Starquake.pdf

"Mine," replied Abdul. "She's right. I've lost some pressure. The water must have frozen and plugged the
leak, though. The pressure seems to have stabilized."
"The tank must be repaired!" Cesar said. "It surely cannot withstand another trip through those extreme
tidal forces."
"The cheela can work miracles. But I don't think they can weld the mist we call steel. I'll just have to risk
it." Abdul paused, looking puzzled, then turned away from the video pickup and put his hands against the
back wall of the tank.
"Hey!" he said. "I feel little tiny tugs of gravity near the wall. They keep zipping back and forth."
"I can see some activity outside your tank," Seiko told him. "It looks like an electric arc. I think they are
attempting to weld the leak shut."
"I hope it holds," said Abdul.
05:06 CREW TIMEWEDNESDAY 22 JUNE2050
(00:01 GMT SUNDAY 25 DECEMBER 2050)
"Ten seconds to reentry," said Sky-Speaker. Pierre saw the view outside his porthole tilt and shift as
the circle of tanks turned into a line of tanks that swooped away from the patch of sky in a large arc,
then dove headfirst through the Kerr-warp at high speed. The next few milliseconds passed too quickly
for the tortured humans to follow.
As Oscar neared the space-warp the five tanks popped, one by one, out of the flat circle of black. After
the passage of the second tank, the diameter of the ring expanded a little, then shrank just as the third
tank passed through. The oscillations in the ring grew larger, and the fourth tank was highly distorted by
the tides of the contracting ring. The cheela obviously hadn't expected this instability. They managed to
slow the last tank down so that it wasn't trying to get through the ring at its minimum radius, but it wasn't
enough. The tank ruptured, spewing a human being and gobbets of water into the vacuum of space.
The cheela robots assembled the remaining four tanks in a line just below the periapsis of the plunging
asteroid, Oscar. The asteroid passed rapidly over the tanks, and one at a time its gravity field jerked the
tanks upward in a high trajectory that took them quickly away from the tides of Egg.
The cheela attempted to help the remaining human. They moved a piece of tank to shield him from the
radiation from Egg. They kept him from being torn apart by the gravity tides by making a miniature
compensator ring of dense spacecraft that circled around him. However, they couldn't prevent him from
being dragged back toward the massive space-warp. His eyes temporarily protected from the vacuum of
space by his underwater mask, Abdul looked up and waved goodbye to his departing comrades. Then,
pushing off from the heavy piece of steel tank, he dove headfirst into the whirling black ring to join the
atoms that had once been Amalita. Just before he reached the ring his body was momentarily surrounded
by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash and he was gone.