Dragon's Egg (32 page)

Amalita opened the hatch to the air-lock and went in, dogging the door behind her. She signaled to Cesar through the port and felt her suit stiffen as the pressure dropped. The outer hatch swung in, and Amalita held onto her safety line as she cautiously looked out. Although she had been outside St. George a dozen times on repair jobs in the long journey out to Dragon’s Egg, this was the first time she had been outside Dragon Slayer, and she knew the scenery was going to be very confusing. Anything in space that causes confusion is a prime source of accidents, and she had not lived this long by taking chances in out-ship jobs.

Amalita looked out of the air-lock set in the middle of Dragon Slayer. Since the ship was inertially stabilized, the stars remained fixed in the sky. However—flashing in front of the port five times a second was the bright white globe of Dragon’s Egg. At 400 kilometers distance, the 20-kilometer-diameter neutron star was about five times bigger than Sol at Earth and took up an appreciable part of the sky.

“If only we were orbiting around it at a faster rate, so that it would blur out into a ring,” she thought. “At five times a second it is right in the visual flicker band and is going to be a real annoyance.”

She moved to the portal and put her head out. With her view enlarged, she now saw the complete ring of
tidal compensators encircling the ship. They revolved about their common center at five times a second while simultaneously orbiting about Dragon’s Egg. Because there were six of them, they seemed almost fused together into a solid ring.

Amalita paused to get accustomed to the sight. There was a bright white globe of light circling about the middle of Dragon Slayer, and at right angles to that a ring of glowing red that twirled about the ship like a wedding ring spinning on a table. The spins of the two matched so that the plane of the ring was always perpendicular to the direction to the neutron star.

“How are you doing?” Cesar’s voice came through the suit communication link.

“Fine,” Amalita said. “I’m just waiting here to get used to the whirling scenery. It reminds me of the time back in the Lunar Ballet Academy when I tried to break the
Guinness Book of Records
mark for the most number of fouettés in a row. After twirling around on one foot for over one hundred turns, I missed my kick, lost my spotting point, and the vertigo got to me—I don’t think things were whirling around as much then as they are now.”

Amalita looked up at the top of Dragon Slayer to the large central turret containing the solar mirror, laser radar, microwave sounder, and other star-oriented instruments. The turret was rotating five times a second, keeping the instruments pointed at Dragon’s Egg. “You haven’t turned off the turret,” she complained. “I can’t work on it while it is spinning around.”

Cesar replied, “Since you first have to remove a laser communication dish from its mount on the hull, and won’t be ready to install it on the turret for several minutes, I thought we should wait to de-spin the turret. Once we stop it, we will have to cut off communication to the neutron star beings. Abdul is now making up a simple message to let them know that we
will only stop for a short while, so they don’t think we have given up and gone away.”

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

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.