Part 25 (2/2)
(00:45 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050).
The four tanks were crowded into the cargo air lock on St. George, and soon the lock was full of b.a.l.l.s of water and sloppy, wet, sobbing people.
”I'm sorry about Amalita and Abdul, Carole,” Pierre said as he took off his mask. ”If only there was something I could....”
”Hush....” Carole was smiling happily. ”Come! I want you to meet a couple of friends of ours.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor to the communications room. The room was empty except for the communications operator. Pierre was completely baffled.
”h.e.l.lo, Pierre.” It was Amalita's voice.
”Did you have a nice ride up from Egg?” Abdul's voice asked.
Pierre whirled around to face a communications screen at one end of the room. He saw video images of Amalita and Abdul in two segments of the screen.
”Surprise! Surprise!” Abdul yelled.
”Itreally is us,” Amalita said. ”Or at least all of us that counts.”
”I even have a moustache to twirl.” Abdul lifted his hand to twirl the end of his long moustache. ”And it feels like the real thing even though it's made of software instead of hardware.”
Carole squeezed Pierre's arm in rea.s.surance as she spoke. ”The cheela scanned them thoroughly just before their bodies were destroyed,” she said. ”Their intellect patterns now reside in cheela supercomputers.”
”But Amalita was irradiated and frozen,” Pierre protested.
”I admit I have a lot of missing memories,” said Amalita. ”But the basic personality is still there.”
”Yeah!” said Abdul. ”She's just as bossy as ever.”
”Hus.h.!.+”
”See?” said Abdul, raising his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders. ”She'll be even more bossy when we get into those walk-around bodies they're building for us.”
”We have slowed ourselves down so we can say goodbye to all of you and our families,” said Amalita.
”Then we had better get back up to normal cheela rates if we are going to stay up with what is going on down here....”
”Doc! Seiko! Jean!” Abdul called. ”Over here on the screen.”
Pierre turned around to see astonished looks on the remainder of his crew as they came into the communications room. His chronometer chimed the hour, and he looked down at it. He started to reset it to make it agree with the clock on the wall, but decided against it. Not many people lived on a time-line six months shorter than the rest of the universe.
06:00 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050.
The long day was over.
Technical Appendix
The following sections are selected extracts from the book,My Visit With Our Nucleonic Friends, by Pierre Caraot Niven, Ballantine Interplanetary, New York, Earth and Was.h.i.+ngton, Mars (2053). This is the only book to win the n.o.bel, Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula, and Moebius prizes in the same year (2053).
DRAGON'S EGG.
The home star of the cheela was given the picturesque name Dragon's Egg by the humans because it is a star right-at the end of the constellation Draco (the Dragon), as if the Dragon had left an egg behind in its nest. The cheela coincidently also called their home Egg because it is the source of lifegiving heat and light, and glows warmly like the eggs they lay.
Egg, like most neutron stars, rotates rapidly because it is a small, compact body and only 20 kilometers in diameter that condensed from a large, slowly rotating red giant star many millions of kilometers across.
Most of the ma.s.s, magnetic field, and angular momentum of the original star ended up in the neutron star.
Dragon's Egg has a surface gravity of 67 billion Earth gravities, a magnetic field at the poles of a trillion gauss, and a rotation rate of 5.0183495 revolutions per second. Thus, one turn of Egg is roughly one-millionth of an Earth day. This approximate million-to-one relative time scale also seems to apply to the cheela life processes. Our nucleonic friends think, talk, live, and die a million times faster than we humans.
RELATIVETIME SCALES.
The cheela use a base twelve numbering system since they have twelve eyes. The cheela units of time are given in the following table, along with the roughly equivalent time span for humans, taking into account the average lifetime of the cheela compared to the average lifetime of a human.
Human Time Cheela Time Remarks
1 day 3,000 g 100 cheela generations 1 hour 126 g 4 cheela generations 45 min 94 g cheela lifetime 15 min 31 g cheela generation 29 sec 1 g = 1 great = 144 turns (equiv. to human year) 0.2 sec 1 t = 1 turn of Egg (equiv. to human day) 17 msec 1/12t =dothturn (equiv. to human hour) 1.4 msec 1/144t = grethturn (equiv. to human 10 min) 115 msec 1/1728t = methturn (equiv. to human minute) 10 msec 1/20736t = sethturn (equiv. to human 4 sec) 800 nsec 1/28832t = blink (equiv. to human blink)
OUR NUCLEONIC FRIENDS.
One can hardly imagine a more alien life form than a cheela. A typical cheela weighs the same as a typical human, about 70 kilograms; but the nuclei in the cheela body have lost their electron clouds, so the nuclei are condensed into a tiny body that is squashed by the high gravity and stretched by the high magnetic field into an oval pancake shape a half-centimeter in diameter and a half-millimeter high-alittle larger than a sesame seed.
The body is tough and flexible, with a tread on the bottom like that of a slug. Unlike a slug, a cheela can move equally well in any direction. The cheela have twelve eyes s.p.a.ced around their periphery, giving them 360-degree vision. The eyes are up on stalks like those of a slug, but because of the high gravity the stalk is thicker. The cheela see using the ultraviolet and soft X-rays emitted by the 8200-K glowing surface of Egg.
Despite their alien appearance, the cheela are not thought of as ugly, terrifying monsters. Instead, they have become our friends. One suspects that their small size may have something to do with it, as well as the fact that they cannot use anything on Earth, or even the Earth itself. Anything made out of normal matter would collapse at a touch from their ultra-dense nucleonic bodies.
LIFE ON A NEUTRON STAR.
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