Dragon's Egg Read Free Page B

MICRORAD/SEC
    FUNCTIONING EXPERIMENTS
        LOW FREQUENCY RADIO
        SOLAR IR MONITOR
        X-RAY TELESCOPE (STANDBY)
    “Only two experiments on,” she said. “The engineers must have turned off the X-ray telescope since the last time I checked.” She looked at the number for the spin rate, flipped the computer terminal into compute mode, and made a quick calculation.
    “Seventy-seven microradians per second comes out to be a little more than one revolution per day—about the same period as the scruff. The scruff must be caused by the effect of the solar heating on the transmitting antenna or some other solar effect.”
    She logged off the terminal, took the roll of paper, and headed back through the pre-dawn hours to her room. The roll would join the many other rolls that laystacked in a pile on her bookshelf, while she joined the rest of Pasadena in sleep.
TIME: FRIDAY 24 APRIL 2020
    In her sleep, Jacqueline was flying. No, not flying, but drifting through empty space. She looked down and finally realized where she was. Below her was the bright globe of the Sun. Spread out before her was the whole Solar System as seen from above. Her astronomically trained mind had placed the dream planets in their proper positions and she could almost imagine faint lines tracing out the nearly circular orbits that gave the Solar System the appearance of a bull’s-eye target from this perspective. She found the tiny double-planet system that was the Earth-Moon pair and was straining to try and make out detail on the Earth when the slow, inexorable rotation of her body dragged her eyes away from the scene. Unable to turn her head around any further, she was forced to gaze upwards away from the Sun, her arms and legs outstretched in the form of an X. “Just like the low frequency radio antennas sticking out of the OE probe,” she thought.
    Soon the rotation brought her body around again and she admired the view. She finally concentrated on looking at the north pole of the Sun. She had no trouble looking at the Sun despite its brightness, and she searched for any variations on the nearly featureless surface. As she stared, she saw nothing with her eyes, but she finally began to notice weak pulsations in her arms and legs. A double pulse, triple pulse, pulse …
    “I’m picking up the complex radio signal of the orbiting black holes!” she thought, as her body continued to revolve. Soon she could no longer see the Sun, but she could still feel the pulsations in her arms and legs. Then, while staring out at right angles from the Sun, she felt a rapid tingling sensation building upin her right arm. It became stronger and stronger, nearly blotting out the slower, rhythmic pulsations. “The scruff!” she exclaimed, and then began to laugh at herself …
    “Nothing like getting yourself so wrapped up in your thesis work that you dream you have become the spacecraft yourself,” said Jacqueline as she sat up in her room. She looked at the bustling noonday traffic out her window and rubbed the prickles out of her right arm, restoring the circulation it had lost while trapped under her exhausted body.
    She was halfway through her belated breakfast when the dream surfaced again in her mind. Although she knew the spacecraft’s operational characteristics almost as well as she knew the operating characteristics of her own body, it did seem strange to her that in the dream the scruff came when she was looking away from the Sun, not toward it.
    She thought about it for awhile, then went to her bookshelf and got down the roll she had been working on the previous night and an older one from several months ago. She unrolled a section from each of them on the floor, one above the other, and slid the old one back and forth until the slowly varying complex pattern caused by the orbital motion of the black holes was matched up on the two rolls. She then looked along both sheets and came to the noisy portions. They were different. First