Starquake.pdf

"Moving-Sand," he hollered into the crust. "Can you answer that for me?"
"You get it. I'm busy cleaning out the Slink rooms," came a voice from the rear of the compound.
With a shrug, Cliff-Web emptied out his gardening pouch, wiped his manipulator on a wiper, dissolved
the stubby, bony
arm back into his body, and made his way to his study. The buzzing grew louder as he entered the room.
Lassie was still resting in the warm corner of the room. He glided onto the taste-plate in the floor, and a
portion of his undertread touched theANSWER square on the screen. It was Admiral Star-Glider, head
of the Slow One Rescue Expedition. The picture was speckled with white spots again. He would have to
call the video-link company and get them to find the bad spot in the X-ray fiber cable to his compound.
"Turn on your holovid to the public services channel," said Star-Glider. "The legislature is winding up its
debate on the funding for the Jumbo Bagel. There should be a tally soon, and then we will be able to start
work."
"Seeing" Star-Glider through the ultrasensitive taste buds built into his tread, Cliff-Web turned some of
his eyes toward a silvery screen set in one wall of his study. He formed a tendril and, reaching to a small
console set into the floor, touched some panels. Brief scenes flashed in front of the screen as the planar
phased-array antenna embedded in a corner of his compound switched its reception beam to receive a
stream of modulated gamma rays coming from a direct broadcast satellite hovering to the west of the
Eyes of Bright.
Four of his eyes looked upward at the pattern of six glowing asteroids hovering over Bright. The pattern
was badly askew.
"The Six Eyes are already way out of their pattern," said Cliff-Web. "We should have been up there to
fix that long ago. After all, we promised we would."
"Well, politicians like to make promises," Star-Glider replied. "But when it comes to appropriating
money for it, they seem to feel they can take their time, especially in cases like this one, where there is no
real urgency. We have plenty of time."
"We did have plenty of time when the accident happened," Cliff-Web reminded him. "But the politicians
have fooled around for six greats of turns trying to find a cheaper way to do it. My engineers and I have
done our best, but there is no way we can build that giant inertia drive engine and get it up into space for
less than a billion stars, and the longer they wait, the more it is going to cost. How are the humans taking
it?"
"According to Sky-Teacher, they are becoming panicky. He can tell by the overtones in their speech."
"What is the present estimate of the time to failure?"
"It's hard to tell. We have an eight body gravity model that can predict the future positions of the ship
and asteroids with respect to Egg fairly accurately, but the real unknown is the strength of the spacecraft
hull. The humans are in the process of climbing into their acceleration protection tanks, and they should
be safe there for a while. But, I would like to get the rocket fixed before the hull fails so the humans can
take the whole ship back up when it is time for them to go. I would guess we have at least two human
minutes."