At The Pulsar

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXXVII. Chinook's fourth jump via T machine is to a pulsar. I comprehensively summarized the concentrated information here. What might we add? Quite a lot.

Joelle the holothete directly senses:

forces;
energies;
free atoms;
free ions;
sub-nuclear particles;
the pulse - a narrow, sweeping, radiant beam.

She makes and corrects mistakes like someone subjected to optical illusions. The pulsar/neutron star had been a supernova in the dinosaur age. Now it is two thirds the mass of Sol but with a diameter of twenty kilometers. It contains a few atoms but is mostly elementary particles compressed as far as quantum mechanics allows. The particles interchange natures. The spin generates an enormous magnetic field that casts out two spirals of stellar material at near light speed. This matter emits thin beams of mostly invisible synchrotron radiation, hence the pulse. Both the star itself and infalling gas generate lethal radiation but a curved shell as dense as the T machine shields both the machine and arriving spacecraft.

A Star Trek film poster said, "The adventure continues..." What I say is that the adventure is only beginning.