Dragon's Egg - Robert L. Forward's first novel. Life on a Neutron Star: the surface gravity is an incredible 67 billion times that of Earth, with matter so compresed that the mass of a normal star is packed into a crusted sphere only 20 kilometers in diameter. A magnetic field 2 trillion times that of Earth distorts the nuclei in the crust, and our normal chemical reactions are replaced by neutron reactions. Men could never live on such a star; only by the most advanced technology can humans exist in synchronous orbit to observe it. Yet on that impossible world, men detect intelligent life - the Cheela, who live so fast that one of our hours is the equivalent to them of more than 100 years of human life.