And if something went wrong? Rebka couldn’t think what it might be. At worst, they would lose one spacesuit, plus E.C. Tally’s current body. That would be unfortunate, but Tally’s brain had been re-embodied once before. If necessary, it could be returned to Miranda and embodied again.
Rebka took a deep breath. Time to begin. Where was Tally? He had been outside for a long time.
As though he had been summoned, Tally in his spacesuit came floating in through the hatch, cable reeling in ahead of him. He watched as Rebka brought the cabin back to normal air pressure. Both of them opened their helmets and Rebka began to strip off his suit.
“Before you remove your suit completely,” E.C. Tally raised a gloved hand, “I want to be sure that I understand the reason for the procedure that you propose to follow.”
Hans couldn’t believe his ears. They had just reviewed the whole thing. In detail.
Was it possible — he had a sudden awful suspicion — was it possible that E.C. Tally had done what he had just been repeatedly warned not to do, and entered the Lotus field?
“Did you go into Paradox while you were outside?”
“A little way, yes.”
“Against my strict instructions!”
“No.” Tally was unabashed.
“Yes it was. You dummy, I told you not to go into Paradox.”
“No. You told me not to get into trouble with the Lotus field. And I did not.” Tally came floating forward, and hovered in front of Rebka. “I want to understand the reason for the procedure that we will follow, because it may be irrelevant. Perhaps you and I have had a basic misunderstanding. Are you sure that the artifact waiting outside the hatch is indeed the one known as Paradox?”
“Of course it’s Paradox. You watched me fly us here. Have you gone crazy?”
“I am not sure.” Tally put down the recorder that he was holding. “Maybe we both have. But I am quite sure of one thing. The object alongside which this ship is floating, whatever it is, does not possess a Lotus field at its surface.”
They went outside in their suits. Hans Rebka was hair-trigger nervous, ready to accuse Tally of every kind of irresponsible behavior, until the embodied computer explained.
“The electromagnetic field readings of the recorder appeared too low. And they decreased, as I came closer to the surface of Paradox.” He was holding the little recorder in one gloved hand. “I wondered if the decrease would continue, beyond the surface of Paradox. It would be easy enough to check. All I had to do was use my suit’s extensor to place the recorder within the visible surface. So.”
Tally attached the recorder to the extensible grip in the suit’s forearm, and began to reach out toward the shimmering wall of Paradox.
“Wait!” Rebka grabbed at the extensor. “The recorder has its own computer and internal programs. The Lotus field will wipe everything — you’ll ruin the recorder.”
“I realized that, when the idea first came to me. However, I decided that I would easily be able to restore the recorder memory; use of the recorder as a probe could tell us exactly how far within Paradox the Lotus field began. I therefore continued with the experiment.” The extensible arm carried the recorder forward, until it met the chromatic swirl of Paradox’s surface. It vanished beyond. “I tried this several times, increasing the degree of extension and then bringing the recorder back to examine it, until the arm was at its maximum stretch of fifteen meters. As it is now.”
Tally floated with the gloved hand of his suit just half a meter away from the rainbow wall of shifting soap-bubble colors.
“And I brought it back.”
The little motor in the extensor unit hummed, and the recorder re-emerged from beyond the shining boundary. E.C. Tally turned, so that Hans Rebka could see the face of the recorder. Numbers glowed on its display.
“Ambient field values.” Tally touched another key. “Exactly consistent with the values obtained before the recorder went inside Paradox. The recorder programs should have been erased beyond the Paradox surface. But it appears to be working perfectly.”
“So the Lotus field does not take effect within fifteen meters of the surface. It’s deeper.”
That was not consistent with the earlier data that Hans had memorized. Also, E.C. Tally was shaking his head. “I had that thought. I therefore considered another test. The recorder results suggested that I could proceed up to fifteen meters into Paradox, without encountering a Lotus field. Even if such a field proved to be present, I could detect the onset of loss of data within myself and return safely. I therefore moved twelve meters inside Paradox—”
“Crazy!”
“ — and found myself enveloped by rainbow colors. At that point I again used the extensor to advance the recorder another fifteen meters. And since it was not affected there by any sign of a Lotus field, I moved another dozen meters. Then another. Then another. Then another.”
“Tally. Get to the point. How far did you get?”
“Not far, in terms of the whole distance to the center of Paradox. I explored only a hundred and twenty-eight meters beyond the surface. However, there was no sign of a Lotus field. Also, I was able to do what I believe no other explorer of Paradox has ever done and returned to tell of it. I went beyond the rainbow wall. I could see all the way to the center of Paradox.”
The designers of E. Crimson Tally had put enormous effort into his construction. Since they were building an embodied computer, a complex inorganic brain operating within a human body, they wanted that computer to follow processes of logic that mimicked to a large extent the thought processes of a human.
Perhaps they had succeeded too well. Certainly, faced with the situation at the surface of Paradox, a totally logical entity would have had no trouble in deciding the procedure to be followed: Rebka and E.C. Tally should take their findings and return at once to Sentinel Gate. The artifact specialists there would evaluate them. They would recommend the next step of Paradox exploration.
Curiosity is an intensely human emotion. It was a measure of the success of E.C. Tally’s creators that he did not try to dissuade Hans Rebka from his actual decision. In fact, Tally egged him on. The only point of disagreement between them was on who would lead the way.
“I should certainly be the one.” Tally was searching his own and the ship’s data banks for a record of the tensile strength of a neural cable. It was not designed to support a large load, and its strength was not recorded as part of the standard specification. “I can readily detect the onset of a Lotus field, and return unscathed.”
“You have no experience at all in getting out of tough situations.”
“I fought the Zardalu.”
“Sure. And they pulled you to bits. You didn’t exactly get out of that situation — we had to carry you out in pieces, and get you a new body. So no argument. I go inside, you keep an eye on me. First sign of trouble, or if I stop talking, you haul me out.”
“What trouble can there be, other than the Lotus field? — with which I am better prepared to deal than you.”
“The fact that you even ask that means you shouldn’t be going in. Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble.” Rebka was looping the cable through a tether ring on his own suit, then attaching the end to his communications unit. He gave it an experimental tug. “There. That should do us nicely.”
“If you are unsure, and wish me to go in your place…”