"Hi, Billy. I hope you have a few new ideas."
"Nope. Not right now. I've been busier than the devil for the past seventy hours."
"So've we, on the last seventeen suggestions. We ran out of ideas when you ran into Terra. Now what?"
Billy grinned. "I'd like to see the quake area."
Hendricks blinked, blanched briefly, and then smiled wanly. "I thought so. Nothing to see, though. We do have a slow-action movie of the debacle. Reminds me of something out of a superthriller, shot in miniature. We had the sphere beam set up in duplex, one taking power out of the star, supplying the other beam which was clutching about five thousand miles of the star's core. The projectors were anchored to the crust of Brimstone, here, and we started pulling. We pulled like a dentist working on an impacted wisdom tooth. Unlike the dentist, the tooth stayed. We broke several beams, each one doing a bit of crust-cracking when the pressure let up. Then we took a big bite and heaved for all we were worth. A slab of crust about seven miles square heaved up, tilted like a poorly-trimmed raft in a heavy sea, and slid sidewise into the semi-plastic inner core of Brimstone."
"I'll bet it was bad, huh?"
"We all got away. The planet heaved and gurgled for a week before it settled down. But Brimstone is less strained than Terra and aside from a few scattered quakes now and then, she's quiet. Made a mess of that district, though. Horrible roaring, clouds of boiling steam, and all the trimmings out of a 'Birth of Terra' animated moving picture."
"Try it with an anchor set in the planet's core?"
"Yeah, but that's too much like anchoring a towline in a cup of custard. Too plastic. We might do it if stars weren't so confounded far apart. Beams get awfully thin on that projection even if we could make it, which I doubt."