have taken a few elementary science courses before he discovered that even a college degree couldn't get you a decent job, those days, in Shensi Province.
When Chou's ship came out of the faster-than-light drive, Chou had no trouble figuring out which objects the Heechee had set the controls for.
Actually there were three objects in view. They were weird. The first was wholly unlike anything Chou had ever seen before, even in the holograms of his astronomy course. It wasn't quite like anything any other human being had e'er seen before, either, except in imagination. The object was an irregular, cone-shaped splash of light, and even on the viewscreen its colors hurt his eyes.
What the thing looked like was a searchlight beam fanning out through patches of mist. When Chou looked more carefully, magnifying the image, he saw that there was another beam like it, sketchier and fainter and fanning out in the opposite direction. And between the two points of the cones formed by those beams, the third object was something almost too tiny to see.
When he put the magnification up to max, he saw that that something was a puny-looking, unhealthily colored little star.
It was much too small to be a normal star. That limited the possibilities; even so, it took Chou some time to realize that he was in the presence of a pulsar.
Then those Astronomy 101 lessons came back to him. It was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, back in the middle of the twentieth century, who had calculated the genesis of neutron stars. His model was simple. A large star, Chandrasekhar said, uses up its hydrogen fuel and then collapses. It throws off most of the outer sections of itself as a supernova. What is left falls in toward the star's center, at almost the speed of light, compressing most of the star's mass into a volume smaller than a planet-smaller, in fact, than some mountains. This particular sort of collapse can only happen to big stars, Chandrasekhar calculated. They had to be 1.4 times as massive as Earth's Sun, at least, and so that number was called Chandrasekhar's Limit.
