Starquake.pdf

slid open. He entered the security port in the base of the wall and felt his body stiffen as a magnetic field
penetrated his body and generated a magnetic susceptibility map to compare with the stored version.
"You are carrying a scroll out that you did not have when
you came in," a mechanical sounding voice vibrated through his tread.
"It's the instruction manual for the operation of the Time-Comm machine," Time-Circle explained. "I'm
going to read it at home."
"Accepted," replied the machine. The magnetic field disappeared, and the outer door opened. Before
Time-Circle left, he set the intruder barriers. He couldn't see the barriers, but the top of the tall wall now
bristled with alternating north and south magnetic poles. The fields were so strong and the gradients so
high that it would take forever to push anything through them to get over the wall. The field strength near
the center of the barrier was strong enough to elongate the cells in a living organism until they didn't
function properly. He had been told it felt as if you were putting a tendril into the purple-hot flame of a
gamma-ray flare. He noticed the fading track of Cliff-Web that indicated he had pushed off down the
slanting corridors to the north-east. Time-Circle moved in the opposite direction and headed Bright-west
for the Administrative Compound of the Inner Eye Institute to arrange for the dedication ceremonies.
Cliff-Web felt quietly pleased with himself. First the Space Fountain (he could see the tiny spike of light
growing up into the sky over the wall at the end of the long north-east corridor), now the Time-Comm
machine. The time machine was finished so far ahead of schedule that the formal turn-on ceremonies
were still scheduled for three turns from now. He wasn't sure whether he would bother going to them. He
hated to have people tell him how wonderful he was. It made his eye-stubs squirm just thinking about it.
He was anxious to get home to his holovid and his plants. He then remembered his cleft-wort that he had
pouched when he left. He stopped and, forming a manipulator, reached into his pouch and pulled out the
plant.
"There, there, Pretty-Web," he said. "You getting too warm?" He held the plant up to his eyes and
looked it over carefully. Itwas too warm. It was almost the same yellow-white on the top as it was on the
bottom, and it was drooping a little between the acute angle of the artificial cleft that took the place of the
natural rock clefts in the mountains where the cleft-wort normally grew.
Now that the plant was out in the open where it could see
the dark blackness of the starry sky, the top surface cooled off and turned a velvety red-black, while the
underside turned a reflective silver. Cliff-Web lifted the plant up to his own deep red topside and put the
base of the holder into a pouch he formed on his topside. He directed his body to heat the pouch; and
the plant, with its roots in a source of heat and its topside cooled by the black sky, started to regain its
normal circulation and perked up. The tension threads that wove back and forth from one side of the cleft
to the other tightened, and the topside corrugations grew more wrinkled, increasing the emissivity of the
top surface. Tiny threads of red light started at random in the black-red top, and wended their way down
the feeder veins to the dull red stem leading to the yellow-white base. It was a pretty moving display.
Cliff-Web could almost feel the hum of the plant as it worked to make food.
Relaxed and happy with himself and his plant, Cliff-Web didn't hurry as he pushed his way north-east.
Using the walls of the compounds along the street as a levering wedge, he pushed his body through the
magnetic field lines that tried to prevent his northward motion.
For a while he moved through the slumlike area of Old Town that surrounded the sprawling grounds of