"... and ..." continued Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

"... and?" queried Graviton-Maker/321, puzzled by the verbosity.

"Don't ..." started Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

". . . touch!" rumbled Graviton-Maker/321, greatly amused.

St. George was far away from the dangerous neutron star in a 100,000-kilometer orbit a third of a light-second away, so it took three turns before Electromagnetic-Manager/1 established contact with the computer on St. George using the laser communicator taken from Dragon Slayer. Once the computer realized that it was communicating directly with cheela instead of the slow-thinking humans, it rapidly repeated the message that it had been sending. The image was that of a female human with yellow hair bound into a single long braid over one shoulder. It reminded Electromagnetic-Manager/I of a ridiculous type of inbred pet Slink that had hair so long that the pet needed a robot attendant to hold its hair up, out from under its tread when it wanted to move. His console computer link identified the human as Carole Swenson, the Commander of the Dragon's Egg expedition.

"Dragon Slayer! Your last laser communicator is dead. Switch to alternate links!Dra .. ."

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 thought for a while about answering the anxious human in order to rea.s.sure her that the crew was in no immediate danger. But by the time she had finished saying the word "Dragon Slayer," he would have obtained permission to proceed with the rest of the mission and he could tell her the better news that the cheela were going to try to return the crew to the command ship, St. George. He erased the image of the human from his screen and set up a call to the Administrator of the Slow One Transport Project.

Two turns later, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 received an in-person visit by the administrator of the Slow One Transport Project. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 didn't like working with the Ancient One, who insisted on being addressed by his archaic egg-name, instead of his position.

"I am Lovely-Eyes," said the administrator. The wrinkled hide and erratic eye-stub motion contrasted with the intense gleam from the dark red eyes.

"Coupling experiments successful," reported Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

"Excellent!" said the administrator.

"Excellent!!" the administrator said again, unnecessarily repeating himself.

"Excellent!!!" said the administrator once again.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 began to be concerned. The eye-stub wave pattern on Lovely-Eyes accelerated, and his hide changed color as his emotions reached the breaking point. His tread started to move again.

"Pro . .." Suddenly four eye-b.a.l.l.s fell sightless to the deck. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 immediately realized that the ancient one had suffered a stroke affecting one of the tri-lobes of his brain-knot.

"Lovely-Eyes!" Electromagnetic-Manager/1 rushed over to a.s.sist the Ancient One. His tread'trummed an emergency call into the deck as he moved.

Eight, intense, dark red eyes stared him to a halt. They were not "lovely eyes," they were fanatical eyes.

"Pro ... Pro ... ceed with project." The treading was weak, but distinct.

"Lovely-Eyes," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1. "I stay until medicos come."

"Go!" came the reply. "And call me Lovely-Eyes no longer. Call me Human-Savior."

The great wrinkled hide shuddered and collapsed. The body of the Ancient One flowed in all directions.

When the medical robots tried to enter, their way was blocked.

After checking with Manager-Director/5, the Web-Con supervisor of the Slow One Transport contract, Electromagnetic-Manager/1 returned to the laser communicator. The human, Carole Swenson, had finished her sentence and was now looking wide-eyed at the screen as she read the message from the cheela. There wasn't time to wait for the human to react, so Electromagnetic-Manager/1 left a long message for the St. George computer and a shorter one for her.

"Dragon Slayer will be disintegrated. Six Eyes of Bright will be collapsed. Return for crew in six months." He turned off the laser communicator, gathered his engineers and their robots, and headed for Dragon Slayer.

Void-Maker/111 arranged her robotic crew with care around the periphery of the large viewport window in the south pole of the human s.p.a.cecraft. When she received the signal from Manager-Director/5 she activated her console and the robots disintegrated the hull around the window.

The viewport blew away as the air emptied out of the ship. She touched her tread screen and the image of another Web-Con engineer appeared. It was Graviton-Maker/321.

"To you," said Void-Maker/111.

"To me," replied Graviton-Maker/321.

"Don't . .."

"Won't." Both of their screens rippled with laughter.

Graviton-Maker/321 set his crew of gravity robots in the path of the slowly tumbling plate of gla.s.s. This piece of high-strength gla.s.s was one of the many parts of the s.p.a.cecraft that the expanded matter scientists wanted to examine. As soon as his robots had the viewport under control, he sent some of them off with the window while he and the rest of the crew returned to Dragon Slayer. By the time he had returned, Void-Maker/111 had cut a large circular sample out of the s.p.a.cecraft hull. The task of capturing the circular piece of hull was so similar to the task of catching the viewport that Graviton-Maker/321 did not even bother to monitor the robots. They were faster thinking and more intelligent than he was when it came to doing their job.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1and his team had arrived and Graviton-Maker/321 joined them as they entered the hole where the viewport had been. They all felt a little uneasy as they entered the dark interior of the ship. Not only was the friendly glare of Egg gone, but they could no longer see the sky.

"Human Protection Tank 6 ahead," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1 to his team as they floated into the center of the cylindrical room. "Take over control."

A team of electromagnetic engineers brought up their generators. Each team was a.s.signed a disinto engineer whose crew of robots were used to clear a path through the walls and cut the cables. In a few dothturns they had cut free Tank 6 containing Abdul from the main hull, had replaced the ship's power to the tank with their own, and had inserted their own optical link in the fiber optic connection to the rest of the tanks.

Electromagnetic-Manager/1 monitored the video transmission channel and looked once again at a human as seen in their own region of the visual spectrum. This human was very different from Carole, the Commander of the human expedition. The hair on top of this human's head-lump was short and black instead of long and yellow. But instead of the ridiculously long thick braid coming out of the top of the head-lump, this human had a ridiculously long string of hair in the middle of the head-lump. The face was dark colored, and the pupils of the eyes seemed very wide open. Electromagnetic-Manager/1 wondered if the look of the human was due to the breathing mask that the humans had to wear under water, or whether something else had caused it.

04:02:39 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050.

"I lost power for a second!" said Abdul, just short of panic. "What's going on?"

"The cheela have breached the hull and are wandering around inside Dragon Slayer," said Pierre.

"I sure hope they know what they are doing!" Abdul replied.

04:02:40 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050.

Manager-Director/5 set up a conference link with her team leaders.

"All tanks separated," said Void-Manager/18.

"All tanks powered," said Electromagnetic-Manager/1.

"All samples obtained," said Science-Manager/23.

"Monopole generators ready," said Monopole-Manager/4.

"Inertia pushers ready," said Graviton-Manager/53.

"Proceed," said Manager-Director/5. She returned to the task of braiding the long hair on her prize-winning Slink. She could have had robots do it for her, but Rapunzel deserved personal care.

"Cut away," Void-Manager/18 told his team of engineers.

Void-Maker/111 and her robots sliced off the science tower at the north pole of Dragon Slayer, and it floated upward in the residual gravity tides. There it would be held in place by gravity robots while the disinto robots reduced it to stored energy.

"To you," said Void-Maker/111.

"To me," said Graviton-Maker/321. He paused, waiting for the next phrase from Void-Maker/111.

There was a long pause.

"Touch," said Void-Maker/111, holding off her disinto robots for a while.

"Touch!" said Graviton-Maker/321. He sent his personal flitter directly at the gigantic structure. He pulled his eyes in under their eyeflaps to avoid the glare as the cold metal turned into a hot plasma as it was torn apart by the strong gravity field surrounding his s.p.a.cecraft. There was a breeze of ionized gas that rapidly settled to the deck and he was through to the other side.

"Touch!" he hollered again on his screen as he swooped his flitter around and dove once more at the mountain of nothing.

Soon, most of the engineers had put their crews of robots on automatic and joined in the fun.

Manager-Director/5 was notified of the disruption by the contract performance program, but she did nothing about it. The robots would probably get the rest of the job done in half the time, now that the cheela engineers were out of the way having fun.

It took five long seconds to reduce Dragon Slayer to five spherical steel tanks, bobbing gently in the center of the ring of six condensed asteroids. The cheela electromagnetic engineers brought back the laser communicator, attached it to Pierre's tank, and set it up so it was pointed out to St. George.

04:02:45 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050.

"Am I glad to see you!" Carole Swenson said as Pierre's face appeared on her screen. "Is everyone okay?"

"So far," said Pierre. He reached to his control panel and set up a split screen display format that combined the images of the remaining crew members of Dragon Slayer with that of Carole.

"I'd sure like to see what those busybodies are doing to us," said Abdul. "But the monitor cameras went with the rest of the ship."

"We have the large telescope trained on you," Carole told him. "At this distance, each of your acceleration tanks is just a blob, but we can resolve the compensator asteroids easily. We can even detect the activities of the cheela. Although they and their machines are too small to see, they are white-hot and we can get a lot of information from speckle interferometry. Except for a few machines near you, they seem to be concentrating out at the asteroid ring. Let me transfer a picture."

The screen blanked and a visual image overlaid with computer graphics appeared on the screen. The computer had strobed the picture at the rotation rate of Egg so the asteroids looked as if they were standing still.

"One of the asteroids is smaller than the others," said Jean.

"According to the plan they left with me," Carole explained, "they are going to shrink all the asteroids by dumping magnetic monopoles in them. Then they are going to shrink the radius of the ring until the asteroids coalesce into a solid rotating ring of magnetically charged, ultra-dense matter. I don't like that.

The tides from the gravity field of the ring are going to get orders of magnitude larger than the tides from Egg. I don't think even your acceleration tanks are going to help you survive that."

"You forgot the augmentor ma.s.ses," Seiko told her.

"What are those?" asked Carole.

"The augmentor ma.s.ses were well covered by the cheela in their briefing to us, Commander Swenson,"

said Seiko. "I'm sure the information was in your briefing."

"I just scanned it quickly," admitted Carole.

"The augmentor ma.s.ses are dense ma.s.ses just like the compensator ma.s.ses, but there are only two of them. Instead of being placed in a ring around the point to be protected, they are placed above and below the place to be protected. In that position the two ma.s.ses add to the tides of the neutron star."

"But that would just make the tides worse," said Carole.

"Not in this case. When they shrink the size of the ring of compensator ma.s.ses, the tides from the ring get stronger than the tides from the star, so the star tides have to be 'augmented' by the augmentor ma.s.ses."

"The cheela are bringing them now." Cesar was looking out the porthole in his acceleration tank. The augmentor ma.s.ses were modest-sized, old-fashioned cheela s.p.a.ceships about the size of a softball. They had black holes in the middle of them to provide enough gravity to keep the cheela in their condensed state.

"Looks like we each get two augmentor ma.s.ses," Abdul said as he watched the activity outside his porthole. "I thought there would be two big ones."

"Because of the way that tidal forces add," said Seiko. "They can do a better job if they null out the tides for each one of the tanks individually."

"The asteroids are now tiny dots," said Jean.

"And the ring is starting to shrink," Pierre added.

"I'll never complain about a mere 200 gees per meter again," said Abdul. "Hey! The ultrasonic pressure drivers have started. This is getting serious!"

"The ring of asteroids is now at 50-meters radius and has coalesced into a solid ring," said Carole.

"Things seem to have halted."

Suddenly the screens blanked and a message appeared on all their screens.

NEXT PHASE STARTS IN 10 SECONDS.

DRAGON SLAYER CREW WILL RETURN IN SIX.

MONTHS.

The ten seconds pa.s.sed slowly. The next two milliseconds were full of activity. Each tank was jerked upwards away from the center of the ring. The ring was collapsed until it was only a few meters in diameter. As it shrank, its glowing surface turned redder and redder, finally turning into a deep, dark, impossible black. It did not even reflect the yellow-white light from Egg. Then, one by one, the tanks were thrust through the hole in the center of the invisible ring. The heavy steel tanks distorted visibly as they pa.s.sed through. They did not come out the other side.

04:03:01 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE2050.

Pierre screamed as his arms slammed against the creaking walls of the heavy steel tank. Just as he thought that his fingers were going to be pulled off his hands, it was over. He coughed up some water he had inhaled, cleared his mask, and tried his control panel. The video display was dead, so he looked out his porthole.

He could make out the presence of three of the other tanks from the light coming from their portholes.