Part 24 (2/2)
”Proceed,” said Manager-Director/5. She returned to the task of braiding the long hair on her prize-winning Slink. She could have had robots do it for her, but Rapunzel deserved personal care.
”Cut away,” Void-Manager/18 told his team of engineers.
Void-Maker/111 and her robots sliced off the science tower at the north pole of Dragon Slayer, and it floated upward in the residual gravity tides. There it would be held in place by gravity robots while the disinto robots reduced it to stored energy.
”To you,” said Void-Maker/111.
”To me,” said Graviton-Maker/321. He paused, waiting for the next phrase from Void-Maker/111.
There was a long pause.
”Touch,” said Void-Maker/111, holding off her disinto robots for a while.
”Touch!” said Graviton-Maker/321. He sent his personal flitter directly at the gigantic structure. He pulled his eyes in under their eyeflaps to avoid the glare as the cold metal turned into a hot plasma as it was torn apart by the strong gravity field surrounding his s.p.a.cecraft. There was a breeze of ionized gas that rapidly settled to the deck and he was through to the other side.
”Touch!” he hollered again on his screen as he swooped his flitter around and dove once more at the mountain of nothing.
Soon, most of the engineers had put their crews of robots on automatic and joined in the fun.
Manager-Director/5 was notified of the disruption by the contract performance program, but she did nothing about it. The robots would probably get the rest of the job done in half the time, now that the cheela engineers were out of the way having fun.
It took five long seconds to reduce Dragon Slayer to five spherical steel tanks, bobbing gently in the center of the ring of six condensed asteroids. The cheela electromagnetic engineers brought back the laser communicator, attached it to Pierre's tank, and set it up so it was pointed out to St. George.
04:02:45 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050.
”Am I glad to see you!” Carole Swenson said as Pierre's face appeared on her screen. ”Is everyone okay?”
”So far,” said Pierre. He reached to his control panel and set up a split screen display format that combined the images of the remaining crew members of Dragon Slayer with that of Carole.
”I'd sure like to see what those busybodies are doing to us,” said Abdul. ”But the monitor cameras went with the rest of the s.h.i.+p.”
”We have the large telescope trained on you,” Carole told him. ”At this distance, each of your acceleration tanks is just a blob, but we can resolve the compensator asteroids easily. We can even detect the activities of the cheela. Although they and their machines are too small to see, they are white-hot and we can get a lot of information from speckle interferometry. Except for a few machines near you, they seem to be concentrating out at the asteroid ring. Let me transfer a picture.”
The screen blanked and a visual image overlaid with computer graphics appeared on the screen. The computer had strobed the picture at the rotation rate of Egg so the asteroids looked as if they were standing still.
”One of the asteroids is smaller than the others,” said Jean.
”According to the plan they left with me,” Carole explained, ”they are going to shrink all the asteroids by dumping magnetic monopoles in them. Then they are going to shrink the radius of the ring until the asteroids coalesce into a solid rotating ring of magnetically charged, ultra-dense matter. I don't like that.
The tides from the gravity field of the ring are going to get orders of magnitude larger than the tides from Egg. I don't think even your acceleration tanks are going to help you survive that.”
”You forgot the augmentor ma.s.ses,” Seiko told her.
”What are those?” asked Carole.
”The augmentor ma.s.ses were well covered by the cheela in their briefing to us, Commander Swenson,”
said Seiko. ”I'm sure the information was in your briefing.”
”I just scanned it quickly,” admitted Carole.
”The augmentor ma.s.ses are dense ma.s.ses just like the compensator ma.s.ses, but there are only two of them. Instead of being placed in a ring around the point to be protected, they are placed above and below the place to be protected. In that position the two ma.s.ses add to the tides of the neutron star.”
”But that would just make the tides worse,” said Carole.
”Not in this case. When they shrink the size of the ring of compensator ma.s.ses, the tides from the ring get stronger than the tides from the star, so the star tides have to be 'augmented' by the augmentor ma.s.ses.”
”The cheela are bringing them now.” Cesar was looking out the porthole in his acceleration tank. The augmentor ma.s.ses were modest-sized, old-fas.h.i.+oned cheela s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps about the size of a softball. They had black holes in the middle of them to provide enough gravity to keep the cheela in their condensed state.
”Looks like we each get two augmentor ma.s.ses,” Abdul said as he watched the activity outside his porthole. ”I thought there would be two big ones.”
”Because of the way that tidal forces add,” said Seiko. ”They can do a better job if they null out the tides for each one of the tanks individually.”
”The asteroids are now tiny dots,” said Jean.
”And the ring is starting to shrink,” Pierre added.
”I'll never complain about a mere 200 gees per meter again,” said Abdul. ”Hey! The ultrasonic pressure drivers have started. This is getting serious!”
”The ring of asteroids is now at 50-meters radius and has coalesced into a solid ring,” said Carole.
”Things seem to have halted.”
Suddenly the screens blanked and a message appeared on all their screens.
NEXT PHASE STARTS IN 10 SECONDS.
DRAGON SLAYER CREW WILL RETURN IN SIX.
MONTHS.
The ten seconds pa.s.sed slowly. The next two milliseconds were full of activity. Each tank was jerked upwards away from the center of the ring. The ring was collapsed until it was only a few meters in diameter. As it shrank, its glowing surface turned redder and redder, finally turning into a deep, dark, impossible black. It did not even reflect the yellow-white light from Egg. Then, one by one, the tanks were thrust through the hole in the center of the invisible ring. The heavy steel tanks distorted visibly as they pa.s.sed through. They did not come out the other side.
04:03:01 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE2050.
Pierre screamed as his arms slammed against the creaking walls of the heavy steel tank. Just as he thought that his fingers were going to be pulled off his hands, it was over. He coughed up some water he had inhaled, cleared his mask, and tried his control panel. The video display was dead, so he looked out his porthole.
He could make out the presence of three of the other tanks from the light coming from their portholes.
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