Starquake.pdf

Please take a rest."
"Doctor Wong, I appreciate your concern. But I am not about to abandon my professional responsibility
at this critical juncture."
"Well—at least take a break and join with me in a cup of hot coffee in the galley." Dr. Wong took the
petite scientist gently by the arm. She allowed herself to be steered down the passageway to the bottom
deck. On the way through the middle deck, they passed Amalita and Pierre working the communications
console that talked directly to the cheela through the laser communication link.
Pierre was stretched out in free fall, his head and arms inside the communications console, while Amalita
was talking to the cheela on the star. The speaker was not a computer-slowed image of a real cheela, but
the real-time image of Sky-Teacher, a special purpose intelligent robot that the cheela had built for the
job of communicating with the slow-thinking humans.
Pierre was replacing the HoloMem crystal in the side of the communications console. He reached in and
removed the small three-sided cover shaped like the corner of a box. The outside was jet black, but the
inner surface was a corner reflector of brilliantly reflecting mirrors. He pushed a button and a clear crystal
cube about five centimeters across popped out into the room, rotating slowly from the force of its
ejection. Pierre left it in midair as he placed another cube into the memory cavity and replaced the
mirrored cover. Then he floated over to catch the cube. The corners and edges of the HoloMem cube
were jet black, but through the transparent faces could be seen flashes of rainbow light from the
information fringes stored in the interior.
06:13:54 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050
Leaving Amalita talking to Sky-Teacher, Pierre grasped the HoloMem cube at opposite corners and
followed Doc and Seiko through the passageway in the floor to the lower deck and pulled himself over to
the library console. He moved carefully, for between two fingers he was carrying all the wisdom that the
cheela had accumulated during the past thirty minutes. He placed the crystal in its scanner cavity in the
library console, fitted the brilliantly polished corner segment into place, and closed the lid.
Sky-Teacher had said that this latest HoloMem crystal held a large section on the internal structure of
neutron stars. Pierre had the computer jump rapidly through the millions of pages until he found a detailed
cross section of the interior of Dragon's Egg. The diagram showed that the star had an outer surface that
was a solid crust of nuclei: neutron-rich isotopes of iron, zinc, nickel, and other metallic nuclei in a
crystalline lattice, through which flowed a liquid sea of electrons. Next came the mantle—two kilometers
of neutrons and metallic nuclei in layers that became more neutron-rich and dense with depth.
The inner three-fourths of the star was a liquid ball of superfluid neutrons and superfluid protons.
Pierre scanned the next page, a photograph of a neutron star, but it wasn't Dragon's Egg. He could tell it
was a real photograph, since he could see a portion of a cheela on a space flitter in the foreground. His
eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by
detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very
dense stars that were almost black holes to large, bloated neutron stars that had a tiny neutron core and a
white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the