THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

Eventually Albumarak said despairingly to her new friends, “I don’t know how you stand the pressure!”

But they answered confidently, “We enjoy it! After all, is there a better cause we could be working for?”

And then, to their amazement, they realized she had never learned the means to make the most of dark-time, devised long before the Greatest Meteorite, which depended on freeing consciousness from attending to the process of digestion. With only the mildest of reproaches concerning Fregwil’s standards of education, they instructed her in the technique, and after that she no longer wondered how they crammed so much into a single day.

As Karg had predicted, casting a fresh eye on the loss-free circuits led to rapid improvement. Whiter was milder here than at Fregwil, but that alone did not account for the speed with which the tendrils grew, nor for the flawless way each and every one checked out. Quelf’s team had been resigned to losing two or three in every score; here, when one slacked in its growth, the cause was sought and found and in a few days’ time it was back to schedule.

Albumarak detected something of the same phenomenon in herself.

She was eating an unfamiliar diet, but her mind had never been so active. She mentioned as much to Theng once, when the latter was in a particularly good mood, and was told: “A few generations ago, the air at Slah was always filthy thanks to the metal-working sites nearby. That was at the time of Aglabec and his disciples—heard of them? I thought you would have! Rival cities like Hulgrapuk and Fregwil made the most of it, to disparage us! But we retained our wits well enough to realize it was no use sending crazy people into space, so we put that right, and now there’s not a city on the planet where you breathe purer air or drink cleaner water or eat a more nourishing diet. We’re allegedly possessed of intelligence; we judged it right to apply our conclusions to ourselves as well as our environment. And it’s paid off, hasn’t it?” Indeed it had…

At one stage Albumarak came near despair, when a simulation proved that nothing like enough sparkforce could be generated to drive even the smallest of the Slah cylinders to the heights achieved by gas-globes. There were no pullstones worth mentioning on this continent; the world’s only large deposit was on Prutaj. Suddenly someone she had never heard of reported that by adding this and this to the diet of a flashplant, and modifying it in such a way, its output could be multiplied until it matched the best pullstone generator. Someone else suggested means of deriving current from the wind; another, from compression using the beating of ocean waves; another, from conversion of sunshine…

Yull was in the habit of visiting the laboratory now and then, sometimes with Karg or Omber, more often alone. One day in spring she arrived with a grave expression, and asked Theng, in Albumarak’s hearing, what progress had been made.

“Good!” Theng declared gruffly. “Ewblet has stabilized the fuel at last, we have enough sparkforce and nearly enough loss-free circuitry to loft a driver to where it can be fired into orbit, and the eastern side of Spikemount slopes at pretty well an ideal angle to build the launcher. We expect to be at status go by fall.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Yull told her soberly.

Sensing disaster, Albumarak drew close.

“Take a look at these,” Yull invited, proffering a pack of images. They were regular astronomical pictures of the kind produced at any major observatory, and they showed a patch of night sky in the vicinity of the Major Cluster. Theng glanced at them and passed them to Albumarak.

“You’ll have to explain what’s so special about them!”

“This is!” Yull tapped one tiny dot with a delicate claw. “Look again. They were taken on successive nights.”

“It’s not on this one,” Albumarak muttered. “But it’s on this one, only fainter, and—no, not on this one, but on this one as well, and brighter if anything … Oh, no!”

“I think,” Yull murmured, “you’ve caught on. For nearly a moonlong past, something has been appearing and vanishing in that area of the sky. We have here a score of images that show it and a quarter-score that don’t. What is it?”

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