Jag was barking in a staccato pattern — Waldahud laughter.
'Your imagination is unbridled, Lansing. Oh, there has been some theoretical work on controlled nova reactions — I've been exploring that area a bit myself — but there's no shield we could build that would protect the baby from a star going nova only forty million kilometers away.'
Keith was not to be deterred. 'Okay, try this: Suppose we force the new star back through the shortcut. When it passes through the shortcut, its gravitational pull will disappear, and the baby goes free.'
'The star is moving away from the shortcut, not toward it,' said Jag. 'We cannot move the shortcut at all, and if we had the power to turn a star around, we would also have the power to skim a Jupiter-sized object out of a close orbit around the star. But we don't.' Jag looked around the room. 'Any more bright ideas?'
'Yes,' said Keith, after a moment. He looked directly at Jag. 'Yes, indeed!'
When Keith had finished talking, Jag's mouth hung open for a few moments, showing the two curving blue-white translucent dental plates within. Finally, he barked in a subdued fashion. 'I — I know I said such things were possible, but it has never been tried on anything approaching this scale.'
Keith nodded. 'Understood. But unless you have a better suggestion—'
'Well,' said Jag's Brooklynite voice, 'we could leave the darmat baby in orbit around the star. Assuming it is still alive, once we put the parasol sun-shield in place, it could, in theory, live out the rest of its natural life — however long that is in close orbit around that star.
But if your plan does not work, the darmat child will be killed.' Jag's voice became quieter. 'I know, Lansing, that I am the one always looking for glory — and, since my role in what you propose is pivotal, I have no doubt that considerable glory would accrue to me were we able to pull this off. But it really is not our decision to make. Ordinarily, I'd say ask the — the patient — for permission before attempting something as risky as this, but that is not possible in this case, because of the radio noise. And so I suggest we do what both your race and mine would do in such circumstances: we should ask the next of kin.'
Keith thought about that, then began to nod slowly.
'You're right, of course. I keep seeing the macro-issue, that if we pull this off, it'll be great for our relationships with the darmats. Damn, sometimes I'm pretty pigheaded.'
'That is all right,' said Jag lightly, choosing not to take offense at Keith's unfortunate choice of words. 'Rumor has it that you are going to have a very long time to acquire more wisdom.'
Keith spoke into the mike. 'Starplex to Cat's Eye. Starplex to Cat's Eye.'
The incongruous French accent; Keith half expected the thing to say bonjour. 'Hello, Starplex. It is wrong to ask, but…'
Keith smiled. 'Yes, we have news of your child. We have located it. But it is in close orbit around a blue star. It is unable to get away under its own power.'
'Bad,' said Cat's Eye. 'Bad.'
Keith nodded. 'But we have a plan that may — I repeat, may — allow us to rescue the child.'
'Good,' said Cat's eye.
'The plan involves much risk.'
'Quantify.'
Keith looked at Jag, who lifted all four shoulders. 'I can't,' said the human. 'We've never done anything like this on this scale before. Indeed, I only recently learned that it was theoretically possible. It may work, or it may not — and I have no way of knowing the likelihood of either outcome.'
'Better idea available?'
'No. No, in fact, this is our only idea.'
'Describe plan.'
Keith did so, at least as much as the limited vocabulary they had established allowed.
'Difficult,' said Cat's Eye.
'Yes.' There was a long period of silence on the frequency used by Cat's Eye, but lots of traffic on the other channels — the darmat community discussing its options.
At last, Cat's Eye spoke again. 'Try, but… but… two hundred and eighteen minus one is much less than two hundred and seventeen.'
Keith swallowed. 'I know.'
The PDQ (containing the cetacean physicist Melondent) and the Rum Runner (with Jag and Longbottle aboard) headed through the shortcut to the sector containing the darmat baby. Working in tandem, the two ships deployed the molecule-thick parasol. Reaction motors were mounted on the parasol's frame, firing away from the blue star to keep the solar wind from blowing it away. Once the baby was in the shade, its nearside surface temperature began to drop rapidly.
Next, 112 hastily constructed buoys, each consisting of a hollowed-out watson casing with special equipment mounted inside, were popped through the shortcut from Starplex. The two probeships used their tractor beams to array them in interlocking orbits around the baby.
On one of his tall, thin monitor screens aboard the Rum Runner, Jag displayed a hyperspatial map showing the steep local gravity well with the star at the bottom. The sides of the well were almost perpendicular this close to the star; they only began to flare out just before the orbiting darmat was encountered. The baby made a second, smaller well of its own.
Once the buoys were in place, the PDQ headed off, moving past the shortcut without going through it, and continuing on for half a day.
Finally, they were all lined up in a neat row. At one end was the Rum Runner. Next to it was the darmat baby. Forty million kilometers beyond the baby was the fiery blue star. Three hundred million kilometers farther on was the shortcut, and a billion kilometers beyond that was the PDQ — Melondent was now a total of seventy-two light-minutes from the star, far enough away that her local space was now reasonably flat.
'Ready?' barked Jag to Longbottle, in the Rum Runner's piloting tank.
'Ready,' the dolphin barked back in Waldahudar.
Jag touched a control, and the lattice of buoys surrounding the darmat baby sprang to life. Each buoy contained an artificial-gravity generator, powered by solar energy stolen from the very star they were trying to fight. Slowly, in unison, the buoys increased their output, and just as slowly, a flattening pocket began to develop in one wall of the star's steep gravity well.
'Gently,' said Jag, under his breath, watching his hyperspace map. 'Gently.'
The pocket continued to grow more and more flat. Great care had to be taken not to flatten out the darmat's own gravity well: if the effects of the baby's own mass were suppressed — which, after all, was what was holding it together — it would lose cohesion, and expand like a balloon.
The buoys' output continued to grow and the curvature of spacetime continued to diminish, until, until — Flatness, like a plateau jutting from the side of the well.
It was as if the darmat were in interstellar space, not spitting distance from a star.
'Isolation complete,' said Jag. 'Now let's get it out of there.'
'Activating hyperdrives,' said Longbottle.
The antigrav buoys made up points on a sphere around the baby, but now, as their individual hyperspace field generators came on, that whole sphere seemed to mirror over, as if it were a glob of mercury floating freely in space.
In a matter of seconds, the glob shrank to nothingness and disappeared.
The buoys were preprogrammed to move the darmat baby away from the blue star as fast as possible. The PDQ was waiting near the point at which the darmat should emerge from hyperspace, far enough from the star that the hyperdrive field should collapse without difficulty.
The Rum Runner set out for the same location, traveling under thruster power. As they passed near the shortcut point, a radio message from Melondent came through, blueshifted because of the Rum Runner's acceleration toward her ship.
'PDQ to Longbottle and Jag. Arrived has darmat baby; popped into normal space it did right in front of my eyes. Hyperdrive field collapse uneventful was. But baby shows still no signs of life, and responds does not to my hails.'
Jag's fur moved pensively. No one had known for sure whether the baby would survive unprotected during its brief journey through hyperspace.
