Dragon's Egg Read Online Free PDF Page B

so much that the low frequency radio digitalization will blank out if we ask it to keep operating at its highest rate.”
    “How fast can it operate?” Jacqueline asked.
    “Well,” Donald said as he looked through the table, “it was minimum-voltage designed for an upper rate of eight times a second, and we have it pushed all the way to sixteen times per second. With the low voltage on the bus, we ought to come back to either eight or four times per second.”
    “Leave it sixteen times a second,” said Jacqueline firmly. “No data is preferable to poor data.”
    Donald looked at her with a slightly bewildered expression as if he were seeing past her pretty face for the first time. He started to protest, but decided against it and made the short change in the command sequence as she wanted it.
    Slowly the command was assembled. Jacqueline and Donald worked on it periodically during the day when Donald was charging to Sawlinski’s account. They also talked about it over lunch and in the evenings, when Sawlinski’s budget received an extra dividend of Donald’s time.
TIME: SATURDAY 2 MAY 2020
    Donald lay back on the grass of the recently mowed lawn of the Griffith Park Observatory. It was Saturday and a pleasant evening lay before him. First, a visit to the early show at the planetarium where he would see the highly touted Holorama show. Then an evening under the stars at the Greek Theater down the hill to listen to the Star Crushers, the latest sensation in popular music. And, to go with it all, a fascinating and beautiful, but perplexing, girl.
    The Sun had set and Donald’s mind wandered up into the lightly star-sprinkled sky as it had been doing ever since he was a little child and he and his father would go out into the back yard in the evening to look at the stars. Occasionally they would both be rewarded by the quick slash of a meteor or the slow progression of a satellite. Donald knew that since those days, his life had been fixed. He wanted to go to the stars!
    Unfortunately, mankind’s reach for the stars had faltered as Donald came of age, but his persistence had garnered him one of the few jobs left in the field. Although it now looked as if he would never get off theEarth himself, he was out there in proxy in the spacecraft that he tended.
    Jacqueline took another sip of wine and watched Donald’s eyes as they peered into the darkening skies. They were as vacant as the deep space they were contemplating.
    “Next time he will make the picnic supper and I will bring the wine,” she said to herself as she thoughtfully slid the sip of wine back over her tongue. “These California vintages are good, but he has a lot to learn if he thinks this is better than a good French wine.”
    Jacqueline knew Donald well enough to realize where his mind was. “Which one are you looking at?” she asked, knowing that he knew the position in the sky of every one of the six deep-space spacecraft that he was responsible for monitoring.
    “Not one of mine,” he replied, “but the first one to leave the Solar System—the Pioneer X. It went out between Taurus and Orion. It must be at 10,000 AU by now. I was imagining that I was out there, no longer able to communicate with Earth, pushing on alone, buffeted by micrometeors and the interstellar wind, getting more and more tired but pressing onward and outward …”
    Jacqueline’s tinkling laugh brought him back to Earth. He rolled over and glowered somewhat shamefacedly at her.
    “Don’t be mad,” she said. “You and I must be more alike than we realize, for I too sometimes dream that I am a spacecraft.”
    She told him of her strange dream, and then they both talked about the well-known phenomenon of graduate students living, eating, and even dreaming their thesis problems.
    “Your subconscious was probably trying to tell you something,” he said.
    “I know,” she replied, “and I take that dream almostas seriously as I do the results of my calculations, or