Part 26 (1/2)
Living on a neutron star is very different from living on the Earth, but our friends, the cheela, find it very pleasant. The very high gravity field of 67 billion times Earth gravity means that everything must be built low to the crust and very st.u.r.dy. The very high magnetic field of a trillion gauss tends to elongate objects along the magnetic field lines and makes it difficult to move things across the magnetic field lines. The two magnetic poles of Dragon's Egg are on opposite sides of the neutron star near the equator. They are called the ”East” and ”West” Poles. Midway between the two magnetic poles the magnetic field lines are parallel to the surface, and the cheela find it easy to move east and west but difficult to move north and south.
There are things lacking on a neutron star that we take for granted. There is no sun. The light and energy that keep us alive on Earth pour down from the Sun during the day, while at night it is dark and cold.
Thus, most life-forms on Earth go to sleep at night. On Egg the light and energy that keep the cheela alive come upward from the crust. It is never dark, so the life-forms on Egg never developed sleep. They do not have a moon, so they have no months. They do not orbit a star, so they have no year. Their only natural unit of time is the rotation of the fixed stars in the sky. Thus, their equivalent of a day-night cycle is a turn of the star.
The cheela don't have lamps, candles, fireplaces, or flashlights, for there is no dark and no cold on the glowing surface of Egg. Even the inside of a cave is brightly illuminated by the glow from the walls. The cheela don't have hanging pictures, hinged doors or windows, leafed books, rooftops, or tops to anything usually, for the gravity is too high. They don't have airplanes, balloons, kites, whistles, fans, straws, perfume, lungs, or breath because there is no air. What atmosphere there is consists of a few electrons and ions of iron or other typical crustal nuclei. They don't have umbrellas, bathtubs, showers, or flush toilets because there is no rain nor are there streams, lakes, or oceans.
Life for a modern cheela is not drab. Although cheela do not wear cloth to cover their supple, elastic, and variable-shaped bodies, they do dress up. Even uncivilized cheela wear body paint to cover their nakedness, and the modern fluorescent, liquid crystal, and variable-emittance paints make the city streets bright with color and patterns in the pre-turnfeast rush. Civilized cheela also never leave their compounds without first inserting into the holding sphincters in their hide a set of six badges that indicate their profession and their rank in that profession. For more festive occasions, jewelry can replace or augment the badges on the hide, while jewel-rings encircle each of their twelve eye-stubs.
A corner of a typical cheela home compound is shown in Figure 1. There are paintings on the wall, but they are painted right on the wall. There are books, but they are rolled up scrolls that are stored in scroll-walls. There are soft pads and pillows, but they are for resting and reading, not sleeping, for cheela don't sleep. There are windows, but they have no gla.s.s, for there is no cold or hot air to keep out. If a cheela wishes privacy, he pulls the horizontally sliding window blind shut. There is a door to the compound, which also slides in a track. Although modern cheela now use nuclear-power chronometers to keep track of time, the old-fas.h.i.+oned pendulum clock works as well on Egg as it does on earth, provided a st.u.r.dy frame is made to hold the pendulum in the strong gravity. On Earth, a one-meter pendulum ticks a slow once a second, whereas on Egg a one-millimeter pendulum ticks a fast three times a blink. On the right is one of the favorite pets of the cheela, a longhaired Slink.
Since cheela are egg-layers that leave their eggs at the hatching pens of their clan, they do not form family units, and each cheela lives alone with its pets. Most cheela choose a Slink for their pet. There are as many different breeds of Slinks on Egg as there are different breeds of dogs on Earth, and apparently for the same reasons.
A typical mongrel Slink is a small hairy animal with an oval shape, an undertread for moving, and twelve eyes up on stalks. Although most cheela don't admit it to themselves, except for the hair and the significantly lower intelligence, a Slink looks and behaves much like a young cheela hatchling. On Earth, it would be as if the most popular pets were monkeys rather than cats or dogs.
Cheela bodies are very wide compared to their height so they take up a lot of area. To accommodate these wide bodies without the aid of bas.e.m.e.nts or multiple stories, the home and workplace compounds also take up a lot of area, so the walls go right out to the street as they do in old towns on Earth.
An architect's version of a typical cheela street in the town of Swift's Climb is shown in Figure 2. The East Pole mountains can be seen in the distance, while to the right rise the South Side cliffs marking the South Side fault line. The main street is east-west, with compounds in each side ab.u.t.ting the slidewalks.
Near the East Pole, the magnetic field comes up out of the ground so all directions are hard-going, and the cross streets are at right angles to each other. In cities far from the poles, such as the capital, Bright's Heaven, the ”cross” streets are at an angle of thirty to sixty degrees to the easygoing east-west streets.
When moving along these cross streets the cheela brace their bodies against the slippery slidewalls and push their way at an angle to the prevailing magnetic field to get to the next east-west street where the rippling is easier.
The cheela learned about traffic problems from the humans long before they had cities big enough to have traffic problems. The street, with its double yellow line down the middle, is ready for the turnfeast glide-car rush.
Each compound usually takes up a separate block to itself. (In Bright's Heaven, the ”blocks” are diamond- or triangle-shaped.) The street name markers are built up from the corners of the compound walls, while the entrances to the compounds are identified with street numbers in the wall and the name of the owner in the slidewalk plate. The home compound on the left is a modern version with half-circle window cutouts and an inner walled patio area with a tri-poster tree. The home compound on the right is an older version with simple square windows and no inner patio.
PLANT LIFEON EGG.
The plants on Egg make food by extracting energy from the hot crust of Egg with their root system and rejecting their waste heat to the cold temperature of the sky. One major form of plant life is the parasol or petal-pod plant shown in Figure 3. It has a single taproot buried deep in the crust. From the single root grow twelve strong, curving compression members or ”trunks,” tied together with tension threads to a central post. Between each trunk and across the top of the plant is stretched a membrane ”skin.” The top membrane, facing the cold sky, is highly emissive and dark. At the end of each of the twelve trunks are the pollen shooters and collectors.
The cheela evolved from the parasol plant and still contain the genetic code for the plant form in their genes. Under proper manipulation of their ”hormone” balance, they become immobile, dissolve their internal muscles, and re-form into a very large version of the parasol plant called a dragon plant.
Ngw* 5. CIft-Wort Plant Upon reversal of the process, they regrow a new, young cheela body to house their brain and nervous system, which had been unaffected by the transformation. This animal-plant-animal process gives the cheela a method for rejuvenation of the body.
Another form of plant life is the tri-poster plant shown in Figure 4. It puts out secondary trunks like the banyan tree on Earth, then grows an interconnected triple trunk system with membranes and tension fibers completing the structure.
A third form of plant life is the cleft-wort, well-known trademark of the Web Construction Company. It is found mostly in crevices in rocks in the mountainous areas at the east and west magnetic poles, although the hardy mountain plant also thrives in the nooks and crannies of the homes and offices in the cities and towns. As can be seen in Figure 5, the cleft-wort plant uses the rocks and ledges to provide mechanical support. A taproot at the base of the cleft climbs up the corner of the crevice to the upper surface where it attaches onto opposite sides of the cleft with broad surface roots. The surface roots then anchor tension fibers in a pattern similar to that of a spider web in the corner of a room. The web fibers support a membrane between them. The upper surface of the membrane is highly emissive to allow waste heat to escape to the cold sky, while the lower surface is silvery to reflect the heat from the hot crust below.
STARQUAKES.
The only ”weather” the cheela have on the nearly airless Egg is earthquakes or, more properly, crustquakes or starquakes, depending upon the magnitude. While a large quake on Earth has a Richter magnitude of 8 or greater, large starquakes on neutron stars can reach an equivalent Richter magnitude of 16!.
Having experienced a starquake at close quarters with a number of different instruments active and measuring, we now have a better idea of what a large starquake is like. Our present understanding is summarized in a recently published book by some of the crew members on Dragon Slayer.1Our findings are not significantly different than the older publications in the field that discussed how the vibrational energy in the crust gets transferred into the magnetic field and then into the electrons and ions in the spa.r.s.e atmosphere,2,3 how the smaller quakes can be used to predict the larges quakes,4and how a large quake can trigger a core collapse or starquake. Unfortunately, being able to predict a large quake from smaller quakes was of little help to us humans who were there. The whole quake sequence takes place in less than a second.
Figure6. Tidal Accelerations Above a Ma.s.s
ULTRADENSE MACHINERY.
Being ultra-dense themselves and living on an ultra-dense world, the cheela have developed a technology of ultra-dense machines that is way beyond our present understanding, although Einstein and others have given us some clues. Of course, even to approach Dragon's Egg with our s.p.a.cecraft, Dragon Slayer, we humans had to construct some simple ultra-dense machines ourselves.
Figure 6 shows the basic problem of getting to know a neutron star better. If our s.p.a.cecraft is in orbit at an alt.i.tudeh above a neutron star of ma.s.sM and radiusR, then only the center of the s.p.a.cecraft is in free fall. The rest of the objects in the s.p.a.cecraft (like the crew) are subjected to tidal forces.
The amount of tidal accelerationa each crew member is subjected to is proportional to the distancel from the center of ma.s.s of the s.p.a.cecraft.