Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  “Inertia propulsion!” Pierre exclaimed. “On our last shift we were teaching them Newton’s law of gravity. Today they have inertia drives! Where will they be tomorrow?”

  “They probably will be able to control space and time and won’t have to bother with such clumsy things as black hole gravity generators and inertia drives,” Amalita replied. “But now I see why we were so awkward. Their main spacecraft will stay fifteen meters away from our spacecraft, but it is so massive that we will experience about one-third of a gee from it, pulling me out of the console chair and over to the viewing port. I guess I could manage to twirl once as I fall so they can see the human joints in action, but I bet I am going to be clumsier in one-third gee than that animation.” She turned from the screen and looked at him, “I wish you were doing my part, so I could get to see the cheela.”

  “I don’t know whether you would like it,” Pierre said. “According to this contour plot of the gravity field from the individual craft, although the size and mass of the flitters are much smaller than the main spacecraft, this one is going to come up to less than one meter from my viewing port and my nose is going to be pulling three gees!” He looked down at her body and grinned, “I guess the reason they didn’t choose you is they must know you don’t wear a bra in free-fall and they didn’t want to give you reverse Cooper’s droop.”

  Amalita turned back to the display, jabbing him with her elbow as she did so, and brought up the next screen full of instructions. “You know perfectly well that since this is the one time that our two civilizations will be close enough culturally to make a physical visit meaningful, they chose the earth’s best known science writer and interpreter for the interview,” she said. “How long do you get?”

  Pierre scanned down the time schedule that the cheela had sent up. “He will stay there for about one second, and will try to remain as motionless as possible for as long as he can, so that my eyes will have time to focus on him. At that, he will probably come close to starving to death unless they can figure out a way for him to eat without moving too much.”

  “It seems ridiculous for them to go through this visit,” said Amalita. “We both have complete descriptions of each other’s physiology and plenty of pictures, both still and motion.”

  “However,” she went on, “if I were offered the opportunity to visit the surface of a neutron star and spend fifteen seconds watching a half year of cheela civilization whirling about me, I would jump at the chance.”

  The console beeped and the computer switched off the information display. A cheela’s visage appeared on the screen.

  “I am Bit-Cruncher, the new Keeper of the Comm.”

  Bit-Cruncher waited out the polite response from the humans by interviewing some new apprentices. One of them would take his place one of these turns, but all of them would meanwhile become so thoroughly soaked in human culture that they would almost think like humans. He was kind to the youngsters, remembering his terror when old Floating-Crystal had interviewed him. Still, they had a rough time ahead, for only one of them could become Keeper of the Comm.

  As one of Floating-Crystal’s apprentices, he had worked hard and had not only kept up with his apprentice work, but had developed a complex new computer program to cross-correlate the immense amount of human knowledge that was still stored in the Sky-Talk Library. His new program was now finding out more about humans than the humans knew about themselves. For this prodigious feat he was awarded the rare opportunity to choose a new name for himself, and it eventually had led to his being made the new Keeper of the Comm when Floating-Crystal became an Old One and went off to tend eggs.

  “It was the opportunity for a new name that really drove me,” he rippled to himself. “I’ll never forgive that romantic-minded Old One that named me Moby-Dick, after reading one of those old human adventure novels.”

  Bit-Cruncher continued to think about prior times as he flowed back to the Comm compound. After he had been awarded the job as the new Keeper of the Comm, his comrades and competitors in apprenticeship had had to seek other occupations. Crystal-Blossom was now a Professor of Humanology at Sky-Talk University and Clear-Thinker was leader of the Visit expedition.

  “Even though he lost out to me for Keeper of the Comm, I think maybe Clear-Thinker might be better off,” he mused. “There will be many Keepers of the Comm, but only one Visit. In addition, although I see humans on the display every turn, I do it through their cameras, which are made for their eyes. He will get to see a human in the flesh, bones and all!” Bit-Cruncher returned to the display just as Amalita was finishing.

  “… meet you, Bit-Cruncher. When will the visit b …”

  Bit-Cruncher contacted Clear-Thinker through the links and got the latest schedule. Things were going well. The main spacecraft had made it out to space and back on automatic control. Everything, even the unwilling Slinks that had been sent along in cages to test the life support system, had survived without damage. Another few hundred turns and they would be ready.

  “Set a definite time,” said Bit-Cruncher, “so the humans can get everything ready.”

  “All right,” Clear-Thinker said. “Two greats of turns from now.”

  “That long? Everyone is going to be tired of waiting for the liftoff,” Bit-Cruncher said. “But I guess it is better to be on the safe side.” Bit-Cruncher returned to the communications display as Amalita finished and informed her that the visit would take place in exactly 57 seconds.

  Amalita and Pierre turned away from the console and got busy. Amalita opened the shields over the viewing ports, set the automatic cameras for the focal distances and exposures the cheela had recommended, and turned them on. She then returned to her chair at the console, found her acceleration belt and adjusted it so she would stay in her seat until the time came for her to twirl across to the port.

  Pierre bustled about the cabin, plucking loose items from loops, off sticky pads and out of corners where they had drifted, and stuffed them into a cabinet. He then went around making sure that all the cabinets were latched.

  “The last thing we want is a pile of loose junk cluttering up the ports,” he said.

  The seconds ticked away. Pierre took up his position near one port, his hands firmly gripping the handholds set in the frame. They both looked out the other port toward the place where the visitors would arrive.

  As they waited, the light in the room flickered eerily as the white radiance from the neutron star flashed into the ports five times a second, alternating with the red glow of the ultra-dense asteroids that circled around their spacecraft, their strong gravitational fields blocking the crushing, tearing tides of the neutron star.

  Suddenly there was a flash of multihued light and they both glimpsed a small brilliant white object the size of a golf ball holding a steady position fifteen meters away. There was a moment’s pause and then the golf ball seemed to explode into a cloud of colored snowflakes that swarmed across the intervening distance. The larger snowflakes stayed well away from the ports while the smaller ones came in closer.

  TIME: 22:30:10.0 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  “Holy Egg!” murmured one of the cheela crew as they slowly drifted in between the large glowing condensed asteroids and settled down in a synchronous orbit fifteen meters out from one of the viewing ports. “I expected the thing to be big, but I never imagined it would be this big!”

  Clear-Thinker mentally agreed with the crew member. He couldn’t see who said it, since she was out of sight around the horizon on their little home away from home. What really bothered him was not that the human spacecraft was big, but that it was “overhead.” Although all the crew had been in space and had learned to conquer the fear that the home star they were orbiting was going to fall on them, this object was much too close for comfort. He quickly called an unscheduled hold in their carefully timed schedule. The humans would hardly notice a one-fifth of a second pause and he felt a full turn of rest and recreation while the crew got used to the sight of the
human spacecraft overhead would be worth the delay.

  He ordered everyone to stay in his assigned station on the spacecraft while he rotated the shell slowly around. The gigantic human spacecraft passed above every crew member several times while they all gazed at the metal skin and stared into the viewing ports, where they could vaguely glimpse some huge shadowy shapes behind the heavily tinted fuzzy glass. After a short while Clear-Thinker stopped the rotation, ordered a minimum crew to stay at the controls and let the rest of the two dozen crew members have a vacation break for a full turn. A few paired off and wandered around to the back side to find a quiet place behind some piece of equipment, but most gathered at the front and continued to stare at the unbelievable sight as the slow turning of the human spacecraft around their home star changed the lighting. At last the neutron star set behind the spacecraft and the show was over. The darkness was also strange, but the cheela psychologists had anticipated that problem and had made sure that the crystal shell underneath them had all the old familiar heat and radiation characteristics that they were used to on Egg, even though the gravitational pull was nowhere near that of home.

  With half a turn gone, Egg rose from behind the opposite side of the spacecraft, and the spectator crowd grew once again. It was obvious to Clear-Thinker that the initial problem of having the spacecraft overhead had now dissipated, but he decided to wait for one full turn before putting the crew back onto the schedule so that their timing for the photographs and spectral analyses would be correctly oriented with respect to the illumination from Egg.

  Precisely one turn later the crew members were back at their posts and the Visit began. A cloud of individual fliers and many small instrument packages took off. Each one was a tiny sphere with a sub-miniature black hole at the center to keep it under enough gravity so that it would not explode. The first instrument packages to get to the human spacecraft were several X-ray generators. Some larger ones were positioned at a distance to illuminate the general scene, their radiation varying in opposition to the illumination from the neutron star that rose and set as the work proceeded. Others were placed in a ring around the viewing ports and sent their violet-white beams through the heavily tinted glass into the interior of the spacecraft. Soon the shadows in the room became clearer. Using the pictures and a map of the console room, the crew could identify the communications console and the chair in front of it. In the chair was a collection of strangely-shaped violet objects surrounded by a multicolored cloud. They increased the illumination and then could finally make out the outlines of the yellow-white clothing and blue-white human flesh covering Amalita’s violet bones. Cameras were set up and adjusted, and data started pouring back to the mother spacecraft where other crew members monitored displays and tended the computers and the communication links back down to Egg.

  TIME: 22:30:11.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two …” counted Amalita as she felt the gravitational tug from the insignificant golf ball fifteen meters away.

  “… one-thousand-three and twirl,” she chanted as she pressed the belt release, did one pirouette through the air and landed on all fours on the thick glass of the viewing port.

  “Rather prettily done, if I do say so myself,” she thought.

  TIME: 22:30:12.9 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  “She is right on the time line,” Clear-Thinker mused to himself as he observed the computer-generated image of Amalita taken the previous turn and compared it with those taken a few turns previously. The enlarged image of the seat belt showed it was coming apart. Now if she could turn around once while she fell to the window, they could get some high resolution, three-dimensional X-ray images that made so much more sense to their computers than the book-oriented, flat diagrams they had obtained from the human physiology textbooks.

  In the following turns the crew members watched as Amalita’s body ponderously fell through the air toward the viewing port, turning slowly as it came. Clear-Thinker kept the X-ray illuminators off most of the time, to keep the radiation dose on his human friend down to a minimum. At times calculated by the computer, the X-ray illuminators would flash on, and another snapshot of the human body in motion was taken. By the time Amalita’s body was approaching the port, the computer had built up a detailed three-dimensional model of her body. Now the illuminators were brought in to focus on certain portions of her body as the scientists called for more detailed data on the glands and the corrugation patterns in the brain. The data they were collecting would keep generations of students busy.

  As Amalita’s hands and feet were contacting the viewing port glass and her body started to bounce back, one of the human-medicine specialists on the crew came up to Clear-Thinker and put down a computer-generated picture for him to scan. As Clear-Thinker flowed onto the pad and tasted the picture, the specialist said, “That is a closeup of Amalita’s left breast. Fortunately she was not wearing a brassiere so that when she landed on the window, her breasts came forward and we were able to get a highly detailed image of the entire mammary gland complex. The thing that concerns us is the anomalous region right at the center of that diagram. We are sure that it is a small group of cancer cells. They are still too small to be seen by human X-ray machines, but it is our professional judgment that they are definitely malignant.”

  “Well, it looks as if we will be able to repay Amalita for her performance,” Clear-Thinker said. “Prepare a picture that the human doctors can understand and we will send it to Amalita along with a warning of what we found.”

  The specialist replied, “We had already planned to do that, but we are all concerned about the time it will take. It will be a week before the Dragon Slayer leaves this orbit and takes Amalita and the rest of the crew back up to the mother ship, St. George. In that week, the cancer could grow and start sending out seeds to contaminate the rest of her body. We had another idea that we wanted to talk to you about.”

  Clear-Thinker flowed off the pad, “What is your proposal?”

  “Now—you must realize that what we are about to suggest is against all normal human and cheela standards of ethics. All the human-physiology specialists here, along with many experts on human psychology, medicine and law back on Egg have argued back and forth for the last two turns. There has been a general consensus, although not unanimous by any means, and it was decided to bring it to you for your approval.”

  Clear-Thinker waited patiently while the specialist worked her way through the circumlocutious argument.

  “The consensus is that because of the high malignancy potential of this growth, and the time it will take Amalita to get to a human doctor, we should treat the cancer now, even though we do not have time to get her permission first.”

  Finally it was out, and Clear-Thinker could understand why it had taken the specialist so much time to come to the point. She was right. By the time the slow-thinking Amalita had been informed of her problem, and had made the decision whether or not to let them try to treat her, the expedition would have had to return to Egg. He also realized that the specialists would not have made their recommendation unless they were sure that Amalita had a serious problem that needed immediate treatment.

  “Go ahead,” Clear-Thinker quickly replied. “What do you need?”

  “We will want to modify one of the X-ray illuminators to increase its frequency and power output,” she said. “Running it at a high power level will burn it out quickly, so it will no longer be available for general illumination, but if we do a careful scan, the focused beam of X-rays should kill the cancer cells with only minimal damage to the rest of the breast.”

  “We have plenty of illuminators,” Clear-Thinker said. “Check with the camera crew to find out which one they can spare, and proceed whenever you are ready.”

  The specialist gathered a crew and soon a modified X-ray illuminator with a large focusing mirror and a high-intensity power source moved up to the window of the viewing port. The computer first aligned the coordinates of th
e focal point of the illuminator with the calculated position of the cancer deep within the slowly moving breast. Then burst after burst of high intensity X-rays shot out from the illuminator as it was slowly moved back and forth in wide arcs about the focal point buried deep within Amalita. The cancer shriveled and died, while the skin at the surface of the breast started to turn pink—as if it had gotten too much sun at the beach.

  TIME: 22:30:16.3 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  “Ouch!” Amalita cried as she rebounded from the window. Her hand went to her breast, but the sharp hurt was gone. “Reverse Cooper’s droop?” she thought to herself. She then turned to watch Pierre, her mouth still forming the automatic count, “… One-thousand-seven …”

  TIME: 22:30:17.1 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  “It is time for the Visit,” announced Clear-Thinker at one of the planning sessions. “Get out the skimmer and check the mush tube and waste disposal systems.”

  The skimmer was a small vehicle especially designed for the Visit. It was not much larger than an instrument shell and had only rudimentary propulsion and control subsystems. A standard individual shell was much larger, and needed a larger mini-black hole to keep it from exploding. Such shells had to stay over a meter away from the viewing ports since their gravity fields were so high. The skimmer was much less massive, so it could approach much closer to the ports. The skimmer had two things that an individual shell did not normally carry, however: a half-dozen turns worth of food, most of it in the form of a liquid mush, and a disposal grate connected to a holding tank.