Starquake

by Robert L. Forward

  Normally, when the compensator masses were doing their job, the central portion of the Dragon Slayer was in nearly free fall. Only near the outer walls did the gravity field become large enough to give a sense of up and down. Now, however, the compensation was way off, and the gravity forces on the upper and lower decks were substantial. The average field was nearly two Earth gravities and slowly getting stronger, while the variations around that average sometimes exceeded two gravities for a millisecond or so. The variations did not act long enough to build up large velocities, but they made it difficult to navigate the rungs. He turned around so that the gravity was pulling him "down" the ladder to the "upper" Science Deck and climbed down to stand next to Amalita, who was sitting on the ceiling, trying to struggle into a spacesuit.

  "I'm going to repair the herder rocket by replacing the valve with a redundant valve from another rocket," she panted.

  "You'll be killed!" he said, his eyes growing wide with concern.

  "We'll all be killed unless somebody fixes that rocket," she said. "I may not make it, but I'm going to give it a good try."

  "I admire your bravery," said Dr. Wong. "But if you would only stop to think, you would realize that bravery is not going to be enough." He bent down and made her look at him.

  'The herder rockets operate in the region halfway between us and the compensator masses, which are at 200 meters from the center of the ring," he said. His voice took on a commanding tone. "What is the magnitude of the tidal force at 100 meters from one of those masses?"

  Doc Wong watched Amalita's eyes glaze over as the superfast colloid computer under the brown ponytail raced through the mental calculations.

  "133 gees per meter," she said. Her eyes blinked as she returned to the task of putting on her helmet. "But it is compensated by the neutron star tides of 101 gees per meter...."

  "Leaving 32 gees per meter," said Doc. "The joints in the herder rockets are designed to stand those strains, but you'll have to admit that your joints can't."

  As he took the helmet from her unresisting hands, a bright

  streak of light flashed across the star image table above them. The cheela Polar Orbiting Space Station had shot by them once again.

  06:52:19 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  Captain Star-Glider was waiting at the docking port as the small jumpcraft maneuvered closer to the space station. It was carrying a two-star admiral, and custom demanded that the captain of the station be there to greet such an important visitor. He wasn't sure why the admiral was coming. It might be that he was on his way out into space, but Star-Glider was not aware of any imminent deep space launches. He suspected that the visit might involve him, since his tour of duty as station commander was about over and it was time for him to move on to a new command. While he waited, he allowed four of his eyes to watch the Six Eyes of Bright pass over, only a kilometer away. It was now over four greats of turns since the meteorite had struck the rocket and the compensator masses were now noticeably out of line. He idly wondered what the bureaucracy of the Combined Clans was doing about it for he had heard nothing in the holovid news reports.

  The jumpcraft docked smartly on a flat spot on the side of the spherical space station.

  "Welcome to the Polar Orbiting Space Station, Admiral Milky-Way," Star-Glider said, his tendrils brushing his six-pointed captain's star in salute. "What brings you so far from the warmth of Egg?"

  "Well, I could say that I've come on a surprise inspection," the admiral answered. Then his tread rippled with laughter as he noticed the nervous twitch in Star-Glider's eye-stubs. "But actually I've come to see you about a private matter. Can we retire to your quarters?"

  "Certainly." Star-Glider was slightly puzzled. Usually a change of command was made by a public announcement. He led the way down the corridors and they entered his quarters. He had left the holovid on and the viewblock contained a close-up of a single cheela eye. It was a cool, deep red and the eye-stub below it was thickening as it drew the eye down below the plumpest, sexiest eyeflap on Egg. The holocamera pulled back to show the rest of the female cheela as she con-

  turned her slow ripple across the stage, winking one eye after another as she sang the slightly risque song, 'Twine Thine Eyen About Mine." Slightly embarrassed, Star-Glider moved over to the control patch to turn it off, but the admiral blocked his way with a tendril.

  "Don't do that," he said. "Let her finish her song, it's one of my favorites." He moved over to a resting pad and flowed himself out to enjoy the show. Star-Glider perched on the other pad with half his eyes on the viewblock and half on the admiral. The song came to an end, and with it the show. Star-Glider moved out a portion of his tread and turned off the holovid.

  "A perfectly delightful creature, that Qui-Qui," Milky-Way rumbled. "I find her an excellent antidote for egg-tending fever. Every time I see those twelve luscious eyeflaps, I feel like a hatchling again." He shuffled his tread a bit, then reached into a pouch and pulled out a message scroll. Instead of rolling it over to Star-Glider, he held onto it as he talked.

  "As you probably realize, your tour of duty here is coming to an end. You have done an excellent job and could stay on here for another tour if you so desire, but you have been recommended for another position. It is not one of the normal command posts, but is a unique one-time mission that requires someone with your breadth of experience in large space operations. It will be an onerous post at times and will require a long-term commitment on your part. Longer than the usual four-great tour of duty. For those reasons, we are not just going to assign you to the post. Instead, I came up here to talk to you candidly about the positive and negative aspects of the position and give you an opportunity to turn it down."

  "I don't mind committing myself to an extra-long duty tour, if it is the right kind of post," said Star-Glider. "But what is so onerous about the job?"

  "You will be given full responsibility ... but almost no authority," Milky-Way explained. "In fact, most of the work of the commander of this special mission will be to beg and plead and cajole to get enough authority to carry out the mission he has the responsibility to perform. In this case, by authority I mean money." He rolled the message scroll across the deck.

  "It was over four greats of turns ago that a meteorite struck one of the rockets herding the Six Eyes of Bright and placed the humans in danger. At that time it was estimated that it would take about five human minutes or ten greats of turns be-

  fore the circular formation of the Six Eyes became so deformed that the gravity tides would tear the Inner Eye spaceship apart. Shortly after that, even the isolation tanks would be unable to protect the humans.

  "When the accident happened, the President of the Combined Clans made the commitment that the people of Egg would undertake a mission to restore the rocket and save the humans. But the initial public enthusiasm for the project rapidly wore off. It was a full two greats of turns before even a design study contract was issued—and it was inadequately funded. The Web Construction Company has completed the design effort and come up with a technically feasible approach. They tried to keep the costs down, but the mission is going to require a significant increase in the space budget and the Legislature of the Combined Clans are clenching their treads and procrastinating to avoid having to appropriate the funds."

  Star-Glider pushed on the scroll and it flattened out on the deck. He lowered an eye to read it.

  "A promotion to admiral!" he said.

  "Yes. Six more points on your star if you take the job," said Milky-Way. "And I can almost guarantee another star if you can ride the Swift without getting eaten."

  Star-Glider hesitated.

  "You will earn every one of those six points if you take the job," said the admiral. "You will have to go on holovid shows and attend clan gatherings to regenerate public enthusiasm for the project. You will have to get to know most of the members of the Legislature of the Combined Clans and become so close to the members of the legislative sub-group on Space, Communic
ations, and Slow One Interactions that they will think of you as a hatchling mate. Above all, despite provocation, you will have to keep calm, make no enemies, and never lose your temper. Can you do it? Will you do it?"

  "Yes!" Star-Glider responded emphatically.

  "Congratulations ... Admiral," said Milky-Way. "I happen to have brought along some dozen-pointers with me." He fumbled through his pouches, then pulled out a board with a half-dozen stars on it. While Star-Glider remained motionless in the middle of the room, the admiral circled him, pulling six-pointed stars out of the holding sphincters in Star-Glider's body and inserting shiny new twelve-pointed stars. When he

  completed the circuit he asked, "Care to change your name, too?"

  "No. I still like the one I chose after I graduated from the academy."

  "Well then, Admiral Star-Glider," said Milky-Way. "Let's assemble your crew for an announcement."

  Admiral Star-Glider turned over the command of the space station to First Officer Horizon-Sensor and returned with Milky-Way to the surface of Egg. He had been in orbit for over a great of turns and was looking forward to going to his clan gatherings again.

  The pilot on the jumpcraft used a short burst of inertia drive to drop them out of their polar orbit. He timed the deorbit push so that their perigee occurred near the East Pole. As they approached the strong magnetic field region above the pole, stubby superconducting wings unfolded from the slender jumpcraft. Tilting the winged spacecraft as it flew through the slippery magnetic field lines, the pilot transferred momentum to Egg through the East Pole fields and switched from a polar orbit to an equatorial orbit. There was no change in the jumpcraft's speed since the interaction with the magnetic field was essentially lossless. The maneuver took them within a hundred meters of the thin metal stalk of the Space Fountain. The tower was now fifty kilometers high and loomed above their trajectory. Star-Glider made sure he was on the topside as the turn was made. The view was excellent. He could even see the small construction elevators moving up and down the lengthening shaft.

  06:52:20 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  The young roustabout felt uneasy. Normally he wouldn't mind at all being squeezed in an elevator between two plump-lidded females. A little squeeze and tickle would help pass the dothturn-long drop to the surface. This time, however, one female was his gang-chief and the other was the shift supervisor. This was his first shift up on the Space Fountain since he had started his apprenticeship at Web Construction, and he was trying to make a good impression so they would let him have more high tower time.

  The two supervisors talked shop under his tread, and he suffered in silence as he tried to find some place for his eyes to

  look that wasn't eyeflap or topside. Six of his eyes watched the three pairs of rapidly moving streams of superconducting rings shooting up through holes at the corners of the triangular-shaped elevator. The other six eyes stared out into space toward the distant horizon where he could see blotches and lines that were cities and roads leading westward toward Bright's Heaven.

  A glowing speck swung around the tower a hundred meters away and shot off into the distance. It was probably a jumpcraft headed for the Jump Loop. The elevator came to a stop at the 60 kilometer platform. The platform was bare except for the deflector magnets surrounding each of the six pairs of ring streams. The upgoing elevator that rode the other three streams had just left the on-shift replacement, and they waited while the shift instructions were passed.

  "Keep a few eyes on the deflector for stream three-up. It's getting warm, and Topside says they are getting too many pushouts," the off-shifter reported. "I sent down for a spare."

  "Got it right here," said the on-shifter, pulling a bulky box from a cavernous workman's pouch. "I'll have it fixed in no time. Have fun in Swift's Climb."

  "I expect to. See you in a dozturn."

  Heavy-Egg knew about pushouts. That was his job on the Topside Platform. The six up-streams were scanned by some sort of detector when they came topside. Any rings that were bent or too hot got pushed aside into a rejection bin where they slammed into a magnetic stopper. You didn't want bad rings going into the turn-around magnets. They could cause a lot of problems. Heavy-Egg's job was to hook the ring out before the next one was rejected so they wouldn't bang into each other and get dented. The magnetic field in the stopper was so strong it would burn his skin if he left his manipulator in it too long. It was hot and noisy work, but he enjoyed it. Each of the rings he saved was worth more than he made each turn. They were made of monopole-stabilized metal, the only thing on Egg that didn't blow up in free fall. The last dozturn shift he figured he had saved Web Construction enough money to pay him for a whole great of turns, and he hadn't allowed one banger.

  They reached the bottom of the tower and the off-shift crew shuffled off the elevator and headed for the chutes. Heavy-Egg stopped to feel the crust at the top of the East Pole mountains. It was humming with power from the con-

  stant stream of rings that were accelerated in long circular tunnels at the base of the mountain and shot upward in a fountain of metal.

  Heavy-Egg flowed into the chute-car. This time he arranged it so that the female next to him wasn't his gang-chief. Her name was Glowing-Tread, and they became real friendly as the chute-car rocketed down the mountain passes in a semi-enclosed superconducting chute that kept the magnetic field out. They braked to a halt in the outskirts of Swift's Climb and headed for the nearest pulp-bar. The pulp-bar had some private pad rooms and some couples headed directly for them, dropping some stars in the bartender's cash pouch as they passed.

  It was still a few methturns to turnfeast, so Heavy-Egg and Glowing-Tread treated each other to a few bags of fermented pulp from the petal-pod plants. They were into their third bag when Heavy-Egg's favorite holovid show came on. It was the "Qui-Qui Show," starring the sexiest female entertainer on Egg. The males whooped and stamped the crust in rhythm while the females made jokes about the shape of her eyeflaps.

  "If she put all twelve eyes on one side, her tread would leave the crust," muttered Glowing-Tread, drawing a few laughs.

  "My eye-balls say you have the same problem," said Heavy-Egg, making the first move. She turned all twelve eyes around to look at him, and his eye-stubs grew stiffer as she winked one after the other in a fairly good imitation of Qui-Qui's famous ripple-wink.

  "Like this?" she said, leaning heavily on him and letting her fleshy eyeflaps rub against his topside edge. "It's a good thing you are there to lean on or I might topple over and bruise something."

  They got real friendly again, and she even let him reach into her heritage pouch to feel her clan totem. However, the totem wasn't familiar—so she wasn't a member of one of the out-clan families related to his clan. She was willing to rent a pad-room and go further, but Heavy-Egg still felt a strong allegiance to his in-clan and its out-clan families. Any egg he might be responsible for must end up in his clan hatching pens. There were already too many clanless hatchlings on the streets.

  Heavy-Egg parted reluctantly with Glowing-Tread. She

  found someone else and went off to turnfeast with him. Frustrated, Heavy-Egg invested a few stars in a private holovid screen room and watched the rest of the Qui-Qui Show.

  Qui-Qui was of his in-clan, and he had actually seen her at a clan gathering. Of course she had been surrounded by admirers. His dream since he became old enough to realize that females were different from males was to have Qui-Qui lay his egg. He knew it would never come true, but that didn't stop him from dreaming.

  The Qui-Qui Show was finally over. Heavy-Egg played it back again using the automatic replay feature while he pouched a turnfeast meal without seeing or tasting it. Most of the rest of the off-shift crew were going to take a few turns of break-time, but he made his way back up to the top of the mountain and reported to the Web Construction scheduler. There was always some roustabout who got too lazy or too full of pulp to make it back to work on time. He was lucky; there was a Topside job open. He gra
bbed it eagerly, for the only thing that he liked better than thinking about Qui-Qui was the nearly sexual thrill of working on the tower, where the tiniest slip meant instant death.

  Heavy-Egg enjoyed work, and often wondered what it would feel like to be a human and have to spend a third of your life unconscious. He had heard that humans would fall asleep even when their lives were in danger. He then remembered hearing long ago on the holovid that the humans were in some kind of danger and wondered if any of them were asleep.

  06:53:21 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  Amalita crawled slowly along the passageway ladder from the Science Deck to the Central Deck, her muscles fighting the high outward-going residual gravity tides. She was careful at each step to maintain a tight three-point grip with feet and hands on the rungs as the varying forces from the errant compensator mass alternately tried to pull her up and down the ladder. As she passed the protection tank containing Seiko, she looked inside. Seiko had her eyes shut, and her limbs hung limply in the water. She was sound asleep.

  "I guess thirty-six hours of strenuous activity is enough even for a super-human like her," Amalita muttered. She clung to

  the handholds near the communications console. Pierre was strapped into the seat.

  "If only Dragon Slayer had some means of propulsion," she said to Pierre.

  "It'd have to be faster-than-light propulsion to get away from the neutron star before the tides tore us...." Suddenly something clicked in Pierre's mind. In special relativity, faster-than-light travel was equivalent to time travel—and he knew the cheela could travel faster than the speed of light. Pierre turned back to the console screen.

  "Sky-Teacher," he said. "You can travel faster than light. Do you have time travel?"

  "Yes," said Sky-Teacher. "A Doctor of Tempology communicated through time two minutes ago, just after your accident."