Starquake.pdf

with spots of different emittance than the rest of her body. The speckled pattern extended to her eyes,
some of which were pink instead of the normal dark red.
Crumpled-Tread gave the gang leader one of the two travel bags he had snatched, and the three street
urchins took off in opposite directions. Cliff-Web heard a banging on the closing automatic door and
stepped on the activator mat to open the door and let the Public Peace Officer out. Her twelve eyes took
everything in at a glance, and she took off after the gang leader, who was still trying to stuff a heavy travel
bag in a pouch. Cliff-Web watched her go, but it was obvious that the officer, weighed down with her
weapons, badges, and communicator, was not likely to catch the fleet youngling.
Cliff-Web had been appalled by the size of the smallest thief. In his clan hatchery, a hatchling this size
would still be playing with the Old Ones, hearing the ancient stories of the clan heroes and their exploits.
The little one must be what the social workers called a "dump hatchling." Its mother was probably a
clanless prostitute who left her egg at the local dump. If the egg wasn't eaten by scavengers, the little
hatchling had a reasonable chance of living, since newly hatched cheela could feed themselves and there
was plenty of food at the dump. Older hatchlings would take the dump hatchlings under their mantle and
then teach them to steal for them.
Just thinking of the poor, unprotected hatchling with its ugly speckled top brought a surge of protective
emotion through Cliff-Web's body. He wanted to find that poor hatchling, throw his protective mantle
over the ugly scarred body, and feed her, and love her. He wanted....
Cliff-Web shook himself and drove back the feeling. He couldn't allow his hormones to turn him into an
Old One yet. He had a job to do. He flowed through the door and entered the terminal, all business. He
found the gate and went through, his magnecard confirming his reservation for the
launch. Since the jump-fare was a major expenditure, they had a tread-reader at the gate that verified he
was the true owner of the card.
As he glided onto the long, slender vehicle, an attendant assisted him in depouching his travel bag. Now
significantly thinner, he made his way up the narrow aisle and slid sideways into his slot. He raised the
panel that would keep his body from slipping out into the aisle during acceleration, pulled out a scroll, and
started reading it the hard way in the cramped quarters. He scanned a small portion while he used his
tendrils to unroll one end while he rolled up the other.
The jumpcraft left on time, and he put away the scroll to watch as the clear superconducting shields
moved up to enclose the compartments. The vehicle slid down a chute to the start of the Jump Loop
proper. The Jump Loop looked like a flattened pipe that traveled along the crust for a while, then slowly
raised itself up off the crust into the sky in seeming defiance of the tremendous gravity of Egg. Cliff-Web's
aisle mate was a youngling that looked as if he had just left the Combined Clans Engineering Academy in
Bright. He was wearing his engineering badges, and they looked newly made.
"Sure looks impossible, doesn't it," said the youngling.
"As if it might fall down," Cliff-Web responded.
"Don't worry," the youngling reassured him. "Everything is perfectly safe. You see, what is holding it up is
what you can't see, the super-high-speed band traveling inside the pipe. There is a big underground
electromagnetic linear motor in a tunnel to the east of here that is pushing the belt up to high speed and
feeding it into the pipe."