Starquake.pdf

The trade was made, with the captain adding the glow-ring to the bargain. He looked carefully at the
ancient scroll.
He unrolled it until he came to the personal sign at the bottom. "It is a portion of a daily log. It was
written by Qui-Qui!"
"We must find out where he got it!" whispered Len-McCoy.
"Later. Right now we have to get a gravity catapult activated, make sure that a clan doesn't starve, and
somehow make friends with a dictatorial Emperor that seems to own every last food Slink and groundnut
on Egg." He stopped his electronic whisper, and his tread moved again as he spoke once more to
Letter-Reader.
"Who is this Emperor you speak of?" Otis-Elevator asked.
"He is the Mighty One, the Terrible One, the Unforgiving One. The cheela that never
flows—Attila-the-Speckled," said Letter-Reader, his speckled tread trembling at the name.
Meanwhile, back at the base, Engineer Power-pack was setting up the power plant that would give
them the energy they needed to survive.
"We are about twenty centimeters from base," he said. "That should give us enough separation so that
crust cracks developing about the power plant won't interfere with the foundations for the gravity
catapult, while the stray gravity fields from the gravity catapult don't disturb the power plant My crew will
set up the bore rig here and start drilling."
"You have enough hole liner pipe to get started," said Engineer Delta-Mass. "By the time you get down
six centimeters my crew will have made the first dozen centimeters of liner for you. After that we can
make it faster than you can drill."
"We will see," Power-Pack said. "That antimatter-jet drill that Cliff-Web designed will poke through this
crust like a black hole through a human."
Delta-Mass returned to base, traveling slowly as she planned the route for the power lines that would
have to be run over the twenty centimeters between the site of the power plant and the base. By the time
she arrived at the base, her crew had the mass separator operating and were feeding it with ground-up
loads of crust. Most of the crust emerged from the machine as dust, which was piped away to a dumping
site. Rare elements and useful metals and compounds were col-
lected, while the high-strength metals were combined into a strong alloy and extruded as a large diameter
pipe.
"The first three centimeters are done," Delta-Mass told her crew as the end of the long pipe fell to the
crust with a ringing clang. "Let's take an early break for turnfeast. My eating pouches are wet from
thinking about the food Slink that is waiting for us. Groundnuts and singleberry together in the same
chunk of meat. I can hardly wait." She led her crew off while the finished pipe was lifted onto
cargo-gliders by a transportation crew and hauled off to the distant power plant site.
Delta-Mass stopped at the outskirts of the base to ask directions. In the turn that she and her crew had
been getting the mass separator into operation, the base construction crew under the direction of