Starquake.pdf

Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans.
"But the Crab Nebula neutron star is over 3000 light-years away!" Pierre exclaimed to himself. "They
would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in
the past eight hours!"
A quick search through the index found the answer.
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-
KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID
ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF
EPSILON ERIDANI.
There followed a long section of encrypted gibberish.
In near shock, Pierre set the library console for automatic transfer of the data to St. George and slowly
floated over to the nearby lounge at the center bottom of Dragon Slayer. Everyone but Amalita was
there. Doc was trying to talk Seiko out of taking some W.A.K.E. pills with her coffee, and Abdul was
telling Jean Kelly Thomas about the recent restoration of the Holy Temple as she gulped down a quick
breakfast after her shortened sleep period while trying to comb out the snarls in her short cap of red hair
at the same time. While Jean and Pierre had been asleep, the cheela had advanced from their first orbital
flights around their home world to intergalactic travel.
Everyone was sitting on the soft, circular lounge seat, held there by the low outward-going residual
gravity forces. Occasionally one of them would look out the viewport below his feet. Pierre jumped up to
the top of the lounge and held onto the handle in the hatch door leading to one of the six high-gravity
protection tanks built into the center of the ship. He too
looked down and out the one-meter diameter window set in the "south pole" of the spherical spacecraft.
The electronically controlled optical shutter had been set to blacken the port thirty times a second as each
of the six glowing compensator masses passed in front of the port. The only light that entered the window
came from a single intense spot that was Bright—the Sun, their home—2120 AU away.
Pierre broke the silence. "It's nearly time for us to leave," he said.
Jean looked up, her perky freckled nose wrinkled in puzzlement. "I thought the plan was for us to stay
down here for at least another week."
"With the cheela doing all the mapping and measurements for us, there is really no need for us to stay
any longer," Pierre explained. "You should have read the detailed description of both the exterior and
interior of Dragon's Egg in that last HoloMem crystal I brought down." He swung down and stopped
himself at the doorway to the lounge.
"I had the computer reprogram the herder probes to move us into the path of the deorbiter mass. In