Starquake.pdf

"Am I glad to see you!" Carole Swenson said as Pierre's face appeared on her screen. "Is everyone
okay?"
"So far," said Pierre. He reached to his control panel and set up a split screen display format that
combined the images of the remaining crew members of Dragon Slayer with that of Carole.
"I'd sure like to see what those busybodies are doing to us," said Abdul. "But the monitor cameras went
with the rest of the ship."
"We have the large telescope trained on you," Carole told him. "At this distance, each of your
acceleration tanks is just a blob, but we can resolve the compensator asteroids easily. We can even
detect the activities of the cheela. Although they and their machines are too small to see, they are
white-hot and we can get a lot of information from speckle interferometry. Except for a few machines
near you, they seem to be concentrating out at the asteroid ring. Let me transfer a picture."
The screen blanked and a visual image overlaid with computer graphics appeared on the screen. The
computer had strobed the picture at the rotation rate of Egg so the asteroids looked as if they were
standing still.
"One of the asteroids is smaller than the others," said Jean.
"According to the plan they left with me," Carole explained, "they are going to shrink all the asteroids by
dumping magnetic monopoles in them. Then they are going to shrink the radius of the ring until the
asteroids coalesce into a solid rotating ring of magnetically charged, ultra-dense matter. I don't like that.
The tides from the gravity field of the ring are going to get orders of magnitude larger than the tides from
Egg. I don't think even your acceleration tanks are going to help you survive that."
"You forgot the augmentor masses," Seiko told her.
"What are those?" asked Carole.
"The augmentor masses were well covered by the cheela in their briefing to us, Commander Swenson,"
said Seiko. "I'm sure the information was in your briefing."
"I just scanned it quickly," admitted Carole.
"The augmentor masses are dense masses just like the compensator masses, but there are only two of
them. Instead
of being placed in a ring around the point to be protected, they are placed above and below the place to
be protected. In that position the two masses add to the tides of the neutron star."
"But that would just make the tides worse," said Carole.
"Not in this case. When they shrink the size of the ring of compensator masses, the tides from the ring
get stronger than the tides from the star, so the star tides have to be 'augmented' by the augmentor
masses."