 Over the course of generations , the cheela come to worship the humans ' spacecraft as a god , and their records of its satellites ' movements cause them to develop writing . Several generations later , the cheela build an arena to accommodate thousands of worshippers . The humans notice this novel and very regular feature , conclude that intelligent beings inhabit the star , and use a laser to send simple messages . Cheela astronomers gradually realize that these are diagrams of the spaceships , its satellites and its crew – impossibly spindly creatures , who communicate with frustrating slowness , and are apparently almost 10 % as long as the cheela 's great arena . A cheela engineer proposes to send messages to the humans . As her attempts to transmit from the civilization 's territory are ineffective , she travels to a mountain range to transmit directly under the spacecraft – conquering the fear of heights that is instinctive for flattened creatures living in 67 billion g . The humans recognize her message and realize that the cheela live a million times faster than humans . 
