Starquake.pdf

mass of Egg below it. The spacecraft slowed its fall, Captain Otis-Elevator finally gained control. They
couldn't afford to hover for long, since they would soon have diverted all the flow. Eagle had drifted over
a small mountain range, and he would have to move them to a flatter landing place.
Flying on the repulsive gravitational forces, Eagle coasted down the mountain slopes, causing minor
crust-quakes as it made its own valley down a mountainside. They passed over a herd of animals grazing
in the plains, scattering them in all directions. Then, with the last bit of stored energy surging through the
pumps to augment the last of the diverted flow, they floated down to a landing. First Officer
Space-Treader monitored the sensors and video monitors on the bottom of the hull.
"... 200 millimeters ... four-and-a-half down ... contact indicator ... engine stop...."
There was a pause as the heavy machine sank slightly into the crust, then'trums and electronic whistles
sounded as Captain Otis-Elevator announced through the neutrino communication link to the waiting
ships in orbit.
"East Pole Station! Dragon's Egg Base here. The Eagle has landed!"
Cheers vibrated throughout the hull of Eagle and were echoed by the communications console under
Admiral Steel-Slicer's tread. He did not join in, however, for all of his eyes were looking upward at the
fragmented remains of the deorbiter mass, Otis. They had saved a world, but at the expense of
sentencing five innocent friends to a slow death.
21:02:46 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
The first warning Letter-Reader had of the catastrophe was the rumbling in the crust from the direction
of the low hills nearby. His eye-wave pattern hesitated for a blink, then resumed as his brain-knot
identified the sound as just another crustquake. Four of his non-pink eyes then returned to their task of
reading the ancient scroll that lay unsprung on the crust. The scroll contained instructions for the operation
of a magical machine that could talk to the stars in the sky. There were many words that Letter-Reader
didn't know, but he hoped that by reading the scroll again and again they would become clear.
The crustquake continued to rumble and seemed to be getting closer. The hunting reflexes built into
Letter-Reader's pink and white speckled tread alerted his brain-knot, and he stopped reading to analyze
the vibrations coming through the crust. It didn't sound like the approach of a wild Swift, so his herd of
food Slinks were not in danger of attack. It was something new, however, and it was coming his way.
Letter-Reader looked off in the direction that his tread had indicated. At first he saw nothing, then he
noticed a disturbance in the crust. The disturbance was coming down the side of one of the nearby hills.
He then looked up to see that one of the stars was falling from the sky. It was coming straight for him!
His screaming tread carried him along as he and his herd ran away in panic.
Steel-Slicer waited until Otis-Elevator had closed down the pumps on Eagle and had stabilized the
energy accumulators.
"Excellent landing," said Steel-Slicer. "How much energy do we have left in the accumulators?"
"Only a quarter of what Cliff-Web had planned," Otis-Elevator replied. "But it should be enough to keep
ship operations powered for a dozen turns."