Cheela - Starquake Part 8

"I'll make sure the cage is locked this time," Zero-Gauss promised. "Do you have anything else for me to take down?"

"A batch of seedlings," said Careful-Mover. "They are waiting in the storage pen next to the elevator."

Zero-Gauss checked the video monitors that showed every corner of the underground nursery and animal pens, made a mental note to check a few plants that looked like they needed attention, then made her way to the elevator in the facilities compound.

Next to the elevator was a dressing subcompound with high walls. She stripped off her six metal professor badges, took off her jewelry, wiped off all her body paint, and emptied out all her pouches, even her heritage pouch containing her clan totem. The totem was made of clay fired in the ancient manner and had a baked-in magnetic field. She rolled the totem in a wiper and put it into a drawer with a combination lock. Now, as naked as the day she was hatched, she opened the door to the dressing room and looked out. Electron-Pusher, the facilities operator, was waiting discreetly at the operations console around the corner.

She moved softly to the holding pens and loaded up her pouches. Poofsie went into a small pouch and the plastic pots containing the seedlings sprouting in non-magnetic soil went into her carry-all pouch.

Now quite bulky, she faced the open door of the elevator. The elevator did not have a cooled ceiling, and it took all her nerve to make her tread move her body under the heavy metal roof. Once inside, she forced her eyes to look at the floor and calmed down. She activated the audio channel of the video link.

"You may shut the door, Electron-Pusher," she said.

"Door shutting, Professor," said Electron-Pusher. "What is the biggest diameter you're carrying?"

"Nothing bigger than my brain-knot," she said.

"We only need three pump-walls then," said Electron-Pusher. There was a whining noise, and the back wall of the elevator moved toward Zero-Gauss.

"Here comes the first wall," he said. "Let me know when everything is through."

The heavy superconducting metal wall stopped in the middle of the room, and a small circular orifice opened in the door a little way off the floor. First, Zero-Gauss emptied out her pouches and arranged the seedling pots near the wall. Then she stuck a manipulator through the tiny hole, grabbed a handle on the other side, narrowed herself down as small as she could, and slipped herself through the hole. The iris on the hole followed the outlines of her body, dilating as the brain-knot went through, then finally shrinking down to the diameter of the trailing manipulator that held the squirming Poofsie firmly in its grip.

While her body resumed its normal flattened shape, her manipulator was busy transferring plants from one side of the wall to the other. That done, the orifice closed tightly and the superconducting wall continued across the elevator to the door, compressing all the magnetic field lines in front of it. The elevator door opened briefly, and the field was pushed to the outside. A second wall approached from the back of the elevator and the process was repeated. The only difference now was that the first wall was made non-superconducting before the final expulsion stroke. After the third wall had pa.s.sed, Zero-Gauss went over to a control plate in the floor and pressed in a code. A probe rose out of the floor into the middle of the room.

"A good pump," she said over the audio link. "It only registers 2800 gauss."

"Close enough to zero for the chamber lock to handle," said Electron-Pusher. "Ready to fall?"

Her eye-wave pattern developed an annoyed twitch at his stale attempt at a joke. He had probably gotten a squeal out of one of her graduate students sometime in the past at the thought of falling down under the ground. Now he repeated it every time they went down.

"I am ready to descend," she said, her tread firmly rapping the metal plating of the floor. She didn't quite get the right "Senior Professor" tone in the'trum. It is a little hard to sound authoritative when you are naked.

"Yes, Professor," said Electron-Pusher, and the elevator began its slow descent beneath the crust.

At the bottom, the magnetic pumping procedure was carried out again using the pump-walls in the lock leading to the low-field chamber. All the residual magnetic fields possible were pumped into the elevator, which used barriers that alternated between normal conducting and superconducting states to trap the fields. The elevator then rose again to the surface where the trapped fields were expelled to the outside.

Zero-Gauss stopped by the dressing alcove, slapped on some neutral body paint, plugged in six professor badges made of metal-colored plastic, and, now decent, moved out in view of the video cameras scanning the chamber. The ceiling was a comforting black. She, Poofsie, and the plants were all glad to be out of the stifling closeness of the elevator and locks.

She started with the animals. Three of the nine segments of the field-free room held multiple breeding pairs of all the major animals on Egg with the exception of the two that were larger than a mature cheela, the ponderous Flow Slow and the carnivorous Swift. These were represented by miniature genetic hybrids about the size of a Slink.

She had a number of different types of Slinks. In addition to three sets of brightly colored but stupid food Slinks bred with flesh of different flavors, there were some highly trained herding Slinks bred for intelligence. Now, with the addition of Poofsie, she had two sets of a laboratory strain especially bred with bodies that responded like the body of a cheela to environmental changes.

She had a lot to check in the laboratory. After having gone through the long, laborious task of getting into the laboratory, she was in no hurry to leave. There was at least two turns of work to do, what with taking the animals through physical checkups as well as intelligence tests. They had restocked the food lockers in the dressing alcove the last time they had pumped out the room, so she would just refuel at turnfeast from them. Besides, someone had to check the quality of the nuts and fruits on the food plants.

Steel-Slicer was looking forward to his return to the Polar Orbiting s.p.a.ce Station. Many things had happened since his last visit there. He had retired from active duty, was elected to the Legislature of the Combined Clans, and had been selected for rejuvenation. He was still ent.i.tled to wear his two-star Admiral cl.u.s.ter badges, so he put them on for his visit.

Far-Ranger had also just finished her rejuvenation and was about to warp back out into interstellar s.p.a.ce. She had invited him up to attend her "warpfeast" before she left.

The robotic glide-car hummed through the run-down east side of Bright's Heaven and slid to a stop in front of the entrance to the Jump Loop terminal. Steel-Slicer slid his magnecard into the payslot, and the glide-car released him. As he flowed to the walkway he noticed a small, wiry, scarred, and badgeless youngling slumped against the wall nearby. The youngling's eyes were casually, but attentively, watching everything going on around him, especially the traffic in and out of the automatic doors to the terminal. The terminal was in a rough section of town, so Steel-Slicer moved quickly across the street and through theIN door.

Once inside, he relaxed a little and headed for the baggage queue, where he unpouched his small traveling kit. There was a little time left before the jump so he moved through the crowded terminal toward the pulp-bar. He started to circle around a small, heavily speckled female who had all eyes on the tough-looking male to whom she was talking. Suddenly, without seeming to look where she was going, the female backed away from the tough, and Admiral Steel-Slicer found himself half-enveloped with speckled female flesh.

"Excuse me," Steel-Slicer said as he tried to move away.

"I don't mind if you don't," said the nubile female as she brought a number of her eyes around and draped a few speckled eye-flaps on his topside. "Besides, you're a lot handsomer than that rough-tread over there." She flicked her eye-stubs at the tough, who glared at them. Steel-Slicer noticed that the speckled pattern on the female extended to her eye-b.a.l.l.s. Some of them were pink instead of the normal dark-red.

The Admiral tried to extract himself, but found that the female had formed a number of tendrils and was holding him by his two-star Admiral's badges. Other tendrils, hidden by their bodies, started tickling him.

"Want to have a little fun?" she said in an electronic whisper that sent tingles through his body. "I know a nice quiet little pad-place nearby."

Steel-Slicer started to turn down the offer when he was jolted by a slap from a heavy manipulator.

"Leave my flapper alone!" said the tough, glaring at him.

Stunned by the shock, Steel-Slicer didn't notice the loss of two of his star-cl.u.s.ter badges as the freckled female pulled away.

"I got them!" she hollered, and started for theIN door at full tread ripple. The tough was right behind her.

"Stop!" shouted Steel-Slicer as he finally noticed his loss. He started after them. The tough pulled a sticker from a pouch in his rapidly retreating trailing edge and waved it menacingly.

"Go suck your eye-b.a.l.l.s, s.p.a.cer!" yelled tne tougn.

"Here comes a clanker!" warned the speckled female as they approached the door. The door was opened by their confederate outside, and it almost shut before the peace officer arrived; but he squeezed through the crack and took up the chase.

Steel-Slicer halted when the peace officer took off after them. He stopped, a little embarra.s.sed, and s.h.i.+fted a star cl.u.s.ter partially to cover the bare place on his hide. It was doubtful the officer would catch the thieves. Since it was time for his jumpcraft to leave, he turned and headed for the boarding area.

"That egg-eating clanker got through!" shouted Speckle-Top. "Scatter! We'll sell the stuff later!"

She pushed down a side street that led toward the old temple grounds, where she knew there were plenty of places to hide. Luckily the clanker had followed Crumpled-Tread. She was the one with the stolen badges so even if the clanker caught him, they would have to let him go.

Her street-trained tread heard the rapid movement of two other clankers coming, so she hurried, trying to keep the noise of her tread-ripple down. At the entrance to the old temple grounds she squeezed her skinny body through a quake-crack in the ancient outer perimeter fence. Dodging some workers carrying out restoration work, she rushed past one of the newly restored "eyes" of the ancient monument and made her way to a small crust-rock at a point where the base of the "eye-stub" met the wall that formed the "body" of the temple. Behind that rock was an ancient tunnel that she discovered a few turns ago. She had noticed a tiny hole in the wall after the huge crust-moving machines had pa.s.sed. Looking for a safe place to hide stolen stuff until it could be sold, she had found that the hole opened into an underground tunnel heavily lined with an old-fas.h.i.+oned type of thick metal superconductor.

When originally built in the days of Pink-Eyes the prophet, the superconductor had kept the magnetic field of Egg out of the tunnel so the High Priests of Bright could travel quickly from the outer sanctuary to the top of the Inner Eye mound, where they would miraculously appear to the crowds below. The tunnel was now clogged with pinned magnetic flux that was strongly coupled to the walls.

Speckle-Top pushed her way through the flux lines until she was inside, whereupon she rolled the rock back to hide the entrance. She relaxed as the magnetic field pinned her body sol- idly to the surrounding crust. She was a little apprehensive about being underground, but felt sure that the clankers would never find her in her secret hideout.

The end of the s.h.i.+ft finally turned around, and Heavy-Egg dismissed his crew. He watched them crowd onto the lifts and head for the surface of Egg and the pulp-bars with more speed than he had seen out of them all turn.

"Last lift, boss." Hungry-Pouch was holding the lift steady.

"Wait for me," said Heavy-Egg. "Got to see the chief."

He took the elevator to the upper deck of Topside Platform and made his way to the compound that was the office of the chief engineer of Topside Platform. His crew had barely made their quota today, and he finally had to take some action. He didn't mind a little squeeze and tickle during the s.h.i.+ft, it helped make the turns go by; but when he had found Yellow-Rock treading Easy-Row behind the elevator shaft, that was the pod that toppled the plant. He wanted them replaced.

The door to the chief engineer's compound was open. Heavy-Egg flowed in with a determined tread, then stopped. A young stranger was in the office, and the chief engineer was listening to him deferentially.

The youngling had badges bigger than the chief engineer's badges.

"s.h.i.+ft Supervisor Heavy-Egg," said the stranger. "It's good to see you again." Seeing the bewilderment in Heavy-Egg's eye-wave pattern, he added, "I'm your boss, Cliff-Web. I've been 'rejuved'-I think they call it now. Do you have a problem?"

"It can wait until next s.h.i.+ft," Heavy-Egg said, reversing his tread-ripple. He moved back out the door in a daze and made his way to the bottom deck. Yellow-Rock avoided his glance as Heavy-Egg flowed onto the lift, took over the controls from Hungry-Pouch and started the long trip down the s.p.a.ce Fountain to the surface.

Time-Circle was feeling lonely again and was looking for someone to talk to. Another of the channels in his time machine had become clogged with noise. He wandered over to the other side of the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute and visited the Crustallography compound; but Neutron-Drip wasn't at her computer, so he went looking for her in the laboratory. All he found was Eager-Eyes, busy treading a touch-and-taste console. On either side of the console were two highly flattened Spheroidal bowls that represented the east and west hemispheres of Egg. They were shaped according to the old-style maps where distances were marked off in tread lengths. They were flat in the regions near the magnetic poles where the cheela treads were of minimum size, and more curved near the magnetic equator where the horizontal component of the magnetic field stretched out the cheela's tread. Now that the cheela had s.p.a.ce travel, they realized that Egg was spherical; but the ancient shape was still useful for the crustallogists, for most of the activity in the crust took place near the poles. The maps flickered with lights showing the crust-quake activity. A bright blue spot would appear on the map, then s.h.i.+ft down in color as the intensity of the quake died.

"I was looking for Professor Neutron-Drip," Time-Circle told Eager-Eyes.

"I'm right here," came a m.u.f.fled voice. The voice seemed to come from under Eager-Eyes' tread.

"She's on-site at the East Pole," Eager Eyes explained. "I'll switch the picture to the visual screen on that wall over there. Things are happening fast, so I had better keep working with the touch-and-taste screen."

"I came over to see if we could have turnfeast together," said Time-Circle. "I didn't realize you had gone."

"The trip wasn't planned," replied the image of Neutron-Drip. She was moving among an array of acoustic transceivers that were picking up data from the distant seismic instruments buried under the crust around the East Pole.

"I jumped over early this turn to make sure the transceivers stay on scale. I think there is a big quake coming. But I can't be sure, since this is the first time anyone has tried to record the quakes prior to a big one."

"Things really started to happen just after last turn-feast," Eager-Eyes reported. "I was watching the signals coming in from the array around the East Pole, when I began to see ring-like patterns."

"Not only that," said Neutron-Drip. "Although they started small, the magnitude of the quakes has been increasing nearly exponentially for the last ten dothturns as they close in on the root of the East Pole mountains."

"Exponentially!" Time-Circle was clearly impressed.

"I expect a 'Trimble-tremblor' anytime soon," said Neutron-Drip. She noticed the confused twitch in his eye-stub pattern. "The East Pole mountains will drop a few millimeters, and the length of a turn will increase slightly. The human n.o.bel Laureate Trimble was the first to predict them accurately from her observations of the Crab nebula neutron star."

"You might be in danger! You must leave at once!" Time-Circle shouted.

'Too late now," Neutron-Drip responded. "Keep collecting the data, Eager-Eyes!" she commanded.

Suddenly the viewscreen went blank.

Time-Circle s.h.i.+fted his gaze to the bowl that showed the eastern hemisphere. The East Pole mountains were surrounded by flash after flash of bright blue light. Suddenly the whole East Pole exploded in a blue glare. There was a pause, then a smooth ripple spread out from the focal point. It reached Swift's Climb ... and the display went out.

Time-Circlenow understood why three channels in his time machine were blocked with noise. He raced out of the lab and across the Inst.i.tute compound. There was one clear back-channel left. If only he could get a message back in time to himself, he might be able to warn the rest of the population on Egg. As he pushed his body through the clinging magnetic fields coming from the crust, he fought off the specter of despair. After all, "he" that was here on this time-line, struggling to reach the time machine, had received no warning message from the future. His present time-line was doomed, but perhaps he could create a paradox-a bifurcation-that would save the "he," and the rest of Egg, on some other time-line. He struggled on.

Quake!

06:58:07 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050.

Deep within the root of the East Pole mountains, a thick block of crust groaned audibly under the great stress of the billions of tons of matter piled up for centimeters overhead. The stress peaked to the ultimate limit, then with a loud crack, a block of crust broke and a long rip propagated through the striated undercrust. The mountain peaks, now unsupported, dropped a full twenty millimeters in the intense gravity field of Egg. The shock wave from the fall of the mountain range spread out from the East Pole at nearly the speed of light, striking first at the town of Swift's Climb.

Walls cracked and communications were cut off as the crust lifted and fell. Neutron-Drip felt her eye-stubs flutter as the crust rolled beneath her. She kept watching the overloaded instruments and willing them to get back on scale so they would record the remainder of what had to be the largest crustquake in cheela history.

A little while later the surface wave pa.s.sed through the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute in Bright's Heaven.

Time-Circle's already panicked brain-knot screamed mentally as the crust raised up underneath his tread.

He slowed to a self-conscious deliberate slide as the wave pa.s.sed under him and the crust dropped again, having done little to him or the well-constructed compounds of the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute.

The magnetic fields of the star, frozen into the moving crust, waved back and forth a little causing electrical currents to flow in Time-Circle's body and exciting the electrons and random nuclei in the tenuous atmosphere until they were moving fast enough to generate electron-positron pairs. The counter-flow heat exchangers in the base of his eye-stubs increased their cooling capacity to extract the heat that had been generated in his eye-b.a.l.l.s by the flowing electric currents. As his eyes cooled to their normal dark red, he could see the decaying X-ray fluorescence as the remainder of the positrons generated by the atmospheric currents found an electron to annihilate with.

More slowly now, Time-Circle continued on to the Time-Comm compound to check his machine.

Although the crustquake was a large one, he was sure that Cliff-Webb had designed the machine itself to survive the shock. But perhaps the quake had disturbed the control console, and that was what was causing the strange noise signals.

The lift carrying Heavy-Egg and seven of his crew was pa.s.sing level 50 when a flare of light from the atmosphere below signaled the start of a crustquake. A couple of methturns later the hum of the up-deflectors changed pitch as the accelerators on the ground compensated for the twenty-millimeter drop of the crust underneath them.

"That was a big one," Heavy-Egg thought, as his tread felt the change in pitch of the vibrations in the deck.

There was a loudclang. A pushout, the first in many turns, was hanging in the catcher, the extra strain having proved too much for the ring.

The shock waves from the crustquake penetrated to the center of the neutron star where they were bounced back and forth by the density differences between the various layers. A number of the bouncing shocks met each other at one of the boundary layers and concentrated their energy in a very small region.

The extra pressure was just enough to initiate a phase change in the material, and it shrank in volume.

Once started, the phase change spread at nearly the speed of light. An inner layer of star almost a kilometer thick changed density and shrank by two meters, leaving the outer layers of the neutron star unsupported. The outer layers fell, and the crustquake became aStarquake.

The gigantic Starquake rose to the surface and shook the crust like a Swift shredding a Flow Slow. The crust alternately buckled and spread, sending anything loose moving across the surface at high speed to smash into walls, plants, or cliffs. The magnetic fields embedded in the crust shook along with the crust and accelerated the electrons and ions in the thin, tenuous atmosphere. The atmosphere heated up until it reached a temperature of a billion degrees. Electron-positron pairs were created, only to annihilate again to produce a continuing flood of X-rays. The X-rays bounced off the high speed electrons in the super-heated atmosphere and with each bounce increased in energy until they were a deadly, penetrating glare of gamma rays.

Time-Circle felt the crust drop beneath him once again. Unlike the first time, the dropping motion didn't stop. The whole world around him was dropping and dropping. The gravelectromagnetic fields in the Time-Comm machine lost control of the spinning black hole at the heart of the machine. The black hole converted back into energy, blowing up the Time-Comm compound and Time-Circle.

Neutron-Drip had been expecting a second series of shocks as the crustquake circled around Egg and returned again. It returned early. She was still trying to understand why the quake seemed stronger than before, when she found herself sliding helplessly at high speed toward the array of instruments she had been tending. The sharp edges on the instruments cut her to ribbons.

Zero-Gauss was in her underground laboratory. She was picking up some pellets that had missed the catcher on a fountain plant during the initial crustquake. The starquake hit and she and all the plants and animals were swept across the metal floor to one corner of the room. The support pillars buckled, and the roof fell in.

A pulsating sheet of fire flickered over the surface of the neutron-star, generating a high-energy blast of radiation that spread out into s.p.a.ce. It only took a millisecond for the high-energy ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays to reach Dragon Slayer in its synchronous...o...b..t above Bright's Heaven. The stronger of the gamma rays sheeted through the tough hull of the s.p.a.cecraft, through the thin protection of Amalita's s.p.a.ce-suit, and irradiated her body with three times the lethal dose. The ultraviolet radiation bounced off the star image telescope mirror, burned through the protective filters, and poured unim- peded down on the star image table, flooding the Science Deck and Amalita's eyes in an ultraviolet glare.

Amalita's eyelids closed too late over cloudy-white corneas and started to blister under the intense radiation. Following on the heels of the electromagnetic radiation pulse came a three-pulse burst of kilohertz gravitational radiation that whipped Amalita's body back and forth, breaking three joints and snapping her spinal cord at the neck. The last memory stored in Amalita's dying brain was of the stinging pain in her eyes.

Qui-Qui was still recuperating from her regeneration and was taking it easy at West Pole mountain resort. She was playing with her new toy, a custom built, high powered, personal flyer. There was less than a dozen on all of Egg, for they cost much more to operate than intercity glide-cars and weren't any faster. A glide-car, however, couldn't goup.

The flyer had a gravity repulsion drive for operation near the surface, an inertia drive for high alt.i.tude, and superconducting wings for gliding on the magnetic field of Egg. It was expensive, it was extravagant, but it was fun!