Authors: Robert L. Forward
He ordered everyone to stay in his assigned station on the spacecraft while he rotated the shell slowly around. The gigantic human spacecraft passed above every crew member several times while they all gazed
at the metal skin and stared into the viewing ports, where they could vaguely glimpse some huge shadowy shapes behind the heavily tinted fuzzy glass. After a short while Clear-Thinker stopped the rotation, ordered a minimum crew to stay at the controls and let the rest of the two dozen crew members have a vacation break for a full turn. A few paired off and wandered around to the back side to find a quiet place behind some piece of equipment, but most gathered at the front and continued to stare at the unbelievable sight as the slow turning of the human spacecraft around their home star changed the lighting. At last the neutron star set behind the spacecraft and the show was over. The darkness was also strange, but the cheela psychologists had anticipated that problem and had made sure that the crystal shell underneath them had all the old familiar heat and radiation characteristics that they were used to on Egg, even though the gravitational pull was nowhere near that of home.
With half a turn gone, Egg rose from behind the opposite side of the spacecraft, and the spectator crowd grew once again. It was obvious to Clear-Thinker that the initial problem of having the spacecraft overhead had now dissipated, but he decided to wait for one full turn before putting the crew back onto the schedule so that their timing for the photographs and spectral analyses would be correctly oriented with respect to the illumination from Egg.
Precisely one turn later the crew members were back at their posts and the Visit began. A cloud of individual fliers and many small instrument packages took off. Each one was a tiny sphere with a sub-miniature black hole at the center to keep it under enough gravity so that it would not explode. The first instrument packages to get to the human spacecraft were several X-ray generators. Some larger ones were positioned at a distance to illuminate the general scene, their radiation
varying in opposition to the illumination from the neutron star that rose and set as the work proceeded. Others were placed in a ring around the viewing ports and sent their violet-white beams through the heavily tinted glass into the interior of the spacecraft. Soon the shadows in the room became clearer. Using the pictures and a map of the console room, the crew could identify the communications console and the chair in front of it. In the chair was a collection of strangely-shaped violet objects surrounded by a multicolored cloud. They increased the illumination and then could finally make out the outlines of the yellow-white clothing and blue-white human flesh covering Amalita’s violet bones. Cameras were set up and adjusted, and data started pouring back to the mother spacecraft where other crew members monitored displays and tended the computers and the communication links back down to Egg.
“One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two …” counted Amalita as she felt the gravitational tug from the insignificant golf ball fifteen meters away.
“… one-thousand-three and twirl,” she chanted as she pressed the belt release, did one pirouette through the air and landed on all fours on the thick glass of the viewing port.
“Rather prettily done, if I do say so myself,” she thought.
“She is right on the time line,” Clear-Thinker mused to himself as he observed the computer-generated image of Amalita taken the previous turn and compared it with those taken a few turns previously. The enlarged
image of the seat belt showed it was coming apart. Now if she could turn around once while she fell to the window, they could get some high resolution, three-dimensional X-ray images that made so much more sense to their computers than the book-oriented, flat diagrams they had obtained from the human physiology textbooks.
In the following turns the crew members watched as Amalita’s body ponderously fell through the air toward the viewing port, turning slowly as it came. Clear-Thinker kept the X-ray illuminators off most of the time, to keep the radiation dose on his human friend down to a minimum. At times calculated by the computer, the X-ray illuminators would flash on, and another snapshot of the human body in motion was taken. By the time Amalita’s body was approaching the port, the computer had built up a detailed three-dimensional model of her body. Now the illuminators were brought in to focus on certain portions of her body as the scientists called for more detailed data on the glands and the corrugation patterns in the brain. The data they were collecting would keep generations of students busy.
As Amalita’s hands and feet were contacting the viewing port glass and her body started to bounce back, one of the human-medicine specialists on the crew came up to Clear-Thinker and put down a computer-generated picture for him to scan. As Clear-Thinker flowed onto the pad and tasted the picture, the specialist said, “That is a closeup of Amalita’s left breast. Fortunately she was not wearing a brassiere so that when she landed on the window, her breasts came forward and we were able to get a highly detailed image of the entire mammary gland complex. The thing that concerns us is the anomalous region right at the center of that diagram. We are sure that it is a small group of cancer cells. They are still too small to be seen by
human X-ray machines, but it is our professional judgment that they are definitely malignant.”
“Well, it looks as if we will be able to repay Amalita for her performance,” Clear-Thinker said. “Prepare a picture that the human doctors can understand and we will send it to Amalita along with a warning of what we found.”
The specialist replied, “We had already planned to do that, but we are all concerned about the time it will take. It will be a week before the Dragon Slayer leaves this orbit and takes Amalita and the rest of the crew back up to the mother ship, St. George. In that week, the cancer could grow and start sending out seeds to contaminate the rest of her body. We had another idea that we wanted to talk to you about.”
Clear-Thinker flowed off the pad, “What is your proposal?”
“Now—you must realize that what we are about to suggest is against all normal human and cheela standards of ethics. All the human-physiology specialists here, along with many experts on human psychology, medicine and law back on Egg have argued back and forth for the last two turns. There has been a general consensus, although not unanimous by any means, and it was decided to bring it to you for your approval.”
Clear-Thinker waited patiently while the specialist worked her way through the circumlocutious argument.
“The consensus is that because of the high malignancy potential of this growth, and the time it will take Amalita to get to a human doctor, we should treat the cancer now, even though we do not have time to get her permission first.”
Finally it was out, and Clear-Thinker could understand why it had taken the specialist so much time to come to the point. She was right. By the time the slow-thinking Amalita had been informed of her problem, and had made the decision whether or not to let them
try to treat her, the expedition would have had to return to Egg. He also realized that the specialists would not have made their recommendation unless they were sure that Amalita had a serious problem that needed immediate treatment.
“Go ahead,” Clear-Thinker quickly replied. “What do you need?”
“We will want to modify one of the X-ray illuminators to increase its frequency and power output,” she said. “Running it at a high power level will burn it out quickly, so it will no longer be available for general illumination, but if we do a careful scan, the focused beam of X-rays should kill the cancer cells with only minimal damage to the rest of the breast.”
“We have plenty of illuminators,” Clear-Thinker said. “Check with the camera crew to find out which one they can spare, and proceed whenever you are ready.”
The specialist gathered a crew and soon a modified X-ray illuminator with a large focusing mirror and a high-intensity power source moved up to the window of the viewing port. The computer first aligned the coordinates of the focal point of the illuminator with the calculated position of the cancer deep within the slowly moving breast. Then burst after burst of high intensity X-rays shot out from the illuminator as it was slowly moved back and forth in wide arcs about the focal point buried deep within Amalita. The cancer shriveled and died, while the skin at the surface of the breast started to turn pink—as if it had gotten too much sun at the beach.
“Ouch!” Amalita cried as she rebounded from the window. Her hand went to her breast, but the sharp hurt was gone. “Reverse Cooper’s droop?” she thought
to herself. She then turned to watch Pierre, her mouth still forming the automatic count, “… One-thousand-seven …”
“It is time for the Visit,” announced Clear-Thinker at one of the planning sessions. “Get out the skimmer and check the mush tube and waste disposal systems.”
The skimmer was a small vehicle especially designed for the Visit. It was not much larger than an instrument shell and had only rudimentary propulsion and control subsystems. A standard individual shell was much larger, and needed a larger mini-black hole to keep it from exploding. Such shells had to stay over a meter away from the viewing ports since their gravity fields were so high. The skimmer was much less massive, so it could approach much closer to the ports. The skimmer had two things that an individual shell did not normally carry, however: a half-dozen turns worth of food, most of it in the form of a liquid mush, and a disposal grate connected to a holding tank.
Most of the crew had the decency to busy themselves elsewhere as the commander of the Visit expedition settled himself onto the skimmer. The spherical shell of the skimmer was only slightly larger than his body, so there was only one way that he could fit on it. With the controls at his front, his food intake orifice was situated near the tube from the mush tanks, while his elimination orifice was over the disposal grid.
Clear-Thinker formed some crystalline bones within his body, conformed them into manipulators, took hold of the controls and raised power.
“Never has a nickname for a spacecraft fit so well,” thought Clear-Thinker, as the “Flying Toilet” rose from the main expedition spacecraft and moved over
to the left viewing port where it stopped—just a bit less than a meter from the tip of Pierre’s nose.
Pierre watched Amalita drop and tightened his grip on the hand-holds to keep himself from following her down to that end of the cabin. He turned his head toward the window as a small glowing speck pushed through the main cloud that stayed a number of meters away, came up to the window, and stopped outside the glass—about an arm’s length away. Pierre looked out at the tiny incandescent sphere. It was slightly larger than a mustard seed.
Clear-Thinker stared up at the ghostly human face hanging in the air above him. The face was a half-dozen times larger than the highest mountain on Egg. The only thing he could see easily was the huge skull illuminated by the deep violet color of the soft X-rays emitted from the X-ray arc. There were the gaping holes for the eyes, each as large as the caldera of the Mount Exodus volcano. Between the eyes was a cavernous slash for the nose cavity, and below that were the two rows of dense teeth, like two mountain ranges, one stacked up on top of another. As a very faint blue-white outline surrounding and covering the skull, Clear-Thinker could see the flesh and hair reflecting the UV radiation from the arc, and thought he could see Pierre’s eyes staring down at him.
“Well—there is no time for a long speech,” Clear-Thinker said to himself. He activated the communication link control and spoke to the human.
“Hello, Pierre,” he said, his undertread rippling a carefully modulated acoustic wave into the pickup. It was not much of a greeting, but he had hoped he had made it a personal one with a carefully practiced
French accent on the “Pierre.” With the greeting off on its way through the Comm computer, where it would be parceled out to Pierre in slow phonemes over many turns, he shivered himself, took the mush tube into his intake orifice, and got himself ready for the long, self-imposed ordeal.
He first formed a crystallium stiffener inside each eye-stub to keep his eyes steady. “No need to make it thick under this reduced gravity,” he reminded himself. “I will need the crystallium for the rest of the structure.”
He concentrated and soon the eye-stubs were braced with an interlocking network of crystalline bones that would keep him from moving too much. This last technique was a new one to him, since like most cheela he had always limited his internal bone-growing repertoire to manipulators, eye-stubs and pulling bars. However, the medical scientists, having learned much about the capability of the cheela organism from a religious sect that had developed extraordinary control over their body functions, had taught him the interlocking technique.
With his preparations ready, he set the skimmer on automatic control, sipped a little mush, and settled down for the Visit with his gargantuan friend.
“Well—so you are Pierre Carnot Niven—are you?” he murmured up at the motionless skull. “All right, Pierre, let’s see who blinks first.”
Pierre focused his eyes on the tiny white-hot speck floating in front of him on the other side of the deeply tinted glass. The skimmer itself was an iridescent sphere about five millimeters in diameter. Almost covering the hemisphere on the side toward him was the opalescent body of Clear-Thinker. The various portions of his body
changed color like an incandescent drop of liquid crystal, as the hot internal fluid currents and cooler radiative surfaces varied their temperature. Spaced around the periphery of the flattened ellipsoidal body were a dozen red pinpoint eyes glowing like tiny coals around a tiny campfire.