Stearn stepped carefully through the portal into Fisher's cabin. He hadn't been inside the place in something like a year and just being there still felt taboo even though he had been invited. Sylvia didn't look any more comfortable than he felt. Stearn kept his eyes moving and had the sensation of being in one of those games where the zombie-monsters are lurking around every corner. At least he'd turned the flames way down so they were just like funky, warm ruglings.



"I apologize for my tardiness. I had things to attend to," Fisher said.



Stearn grinned despite his uneasiness. He knew at least some of the things.



"You said you'd updated your model and that we needed it," Sylvia said. "You work fast."



Fisher smiled, but it looked forced. "As fast as I can. Really, I got lucky that some of my previous guesses were close to right. Then it was a relatively simple matter of making adjustments based on the new data."



Lucky, yeah. This guy was funny after all.



"Well, let's see it," Sylvia said.



"Very well," Fisher said, then gave Papa a simulation number to access. The flames rose up in the middle of the room with a twisting star dragon moving among them.



Stearn realized then what he should have realized a long time ago. Fisher had really just turned his cabin into a giant picture tank and the flames were in all likelihood not real at all. They were virtual, with a little help from some heaters and scent-dispensers. The guy was sneaky. He liked that.



The three waded hip-deep through the roiling disk to the dragon. This was really cool. The projected dragon was three-dimensional and visible in fine detail. No where was the surface of the creature smooth -- there were tiny ridges and curves and twists covering every segment, easily seen despite the shifting glowing hue. Stearn squinted, seeing detail on even smaller scales. Neat! And it reminded him of something.



"All right then," Fisher said. "Welcome to Star Dragon Anatomy 101."



Oh please, thought Stearn, not a boring lecture!



"Just hit the highlights," Sylvia said. "We need to get to work on strategy development as fast as possible."



He really loved that woman.



Fisher nodded and the started pointing to the various dragon features as he described them. "This model is specific now to the dragon we have been tracking. You can see the ball at the end of its tail. The rest of the animal appears consistent with the range of properties we saw during the swarm. First, the head and the eyes. The multi-facets probably are involved in providing an extended wavelength range to high energies -- extreme ultraviolet and even X-rays. Three eyes makes a lot of sense in this environment. We have two eyes and mostly respond to events in a plane before us. We have to look up or look down. The dragon can keep an eye on the sky and much of the bowl of the disk which is probably handy for spotting a developing outburst."



"I'm not getting a mind-mod to have trinocular vision," Sylvia said. "Other wavelengths can be easily handled by stretching a color palette, but I'll still need to look up and look down."



Stearn said, "I got that covered. There's a video game interface for a space-based shooter in zero-gee that does it really well."



"Fine then. We'll steal that."



Fisher went on. "The eyes are probably not the most important sensory apparatus on the head. The assortment of whiskers around the mouth can be used to broadcast and receive radio waves at a variety of frequencies. In conjunction with the surface circulatory system they should also be good at seeing the electro-magnetic fields in the area."



"Figured as much," Sylvia said. "How about movement?"



"The twists let it slide along the field lines, and the clever twists -- see there," Fisher pointed as the model did a reverse twist in the middle of its long body," initiate shifts to other field lines. There's a surface circulatory system that moves charge around to facilitate movements. Think about it like a complex integrated electronic circuit with strategically placed capacitors and inductors, transformers, rectifiers, and both AC and DC regions. The charge can be circulated to produce an impressively strong magnetic field of the dragon's own that can actively shield it from particle storms, just like the van Allen belts around the Earth. They probably use it during outbursts and if we could see them at all against the disk they'd look like ball lightning with shimmering auroras."



"You haven't gotten to the best part yet," Stearn said.



"Oh yes, the rocketing." Fisher shrugged. "This one can't, not with the ball on the end. I've checked the fields."



Stearn said, "Strip it off, show us anyway."



"Sure." He issued some commands to Papa. The ball vanished and the dragon began to coil. "See how the segments stack up in this new plane? The asymmetric pieces and their asymmetric surfaces match up just right. Plasma directed into these new super coils can be tightly confined and fusion can be induced. The plasma in the interior cavity can then be heated and expelled for propulsion."



The dragon rocketed above the disk.



"I knew it," said Stearn. "It looks just like our magnetic fusion reactors which tossed out symmetry centuries ago. They're only locally quasi-symmetric and confine plasma along a distorted helix and thus reducing collisional diffusion effects. The particle trajectories remain close to magnetic surfaces as long as there is one ignorable coordinate, which does not require circular symmetry if you think about it, and an approximate helical symmetry is plenty to do the job. Got to have the structures perfectly shaped though, on millimeter scales."



Stearn realized that both Fisher and Sylvia were staring at him. Sylvia's mouth even hung open. "What?" he asked. "Fusion confinement has such weird-looking solutions of course I'm an expert on them!"



"Of course you are," Fisher said. "Well, the other essential item you must incorporate into your simulation is heating-cooling balance. That places a lot of constraints on the observed behavior. The laser action appears to be as automatic as sweating: heating charges capacitors which pump the populations as certain voltages are reached. I haven't figured out all the materials. Okay, hardly any of the materials, but the global conservation laws must be met."



"That will have to be good enough for us," said Sylvia. "Papa, can you hook this model into the simulation we're building? The model with the ball on its tail?"



"Absolutely," Papa said.



"There's more," said Fisher.



"Anything that will affect perceptions that you're confident about?"



"Not if you put it that way."



Stearn kept watching the rocketing dragon. It was very cool to watch. He was a little disappointed that the fusion power seemed to be the same that they'd developed. It did occur to him that the solutions were very difficult to find and required very powerful numerical techniques. How could nature have found them? This wasn't the kind of thing you stumbled over even with a Hubble time worth of chimpanzees typing on keyboards.



"Come on, Phil," Sylvia said. "Time to hunt me down like a dragon."