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the great mirror and the tiny Phoenix ship, together like toys in one corner of the room, but the big thing
was the Crabber star itself as seen from PhoenixCorp. It wasn't dangerous Hypatia said. Hans had
dimmed it down, and anyway we were seeing only visible light, none of the wide-spectrum stuff that
would be pouring out of it in a minute. Even so, it was huge, two meters across and so bright we had to
squint to watch it.
I don't know much about stellar surfaces, but this particular star looked sick to me. Prominences stuck
out all over its perimeter, and ugly sunspots spotted its face. And then, abruptly, it began to happen. The
star seemed to shrink, as though Hans had zoomed back away from it. But that wasn't what was going
on. The star really was collapsing on itself, and it was doing it fast. ("That's the implosion," Hypatia
whispered.) While we watched, it went from two meters to a meter and a half, to a meter, to smaller
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still
And then it began to expand again, almost as fast as it had shrunk, and far more bright. Hypatia
whispered, "And that's the rebound. I've instructed Hans to cut back on the intensity. It's going to get
worse."
It did.
It blossomed bigger and brighter and angrier until it filled the room and, just as I was feeling as
though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the picture began to break up. I heard Terple
moan, "Look at the mirror!" Then I understood what was happening to our image. The little toy
PhoenixCorp ship and mirror in our viewers were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation
from the supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp craft were blazing bright themselves,
reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from the gravitational lensing. As I watched,
the mirror began to warp. The flimsy sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of
plasma, like blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh underneath
the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot
and glowing.
I thought we'd seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A moment later the image
of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn't anywhere near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright
as it had been before, but it was still something scary to look at. "What ?" I began to ask, but Hypatia
had anticipated me.
"We're looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, Klara," she explained.
"We're not getting shipside magnification from the mirror anymore. That's gone. I'm worried about that
camera, too. The gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last much "
She stopped, as the image disappeared for good. Simply winked out and was gone. " longer," she
finished, and, of course, it hadn't.
I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her eyes. Ibarruru and
Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. "That's
it," I said briskly. "The show's over."
Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. "Hans has all the data," he reported. "He's all right."
Terple had her hand up. "Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the dish burned pretty fast and
the hull's probably intact, so if we can get a repair crew out there "
"Right away," I promised. "Well, almost right away. First we go home."
I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the cheer was rapidly
fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. "Where's that?" he asked glumly.
I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said sympathetically, "You're missing
your kids, aren't you? Well, I've got a place where there are plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up
male on my island, you'll be the only dad they've got."
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XII
That blast from the supernova didn't destroy PhoenixCorp after all. The mirror was a total write-off, of
course, but the ship itself was only cooked a little.
So June Terple stooged around for a bit while it cooled down, then went back to check it out with what
was left of her crew. Which wasn't much. Mason-Manley talked his way back into her good graces once
Denys wasn't around anymore. Kekuskian promised to come out for the actual blow-up, eighty years
from now, provided he was still alive. And, of course, Terple still had the indestructible Hans, now back
in his own custom-designed datafan. The rest of her crew were all replacements. Starminder went back
to her family in the Core, and I paid Ibarruru's fare to go along with her as a kind of honorary Citizen
Ambassador.
Naturally, Terple invited me to join them for their stint at the neutron star. She couldn't really avoid it,
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