Starquake.pdf

"I'm right here," came a muffled voice. The voice seemed to come from under Eager-Eyes' tread.
"She's on-site at the East Pole," Eager Eyes explained. "I'll switch the picture to the visual screen on that
wall over there. Things are happening fast, so I had better keep working with the touch-and-taste
screen."
"I came over to see if we could have turnfeast together," said Time-Circle. "I didn't realize you had
gone."
"The trip wasn't planned," replied the image of Neutron-Drip. She was moving among an array of
acoustic transceivers that were picking up data from the distant seismic instruments buried under the crust
around the East Pole.
"I jumped over early this turn to make sure the transceivers stay on scale. I think there is a big quake
coming. But I can't be sure, since this is the first time anyone has tried to record the quakes prior to a big
one."
"Things really started to happen just after last turn-feast," Eager-Eyes reported. "I was watching the
signals coming in from the array around the East Pole, when I began to see ring-like patterns."
"Not only that," said Neutron-Drip. "Although they started small, the magnitude of the quakes has been
increasing nearly exponentially for the last ten dothturns as they close in on the root of the East Pole
mountains."
"Exponentially!" Time-Circle was clearly impressed.
"I expect a 'Trimble-tremblor' anytime soon," said Neutron-Drip. She noticed the confused twitch in his
eye-stub pattern. "The East Pole mountains will drop a few millimeters, and the
length of a turn will increase slightly. The human Nobel Laureate Trimble was the first to predict them
accurately from her observations of the Crab nebula neutron star."
"You might be in danger! You must leave at once!" Time-Circle shouted.
'Too late now," Neutron-Drip responded. "Keep collecting the data, Eager-Eyes!" she commanded.
Suddenly the viewscreen went blank.
Time-Circle shifted his gaze to the bowl that showed the eastern hemisphere. The East Pole mountains
were surrounded by flash after flash of bright blue light. Suddenly the whole East Pole exploded in a blue
glare. There was a pause, then a smooth ripple spread out from the focal point. It reached Swift's Climb
... and the display went out.
Time-Circlenow understood why three channels in his time machine were blocked with noise. He raced
out of the lab and across the Institute compound. There was one clear back-channel left. If only he could
get a message back in time to himself, he might be able to warn the rest of the population on Egg. As he
pushed his body through the clinging magnetic fields coming from the crust, he fought off the specter of
despair. After all, "he" that was here on this time-line, struggling to reach the time machine, had received
no warning message from the future. His present time-line was doomed, but perhaps he could create a
paradox—a bifurcation—that would save the "he," and the rest of Egg, on some other time-line. He
struggled on.