop almost right in front of my eyes.”
“At what stage are the cheela now?” Pierre asked.
“They are beginning to pass us in all areas except molecular chemistry. But since they don’t even have molecules to experiment on, you can’t blame them for that. They tell us that they can almost predict the contents of the rest of the encyclopedia, but they insist that we send the entire text down for the sake of their historians and humanologists. We should be changing to the last encyclopedia crystal WAT to ZYZ shortly. Then you should erase the encyclopedia crystals and the cheela will start filling them up with information that they have learned on their own in the past day.”
“Good,” Pierre said. “Amalita and I can take it from here. You had better get some rest yourself.”
“I won’t take long,” Abdul said as he floated out the door. “This is too interesting to miss.”
TIME: 22:26:03 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Floating-Crystal returned from her vacation with mixed emotions. It had been a delightful vacation, eight long turns in the foothills at Swift’s Climb mountain resort. She had enjoyed every millisecond of it, even though she would never get used to the idea of looking down on things. She was reluctant to return to what everyone would admit was often the most boring job on the star, yet at the same time she felt eager to be back at work; while the job of Keeper of the Comm was boring at times, it was the most important position a cheela could aspire to (with the possible exception of the President of the United Clans).
Floating-Crystal was feeling good as she entered Sky Talk complex. She decided to take a shortcut. Rather than moving along the paths in the easy direction, and then crossing over at the superconducting tunnels, she flattened herself out and pushed her way in the hard direction across the park that separated the compounds in the complex. She could almost feel the magnetic field lines rippling across her top side as she pushed herself along, her tread gripping the textured surface. She flowed by the crumbling ruins of the gigabit receiving antenna that had been the pride and joy of her predecessors many generations ago, and went into the compound surrounding the huge transmitter array.
Her first thought was to check on the Comm display. As she flowed onto its large flat surface she could tell that the human—Amalita Shakhashiri Drake—was still in the middle of her sentence. At the bottom of the screen the computer had superimposed the words of the sentence. Those that Amalita had already spoken were in one taste and the computer prediction for the words in the rest of the sentence were in another taste. It was a long sentence, and full of the many redundancies that humans found necessary to insert into their speech. It was the very predictability of the redundancies that made the job of Keeper of the Comm so boring.
Before Floating-Crystal had left on her vacation Amalita had spoken the words:
“Pierre has informed me that the Ho …”
Floating-Crystal did not need a computer to figure out that the next few phonemes were “… loMem crystal …” and that the rest of the sentence was probably something about the holographic memory data storage crystal being full and that they should stop transmitting data up for a minute while Pierre put in a blank crystal.
When Am
alita had gotten to “Holo …”, Floating-Crystal had decided it would be a good time for a long vacation and had taken off. On her return to the display, she was surprised to find that both she and the computer had misjudged the human. Amalita had progressed much further in her sentence than she had expected, although the general content was the same. The computer display of the spoken part now read:
“Pierre has informed me that the HoloMem’s full. Stop one min …”
“Good,” Floating-Crystal thought to herself. “The old array has been transmitting data up to the humans for generations. That minute will give us time to tear down the obsolete hunk of junk and build a decent one with computer-controlled phased-array beam steering.”
Floating-Crystal flowed off the display and went to the translation compound. Her three apprentices were busily scanning the human-language output of a computer generated translation of a text on cheela physiology. Although the computer did an excellent job of translation, there were many times that a straight human translation of a cheela sentence ended up distorted (or even bawdy) and it required an experienced student of human culture to figure out how to restructure the human sentence to retain the original cheela intent. Clear-Thinker, the eldest apprentice, felt the vibrations from Floating-Crystal’s tread as she approached. He turned a few of his eyes toward her.
“Remind me in three or four dozen turns to find a good stopping point in the data stream,” Floating-Crystal instructed him. “It is time for the humans to change crystals.”
“This book on physiology that we are translating now is scheduled for transmission in about three dozen turns,” the apprentice replied. “It has a lot of pictures, so the number of bits is quite high, but it shouldn’t take too many turns to transmit—even at the slow bit rates that the human receivers can handle.”
“Good,” Floating-Crystal said. “Make the break at the end of the text.”
She then returned to the Comm display room and prepared her reply in front of the cameras. The computer stored her performance and then played it back for her review—first on the long, thin visual display that just showed her front edge and eyes, and then on the human-oriented rectangular taste display. The camera for that display looked down at her from an angle and showed her whole flat body with the ring of eyes around its periphery. She could see the bulge that was an egg near her middle and wondered idly whether it had been Clear-Thinker or Bit-Cruncher who had put it there. “Not that it really matters,” she thought to herself. “It looks as if it will be ready to leave with the Old Ones at the hatching pens pretty soon.”
“I still think the whole thing is slightly obscene,” she murmured as she examined her image in the human display. “Nobody but lovers, computers, and humans ever see the top side of me.”
She didn’t like her first performance and redid it a couple of times until the message was short, yet clear. She then keyed the computer to transmit the message at human rates as soon as Amalita finished her sentence.
With a long break coming up, there was a lot to do. She contacted Comm Engineering and told them that they would soon be able to replace the aging antenna. They were delighted to be able to switch from maintenance to design and building. She could almost taste the eagerness in the Chief Engineer’s image as he flowed away to tell his crew.
She then called a meeting of the Comm Advisory Board. There had been some talk of a possible expedition to visit the humans, but because it would involve a good deal of direct communication, it had been put off until the next break in the data stream.
A dozen turns later the Advisory Board gathered. They listened to the gravitational engineers as they explained the latest test results on their gravity-control and inertia-drive experiments. The inertia drive was the propulsion mechanism that would allow them to leave their neutron star home, where the escape velocity was one-fourth the speed of light. However, the most dangerous part of travel off the surface of a neutron star was the explosive decompression of neutronic matter (including the neutronic matter of the space traveler!) when it was no longer kept compressed by the gravitational pressure supplied by the star. Now the engineers were sure that both problems had been solved.
Most of the Advisory Board had a difficult time accepting the fact that solid substances like the hard crystalline crust of their neutron star home or their equally tough yet supple bodies were not stable. Yet, without gravity to hold them together, they would decompose and reform into a tenuous molecular structure with the nuclei spaced a hundred times further apart than normally. However, these facts were well known to Floating-Crystal. One of the Old Ones tending her hatchling pen had worked on the original antigravity machine. He, himself, had seen a small speck of neutronic material expand when placed in the zero gravity region formed by the machine, and he had watched it turn into a transparent, twinkling molecular crystal floating in space. He had given her name to her when she hatched, and later told her about the beautiful floating crystal that had been her namesake.
After many meetings of the Comm Advisory Board and the engineers, it was finally decided that a visit to the humans was technically feasible. However, the effort required was substantial, so a commitment by the President and the Council of the United Clans was needed.
After much public debate, the program outlined by the engineers was approved, the finances were allocated, and the generation long project was started. Although the focus of the effort—“A Visit to the Humans”—was quixotic in nature, since there was almost nothing that could be communicated during the visit, they all knew that the real reason for the project was to crack the invisible egg-sac of gravity that had kept the cheela bound in the hatchery of their laying. For they all knew the cheela species could not stay on their home star forever.
The decision for the Visit came soon after the data stream was turned off. During the period while the cheela engineers were rebuilding the data transmitter and Pierre was replacing the full HoloMem crystal with an empty one, Floating-Crystal took over the Comm link to Amalita and with the help of the Visit program engineers, told her what to expect and what to do.
“We are coming out to visit,” was her first message. As the turns passed and she saw in the display the look of astonishment and concern build on Amalita’s face, she quickly brushed aside the protest that was forming on Amalita’s lips. “We will not explode. We will provide our own gravity.”
For the next minute Amalita listened attentively while Floating-Crystal explained the general outline of the planned visit. Amalita was a little concerned when she heard about the X-ray generator they were going to use to illuminate the inside of the spacecraft, then blushed a little when she began to realize how much someone could see who used soft X-rays for part of his vision range. However, the cheela already knew a great deal about human physiology. They had had plenty of time to study the human encyclopedia and the textbooks that had been beamed down by the humans many generations ago, so they knew that the total X-ray dose they would be using on their human friends during their short visit would be minimal.
At the end of the first minute, Pierre returned from the computer room to hear the musical voice of Floating-Crystal.
“We have started the data again. First is a schedule for you to follow during the visit. The expedition will start in about fifteen minutes. Read the instructions carefully, for the whole visit will only last ten seconds.”
Foating-Crystal saw Pierre come slowly around the corner and was overjoyed to see him. She had been hoping he would come back into view before she had to retire her job and take her place as an Old One teaching the hatchlings how to talk.
“I’m glad to see you again, Pierre,” she said. “I must say goodbye now. You have much reading to do and preparations to make. When you return to the monitor, there will be a new Keeper of the Comm.”
“These fifteen-minute lifetime friendships are hard on the emotions,” Amalita said to herself as she brushed her eyes, then flicked the communications screen to the computer and sta
rted reading the words that appeared there.
The cheela plan was very detailed and concise, for the cheela had long since had a complete description of the ship Dragon Slayer.
Amalita punched for a hardcopy of the screen full of words for Pierre to read, then went on to the diagram. The diagram was animated and showed herself seated at the console and Pierre near one window. Then the cheela ship arrived outside the ship. Her cartoon image rose from the chair at the console, raised its arms and, twirling around once like a clumsy ballerina, fell toward the right viewing port. Meanwhile, the cartoon of Pierre clung to another port, its nose pressed to the glass. A closeup view showed that less than a meter from his nose was a tiny speck a few millimeters across, and on that speck sat a cheela—no spacesuit—no pressure container—nothing to keep it from exploding.
Pierre quickly read the instructions, then they both watched the animation again. They were bewildered by their motions in the animation. They both looked clumsy and constrained—as if they were acting out their motions in earth-bound simulators instead of the graceful ballet of free-fall motion they were used to.
They read further and then began to realize why they had been so clumsy in the animation. To survive in space, the cheela explorers had to bring gravity with them. Their main spacecraft was a hard crystalline spherical shell about four centimeters across with a rather “large” miniature black hole at the center. At 11-billion tons mass, the black hole provided 180 thousand gees at the surface of the crystal sphere. Although far from the 67-billion gees that the cheela lived in at the surface of the neutron star, it was enough to keep their electron structure in its degenerate form. Individual cheela and equipment modules had their own smaller version of the main spacecraft. The radii of the individual flitters and equipment tugs were much smaller, so that only a tiny black hole was needed for each one. The smaller spacecraft had separate power and inertia propulsion subsystems, and the whole swarm fitted neatly into hemispherical depressions that pocked the surface of the main spacecraft.
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