Starquake.pdf

06:58:07 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
Quake!
Deep within the root of the East Pole mountains, a thick block of crust groaned audibly under the great
stress of the billions of tons of matter piled up for centimeters overhead. The stress peaked to the ultimate
limit, then with a loud crack, a block of crust broke and a long rip propagated through the striated
undercrust. The mountain peaks, now unsupported, dropped a full twenty millimeters in the intense
gravity field of Egg. The shock wave from the fall of the mountain range spread out from the East Pole at
nearly the speed of light, striking first at the town of Swift's Climb.
Walls cracked and communications were cut off as the crust lifted and fell. Neutron-Drip felt her
eye-stubs flutter as the crust rolled beneath her. She kept watching the overloaded instruments and willing
them to get back on scale so they would record the remainder of what had to be the largest crustquake in
cheela history.
A little while later the surface wave passed through the Inner Eye Institute in Bright's Heaven.
Time-Circle's already panicked brain-knot screamed mentally as the crust raised up underneath his tread.
He slowed to a self-conscious deliberate slide as the wave passed under him and the crust dropped
again, having done little to him or the well-constructed compounds of the Inner Eye Institute.
The magnetic fields of the star, frozen into the moving crust, waved back and forth a little causing
electrical currents to flow in Time-Circle's body and exciting the electrons and random nuclei in the
tenuous atmosphere until they were moving fast enough to generate electron-positron pairs. The
counter-flow
heat exchangers in the base of his eye-stubs increased their cooling capacity to extract the heat that had
been generated in his eye-balls by the flowing electric currents. As his eyes cooled to their normal dark
red, he could see the decaying X-ray fluorescence as the remainder of the positrons generated by the
atmospheric currents found an electron to annihilate with.
More slowly now, Time-Circle continued on to the Time-Comm compound to check his machine.
Although the crustquake was a large one, he was sure that Cliff-Webb had designed the machine itself to
survive the shock. But perhaps the quake had disturbed the control console, and that was what was
causing the strange noise signals.
The lift carrying Heavy-Egg and seven of his crew was passing level 50 when a flare of light from the
atmosphere below signaled the start of a crustquake. A couple of methturns later the hum of the
up-deflectors changed pitch as the accelerators on the ground compensated for the twenty-millimeter
drop of the crust underneath them.