Starquake.pdf

Pierre spoke quickly to the robotic image as the gravitational forces jerked him about in his harness.
"We've had it," he said. "I'm afraid you'll have to retransmit that last HoloMem directly to St. George....
Goodbye."
Pierre noticed a hesitation in Sky-Teacher's response and stopped. He could see a clustering of live
cheela bodies to one side of the robot. The eyes and tendrils on that side of the robotic body accelerated
into a blur as Sky-Teacher talked to the live cheela at near-normal cheela speeds. A fraction of a second
later, the hesitation in Sky-Teacher's eye wave pattern was replaced by its normal rhythm.
"WAIT!"Sky-Teacher cried. "We will rescue you!"
"In five minutes?" Pierre shook his head. "Impossible!" Timing the gravity strains, he dove down to the
library console to change the rate for data transfer to emergency mode.
06:51:05 TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
The young post-doctoral student swayed back and forth as the senior engineer put the final touches on
the machine. Although he had gotten his doctorate in tempology and was not a bad engineer himself,
Time-Circle knew that making a magnetized and electrified black hole this big was not something to be
left to mere scientists. Fortunately, his grant from the Basic Science Foundation had been large enough so
he could afford to hire the best engineer on Egg, Cliff-Web.
Engineer Cliff-Web was not afraid to take on "impossible" projects. After stretching his tread as
Assistant to the Chief Engineer on one of the first jump loops, he had taken on the design of the first
space fountain. Cliff-Web had designed a tower 200 times taller than the diameter of Egg, and not only
showed how to build it, but proved that it would make money if it were built. He sold the idea, formed
the team, and then went on to other "impossible" engineering projects. Time-Circle had been lucky to
have gotten Cliff-Web for his project. But then, he doubted that any other project could have been more
challenging and more "impossible" than this one— building a time machine.
It had been almost two human minutes since the time machine project had started. For his doctoral
thesis, Time-Circle had proven the feasibility of time travel by sending signals through time. As a result, he
had received his Doctorate of Tempology and had been allowed to choose a new name for himself.
His first time machine had only two time communication channels. He had modified a normal black-hole
generator so that it used a mixture of protons and magnetic monopoles with high speed and high relative
angular momentum. By making the black hole out of both magnetically and electrically charged matter, he
had been able to make the rapidly spinning prolate mass open up its event horizon at spin speeds less
than 99% of the speed of light. The resultant black hole lasted less than a sethturn, but by careful timing,
Time-Circle had sent a gamma-ray pulse forward in time through one channel and backward in time
through another channel before the black hole popped into a tiny blast of radiation.
The Time-Comm machine Engineer Cliff-Web was now building for him would be permanent and could
send signals backward or forward to any time where the machine was in existence or until all eight
communication channels were filled with messages. It would be a long time before anyone, even the
rapidly advancing cheela, could make a time machine that allowed physical travel of living beings, but