Part 2 (1/2)

”Good,” said Time-Circle. ”Let me check it out. Hmmm. This is an historic moment, what message shall I use? It has to be short, but it should be significant. I've got it!” His tread moved over the screen as he set up the message.

”Turn back O Time,”Cliff-Web muttered.... ”I read it on the detection screen just as I tweaked the last parameter.”

'That is what I just sent!” said Time-Circle. ”It works! It works!”

”I already said that,” Cliff-Web reminded him as he pouched his tools and measuring instruments. The gravity wave detector was long and ma.s.sive, but folded up into a package that fitted nicely into the big pouch in his body that he had developed for instrument transport. At the very last he went over to the corner and picked up the plant that had been sitting there. It was his trademark, pet, and closest companion-a cleft-wort plant. Checking the plant over carefully, Cliff-Web put it into another pouch in his cavernous body.

”You've plugged up the past of one of your four back-time channels,” he warned as he left.

Time-Circle wasn't listening. He was preparing a message to himself at the dedication ceremonies for the Time-Comm machine some three turns into the future. As he was sending it, a confirmation message came from his future self.

He had arranged for it to use the same back-time channel that he had used for his test message. His future self reported that the message had been received at the dedication ceremony, and only two sethturns early. The wave pattern of Time-Circle's eye-stubs slowed as he made adjustments to the time-interval circuits. The message utilization code tacked onto the end of the confirmation message indicated that the message was within a few bits of the maximum that could be sent over that distance in time. Time-Circle had the computer make a scroll copy of the coded message so he could later calculate the exact bit-time product, but it looked as if it were close to what his theory had predicted-864 bit-greats. That meant that he could send a message 864 bits long over a time interval of one great of turns, or a one-bit message over 864 greats. Time quantization statistics would cause variations, of course, and one of his research tasks with the machine was to determine those statistical variations.

He didn't want to fill up any more channels with messages until he had done some calculations, so he put a pa.s.sword lock on the touch-and-taste screen, which turned a blank silver patch in the yellow-white floor as he headed for the door.

The walls around the Time-Comm laboratory were extra high, and thus very thick at the base. As his tread approached the door, a sensor pattern in the floor read the wrinkles in his tread and the inner door slid open. He entered the security port in the base of the wall and felt his body stiffen as a magnetic field penetrated his body and generated a magnetic susceptibility map to compare with the stored version.

”You are carrying a scroll out that you did not have when you came in,” a mechanical sounding voice vibrated through his tread.

”It's the instruction manual for the operation of the Time-Comm machine,” Time-Circle explained. ”I'm going to read it at home.”

”Accepted,” replied the machine. The magnetic field disappeared, and the outer door opened. Before Time-Circle left, he set the intruder barriers. He couldn't see the barriers, but the top of the tall wall now bristled with alternating north and south magnetic poles. The fields were so strong and the gradients so high that it would take forever to push anything through them to get over the wall. The field strength near the center of the barrier was strong enough to elongate the cells in a living organism until they didn't function properly. He had been told it felt as if you were putting a tendril into the purple-hot flame of a gamma-ray flare. He noticed the fading track of Cliff-Web that indicated he had pushed off down the slanting corridors to the north-east. Time-Circle moved in the opposite direction and headed Bright-west for the Administrative Compound of the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute to arrange for the dedication ceremonies.

Cliff-Web felt quietly pleased with himself. First the s.p.a.ce Fountain (he could see the tiny spike of light growing up into the sky over the wall at the end of the long north-east corridor), now the Time-Comm machine. The time machine was finished so far ahead of schedule that the formal turn-on ceremonies were still scheduled for three turns from now. He wasn't sure whether he would bother going to them. He hated to have people tell him how wonderful he was. It made his eye-stubs squirm just thinking about it.

He was anxious to get home to his holovid and his plants. He then remembered his cleft-wort that he had pouched when he left. He stopped and, forming a manipulator, reached into his pouch and pulled out the plant.

”There, there, Pretty-Web,” he said. ”You getting too warm?” He held the plant up to his eyes and looked it over carefully. Itwas too warm. It was almost the same yellow-white on the top as it was on the bottom, and it was drooping a little between the acute angle of the artificial cleft that took the place of the natural rock clefts in the mountains where the cleft-wort normally grew.

Now that the plant was out in the open where it could see the dark blackness of the starry sky, the top surface cooled off and turned a velvety red-black, while the underside turned a reflective silver. Cliff-Web lifted the plant up to his own deep red topside and put the base of the holder into a pouch he formed on his topside. He directed his body to heat the pouch; and the plant, with its roots in a source of heat and its topside cooled by the black sky, started to regain its normal circulation and perked up. The tension threads that wove back and forth from one side of the cleft to the other tightened, and the topside corrugations grew more wrinkled, increasing the emissivity of the top surface. Tiny threads of red light started at random in the black-red top, and wended their way down the feeder veins to the dull red stem leading to the yellow-white base. It was a pretty moving display.

Cliff-Web could almost feel the hum of the plant as it worked to make food.

Relaxed and happy with himself and his plant, Cliff-Web didn't hurry as he pushed his way north-east.

Using the walls of the compounds along the street as a levering wedge, he pushed his body through the magnetic field lines that tried to prevent his northward motion.

For a while he moved through the slumlike area of Old Town that surrounded the sprawling grounds of the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute. Most of the compounds here had their window slides closed, so there wasn't much to see except wall. The intersections were irregular and he found he had gone too far east before he realized he should have taken a north-west tack back a few intersections. The north-west street he had available now was 60 degrees north of east instead of the nominal 30 degrees. Grunting with annoyance at himself, he pushed his way across the intersection, found the south wall of the street and pushed north-west, this time more north than west. A robotic glide-car for hire pa.s.sed in the spa.r.s.e traffic and he was tempted to wave it down, but it was going in the wrong direction, and besides, he could use the exercise.

As Old Town changed to the suburbs of Bright's Heaven, the street pattern became more regular. The main thoroughfares ran straight east and west, with the side-pairs of streets angled off at exactly 30 degrees north from east in crisscrossing patterns that formed diamond and triangular blocks. The personal compounds were built right up to the walkway, and the walls had been coated with frictionless tile to allow for rapid motion of pedestrian traffic north and south. Most of the compounds now had their window slides back so Cliff-Web could look into the outer courtyards.

He stopped to admire the plant arrangement in one fence-port. Someone had taken a normal, triangular window opening and had inserted cleft-brackets between alternate courses of bricks, making an ascending staircase of cleft-brackets. A single heavy stem came up from the crust, divided into two branches that went up from the sides of the triangular notch, then spread its web over one cleft support after another. Being staggered, each web of the multi-webbed plant was able to see the dark sky and thrive. The top two clefts in the arrangement were not yet webbed, but he could see the little tendrils being trained to make the next step. Surrounding the growing tips were little boxes. He couldn't figure out what they were. He was impressed with the display. As he moved over the nameplate embedded in the walkway in front of the door, he took note of the name. D. M. Zero-Gauss, 2412 North-West 7th Street. Must be a professor at the Inst.i.tute. He would have to arrange a visit to discuss gardening some turn.

Cliff-Web didn't miss the proper intersection now that he was back again in familiar territory. He tacked north-west past his compound, still a number of diamonds to the north, made the sharp turn to the north-east onto his own street, and headed for home. His compound was one of the largest in the neighborhood. It took up a whole diamond to itself. After he had earned the huge incentive bonus for coming in way under the target cost for the design of the s.p.a.ce Fountain, he had enough stars to his credit that he bought out his neighbors, tore down the walls between the four plots, and expanded his old personal compound. One of his neighbor's compounds had been turned into a workroom, another into a potting yard and heatbed for new sprouts, and the third into quarters for his pets. He whispered a happy electronic whistle into the crust as he approached his compound. Happy noises echoed back.

He was first greeted by Chilly, the genetically miniaturized hybrid Swift. Chilly had slithered up to the top of the compound fence, its tail wrapped around the street-sign post built into the corner, and greeted him with up and down bows of its head. The five sharp-pointed teeth would spring out to show a glowing white maw, then draw back in again as it swallowed. Chilly took a swipe at the cleft-wort plant Cliff-Web was carrying on his back, but Cliff-Web diverted the animal by sticking a manipulator down its gullet. Chilly's razor-sharp teeth, which could have amputated the end of his manipulator in one bite, just sc.r.a.ped the skin slightly and continued to mouth the manipulator as he pulled it free. Cliff-Web paused to let Chilly slide onto his topside and reached through the fence window to pat a few friendly bodies on the other side. He reached his doorway, pulled out his magnekey, unlocked the fence-door, and slid it into the wall. He was immediately surrounded by three Slinks, a half-dozen Slinklings, and Cold, Chilly's mate.

After he said h.e.l.lo to all the Slinks, they took off on their various Slinkish activities, and he had time to look around for Rollo. The ball-like animal was cowering in a corner behind its large, slow-moving cousin, Slurge, a miniaturized Flow Slow. Slurge had gotten into the parasol bed. He would have to speak with his caretaker, Moving-Sand, about that.

”Come here, Rollo,” he called, holding out a waving tendril. ”Come, Rollo. Come here.”

Slowly the ball rolled out from behind the Flow Slow, its mult.i.tude of eyes drawn by the waving tendril.

Finally it moved close enough for the tendril to stroke it. It rumbled in pleasure, ducking its eyes out of the way of the moving tendril.

”There, there, Rollo,” he said. ”No need to be afraid. The noisy Slinks are all gone now.” The pet, now more relaxed, rolled around his periphery, enjoying caresses from one tendril after another. Just then Moving-Sand flowed into view around the corner.

”I knew it must be you when I heard the commotion. Those Slinks must have vibrated the whole neighborhood by now.” Suddenly he noticed the Flow Slow in the parasol bed.

”Hey!” said Moving-Sand. ”What do you mean letting Slurge get into the plants! How am I going to keep things in shape here if you don't help?”

Forming a heavy, clublike manipulator, Moving-Sand flowed over to the heavy creature that was soaking up plant juices through its lower tread, and banged it hard on one side.

”Move, you big hunk of flabby rock,” Moving-Sand hollered through the crust.

Shrinking as much from the shrill cry on its underside as from the heavy blows on its armored topside, the miniaturized Flow Slow moved off the patch of parasol flowers and back onto the lawn it had been trained to keep in check.

Moving-Sand gave it a few more blows to keep it moving. ”Your mail is in your study and your meal is in the oven,” Moving-Sand said. ”Get it yourself. I've still got a dozen more fountain-shoots to transplant.”

”How are the fountain plants doing?” asked Cliff-Web.

”The ones that survived are doing fine,” Moving-Sand reported. ”They would do better if you had left them back at the East Pole where you found them, where the magnetic field goes straight up and down. I found if I started from seed, picked those with a tilted firing tube and lopsided catcher, and planted them pointing in the proper direction, I could get them to grow. Don't ever expect them to get too large, though. Nope. The catcher would get so lopsided they'd topple over. Got one planted right over there.”

Moving-Sand's eye-stubs twitched to a circular patch of parasol flowers, in the center of which was a tiny fountain of blue-white sparks.

The fountain plant was a highly energetic form of plant life that worked at intense rates just to stay alive.

Biologists at the Inner Eye Inst.i.tute still argued over whether it should be cla.s.sified as a plant or an animal, since it could only live in highly rich, neutron-poor soil like that found in the East and West Pole mountains.

The central core of the fountain plant was a long thin tube. Its extensive root system pulled in the nutrients and burned them at a terrific rate. The blue-hot temperatures inside were transferred to seedlike particles that were shot up the tube into the sky in a shower of tiny blue-white specks. The specks cooled by radiation and were only dull red by the time they were gathered in by the cup-shaped collector at the base of the plant to be recycled again. Each gamma-ray photon emitted during the short-lived trajectory moved the nuclear equivalent of the photosynthesis cycle one more notch along on the way to make an energized molecule that could be used by the plant to grow.

The fountain plants Cliff-Web had seen in the East Pole mountains often lived less than a turn. They would start from seed in a promising mound of dust, would sparkle for a few dothturns, getting visibly bigger as time went on, then as the nutrient wore out, the firing stalk would start to shoot out larger seed particles. In the last few methturns, the dying stalk would start to wobble while the ejection velocity increased, and the seeds would be shot over a region many centimeters on a side. If they landed on a promising mound of neutron-poor material, the process would start again. Otherwise the seeds would wait until ground tremors or animal motion moved them to the right place.

Cliff-Web had hoped that by supplying adequate amounts of nutrients he could keep them running for many turns at a time. These plants were not designed for a long life, however, and seemed to give up after a half-dozen turns. They were a real delight when sparking, so he just enjoyed the sight for a few methturns, then went across the outer courtyard to his study room in the inner compound.

As he entered the study, La.s.sie moved off its pad near the wall that backed up to the oven in the next room. The aging Slink moved erratically as it came to greet its master. The Slink was so old it had lost most of its long hair. Cliff-Web was bemused at how much the hairless Slink looked like a wrinkled cheela hatchling. The close resemblance of the two species was probably why the slinks were the favorite pets of the cheela. Practically every cheela kept one, and the latest trend was to name the animals after hairy, four-legged human pets such as La.s.sie, Trigger, Peter, Bossy, and Tabby.

Cliff-Web went to his work station, and the silver touch-and-taste screen activated as soon as his tread moved onto it. As a major engineering contractor, Cliff-Web had the latest in intelligent terminals. He read his computer net messages, dictated some replies to his roborespondor program, arranged for the final billing for the Time-Comm machine, then turned to his scroll delivery. He had been gone for a long time, and even though computer messages had replaced most personal message delivery services, there still were a large number of message scrolls in his scroll wall.

Made of strong, crisscrossing plates built into the wall of his study, the scroll wall held those doc.u.ments that were either too important or too bureaucratic to trust to the computer net message service.

Suspecting what it was, Cliff-Web reached for the largest scroll and pulled it from its diamond-shaped hole in the wall. A glance at the outside showed he had guessed right. It was the formal request for plans for the design of the inertia drive engine to replace the failing rocket in the asteroid protecting the humans.

Strengthening his manipulator bone to compensate for the weight of the multi-folded doc.u.ment, he lowered it carefully to the floor where the springy metal foils distorted into an ellipsoidal shape, just waiting for the flick of a tendril to flatten out at the desired sheet. Although there was a copy for him to look at in his message files, Cliff-Web still liked to stare at the crust when he was thinking, so he formed a tendril and, poking it in the central hole of the scroll, pushed down.

The slight bit of pressure added to the strong gravitational field of Egg caused the metal foil to flatten out, revealing the top page. It was the Request For Plan for the giant inertia drive. Cliff-Web scanned the first page and didn't like what he saw.