Dragon's Egg (28 page)

“I’m not looking forward to it,” Cliff-Watcher said as he led the way up the canyon.

At last they came over a rise and entered the wide, level region that Swift-Killer had found. With a sigh
of relief, they unloaded the message equipment and spread out on the fuzzy crust for a rest.

“I sure could use some food right now,” Cliff-Watcher said. “Even an unripe pod would taste good.”

“You would never make a trooper,” North-Wind retorted. “I haven’t been hungry since we left the last base camp. It is all just a matter of proper attitude. Look at me, I am not even hungry for a pod, much less an unripe one.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Swift-Killer remarked. “I just happened to have saved out three ripe pods, but since North-Wind isn’t hungry and Cliff-Watcher seems to pine for unripe pods, I guess I will just have to eat them myself.”

At these words the two males swarmed over her, prodding her all over until they found the pouch that held the three pods. Despite her protests that this was no way to treat a troop commander, North-Wind held her down while Cliff-Watcher carefully kneaded the pouch open and extracted three slightly bruised pods. They all then relaxed, eating their last meal for some time, as they stared up at the tiny light hanging in the sky, with its ring of six bright lights slowly circling about it.

Soon the three were busy setting up the beaming apparatus. The flat glancer mirror was propped up at an angle against a nearby cliff, and the curved expander was placed a slight distance away. Swift-Killer organized them into a smoothly working team. North-Wind held up the flares, and kept them placed as close as possible to the point in space that Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher had decided upon. Cliff-Watcher used his finest tendrils to manipulate the flow valve on the holder for the pod juice, while Swift-Killer constantly checked the alignments of the various portions of the apparatus and at the same time rhythmically read off the calls from the tally string that she held at her side.

“Long burn, flick, flick, flick, dash, flick …” Swift-Killer droned slowly as Cliff-Watcher concentrated on turning the valve of the vial of pod juice and North-Wind held the flare carefully at the correct position.

The message was very boring, since it was just a picture with a lot of blank space, but both North-Wind and Cliff-Watcher had participated in previous attempts to beam a message up to Inner Eye and knew what they were getting into. The many short flashes representing spaces were just as important as the dashes representing points or the long burns that signified the beginning of a line. A few omitted flashes could badly distort the picture and the message they were trying to send.

Swift-Killer had decided long ago that accuracy was more important than speed, even constant speed. After all, the strange beings in the Inner Eye certainly took their time in sending down their pictures—almost as if they were too slow-witted to cope with anything faster.

They slowly ground through the first picture message. Swift-Killer called a halt to see if there was any darkening of the dark detector, indicating that there was a message coming back to them in return.

“Nothing,” Swift-Killer said, as she lifted the small vial of fluid and peered through it.

Contact

The wide angle X-ray/ultraviolet scanner on Dragon Slayer detected a moderately strong pulsed emission in the east pole mountains. It had not been there when that same area had been scanned a few seconds ago. Automatic feature extractors singled out the region and a search-and-identify priority was assigned to the narrow angle scanner, which locked onto the blinking light source in a millisecond and began to record and analyze the pulses in detail.

An occasional pulse of high temperature thermal radiation at the east pole was not unexpected. Fairly often, a chunk of meteoric material would be pulled in by the star’s gravity, and as it would approach the star, the extreme gravitational and magnetic fields of the star would rip the rock apart and transform it into a blob of ionized plasma. The hot gas would fall at near relativistic speeds down along the magnetic field lines to impact on the surface in a brilliant explosion of heat and light.

However, these pulses coming from the star were not the fiery blasts from infalling meteors. The regularity of the pulsations triggered a higher priority circuit that kept the narrow angle scanner on the pulsations
until they quit several milliseconds later. Low-level judgment circuits evaluated the significance of the periodicity and assigned it a moderately high priority. The narrow angle scanner would return to that site often in its constantly varying scanning routine, but there was nothing there of interest to the humans.

“Let’s try again,” Swift-Killer said. Keeping the dark detector in front of one of her eyes, she went back to the apparatus. This time she held the valve herself with a set of manipulators, while a set of tendrils felt off the knots in the tally string.

Much later Swift-Killer called a halt. The second message had been beamed up to the Inner Eye, and still there was no response.

“If only we could be sure that our weak light could be seen at that distance,” Swift-Killer complained bitterly.

“You could climb to the top of that peak over there,” North-Wind said with mild sarcasm. “Cliff-Watcher and I will be glad to beam a message up to you and you could check on the reception.”

For once, Swift-Killer was silent. She could think of nothing else to do but to try again.

They were nearing the end of the third message when a loud crash came vibrating through the crust. Swift-Killer didn’t move. The highly developed sonic direction-finding apparatus in her tread had told her exactly what had happened.

“The glancer has fallen,” she said. Her eyes, which had been concentrating on the work of monitoring the fall of the drops of pod juice onto the end of the flare, continued their gaze while Swift-Killer slowly turned the valve off, closing it tightly to prevent leaks. She pouched the vial, and then finally turned her attention
to the base of the nearby cliff where the glittering shards of the broken glancer lay in a shattered heap.

Swift-Killer flowed over to the base of the cliff, forming a manipulator as she went. She felt through the sparkling pieces, but found none that were anywhere near the size of the original mirror.

“At least we got some of the messages off,” Cliff-Watcher said consolingly.

“Yes, but there are still more, and we ought to repeat them as often as we can to make sure they are received,” Swift-Killer said. “We must find a way to keep sending without using the glancer.”

“Perhaps we can find a suitable chunk of crust around here,” North-Wind suggested.

“I’m afraid not,” Swift-Killer said. “I have been looking at the various types of crust as we passed by different formations, and all the material in these mountains seems to consist of fuzzy crust. I have not seen anything around here that had anywhere near as shiny a cleavage surface as a glancer. We will have to think of something else.”

Swift-Killer tried many things. However, there was no way that she could get a beam formed and directed upwards to the Inner Eye. She had even tried leaning the expander up against the cliff at an angle (being careful this time to back it up with chunks of crust), but the light from the flare came in at such an angle that the light reflected from the expander was sprayed out in a distorted beam that rapidly dissipated into the sky. She knew where the focus spot of the expander was, but it was an unreachable point way up in the sky, at least a dozen times higher than she could reach, and almost as high as the cliff itself. Then she had an idea.

“If we put the expander flat on the crust, pointing up at the Eyes,” she said, “then the focus spot will be up around the top of this cliff. If we climbed up there with the flares we could make the light near the
focus and the beam from the expander would go straight up to the Eyes.”

Being a trooper, North-Wind said nothing, but Cliff-Watcher exploded. “You can’t be serious. That cliff must be twice as high as you are wide. It will take you a dozen turns to climb that high, even if you can find a route, and we are out of food! We will be nothing but bags of skin if we ever make it!”

“You are not going,” Swift-Killer said. “You will stay here. I will need to have you move the expander to different positions along the face of the cliff until we get the focus spot so it is just above the edge of the cliff where we can reach it.”

Swift-Killer went to the broken glancer, picked up one of the larger shards and pouched it.

“Let’s go, North-Wind,” she said, and took off toward the far end of the cliff, with the obedient trooper close on the tread of his Commander.

A fraction of a second later, the pulsed emission started again, and this time the narrow-angle scanner caught it early in its emission period. The semiautomatic search-and-identify circuits kept the scanner focused on the pulsations, while the feature extractor in the frequency analysis circuits activated a correlation program. A strong match was then found between the pulsation pattern of the emissions and the rectangular picture pattern that Abdul had chosen in his attempts at communication with Dragon’s Egg. If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised.

The new correlation was enough to trigger an action circuit. As a result—a millisecond later—humans were called into the loop.

Seiko glanced up at the computer message across the top of her screen. She was floating too far away from the console to reach any of the keys, so she used audibles, even if they were slower.

“Display!” she commanded, and instantly a replay of the narrow-angle X-ray/ultraviolet scanner was on her screen. She watched the regular blinking of the spot in the middle of the east pole mountains, then glanced up to see that the computer had slowed it down considerably for her.

Seiko watched it for a few seconds. The pulsations stopped abruptly. There seemed to be no sense to them.

“Analysis!” she commanded.

The picture on the screen stayed, while the computer overprinted result after result of its analysis.

Seiko scanned down the list and stiffened in shock. She expertly twisted her body in a midair position-reversal maneuver, caught hold of the edge of the console and pulled herself up to it. Her fingers flew over the keys. Within a few seconds, Swift-Killer’s second message was building up on her screen.

“Abdul!” she called to the next console, where Abdul Nkomi Farouk was laboriously working out a new message. “They are answering!”

Cliff-Watcher had been right. The path that finally took them to the top of the cliff was tortuous and hard.
Both Swift-Killer and North-Wind were hungry long before they reached the top, and this time it was the real hunger of someone who had been working at hard labor for a dozen turns. Swift-Killer still had plenty of reserves, but she was beginning to worry about North-Wind, for he was not as robust as she was. However, being a trooper, he never complained.

As Swift-Killer approached the edge of the cliff, she pulled the glancer shard from a pouch. “I’m sure I could never get one of my eyes to look down over the edge to see where Cliff-Watcher is, but as long as it thinks it is looking out at the horizon, I shouldn’t have any trouble,” she explained to North-Wind. Forming a strong manipulator with a deep root embedded in her tread muscles, she extended the shard out over the edge of the cliff.

She clustered her eyes in a line; with a little adjustment, she could see the deep red top of Cliff-Watcher waiting patiently next to the expander.

“I must really be getting hungry,” Swift-Killer thought. “Here I am gazing full on the topside of a handsome young male and I am not even interested.”

Swift-Killer turned to North-Wind and said, “We will have to move down this way.” She led the way down the cliff until they were at the point above the waiting Cliff-Watcher. Cliff-Watcher had never thought that his hatchling name had amounted to much, and now here he was spending what seemed to be his last dozen turns on Egg, doing nothing but watching a cliff.

Swift-Killer tried both long-talk and short-talk, and soon found that there was no trouble in communicating with Cliff-Watcher if he just kept a portion of his tread leaning up against the face of the cliff.

Cliff-Watcher had already arranged the expander; it was as close to the base of the cliff as he could get it. North-Wind formed a heavy manipulator like that of
Swift-Killer and slowly stretched it out over the edge, a small flare held at the end.

Swift-Killer removed one of the vials of pod juice from a pouch, and gripping it carefully, extended that, too. She constantly reminded herself to hold tightly to the vial; if it fell, the expander would be shattered in as many shreds as the glancer. Slowly she formed a muscular pseudopod that slithered out on top of the hefty manipulator. The fine tip of the pseudopod curled its way around the valve. The valve slowly turned and a tiny stream of liquid hit the end of the flare. They both flinched from the unaccustomed blue-white light, but soon a steady beam shot forth into the sky. Swift-Killer evaluated it carefully. Fortunately the winds were high that turn, and there were many dust particles in the air. Swift-Killer could see the strong beam as it went upwards, only to come to a bright point at some unimaginable distance overhead. Swift-Killer turned off the valve and they both slowly withdrew their manipulators back over the edge and relaxed.