Teri said, “Councilor, we have an explanation.” Her glance at Torran said, Equal credit for this, all right? “Here is what we have learned. . . . ”
The No Regrets stood at a fixed location, five kilometers off center in a spherical region of radius nineteen kilometers. The space was bounded by a wall of unknown composition, impervious to external radiation and reflecting anything directed to it from inside.
“But we shouldn’t try to take the ship to either the nearest part of the boundary, or the farthest.” Teri was leaning over Torran Veck’s shoulder as he sat at the controls of the No Regrets. “Our best hope is one of the poles.”
It was their shorthand description for the only two points of asymmetry they had discovered in the spherical space. The “poles” were places where the return laser signal was much weaker than elsewhere, and they held out hope for an easier passage to external space.
“I have a vector to the nearer one,” Teri went on. “The distance is 12.3 kilometers.”
“Marked, and entered into the navigation system.” Torran was far more cheerful when he could do something that involved physical activity. “We can be on our way any time. All right to go ahead?”
“Proceed.” Julian Graves sat with his eyes closed and seemed half asleep. “I am sure that it is not necessary to remind you to proceed with extreme caution. We cannot afford to progress from a safe situation to a hazardous one.”
It seemed to Teri that Julian Graves was playing a little fast and loose with words. This was a safe place, where you had no idea how you had arrived and or where you were, and a surprise could pop up to destroy the present calm at any moment?
Teri couldn’t speak for the others, but she wanted out—out to a place where you could see stars and planets again, even if the one seemed ready to go supernova, and the other might be a world where nothing had ever lived or ever could.
“We’re closing in,” Torran said. Even crawling along, twelve kilometers for any form of spacegoing vessel was no distance at all. “We are six hundred meters away from the boundary. The drive is working harder to keep us in place, which means that a stronger attractive force is drawing us toward the wall. Nothing to worry about—we could stand a pull a thousand times as hard and still have spare drive capacity to keep us balanced. But there’s no way of knowing how things will change as we approach closer to the boundary. Our instruments have monitored our progress so far, and the ship’s computer did a fit and came up with an inverse cubic relationship with distance. That can’t go on—it implies an infinite force at the boundary—but what we have isn’t enough to worry about. Even so, I’m not sure we ought to approach any closer.”
That degree of caution from Torran was unusual. Teri leaned over him as he sat at the controls. “What’s the problem?”
“The boundary point that we are approaching is nothing like you found in other places with your laser probes. There, everything was smooth and reflected light evenly in all directions. Take a look for yourself at what’s happening at the pole. I have a broad beam laser illuminating the area straight ahead of us. See how the wall looks? It’s all broken and granular. Not only that, there are big changes from moment to moment in the Doppler return. Unless some physical effect is going on different from anything that we know, some parts of the boundary are approaching fast, while others retreat—and they alternate, in a random manner. I don’t know of any type of force field that could produce those effects.”
Torran turned to Julian Graves. “Councilor, I have halted our forward progress. I think that the ship ought to remain at its present distance from the pole. However, with your permission, I would like to go outside in a suit and investigate what lies ahead.”
Two days ago Teri would have resented that suggestion. Torran was seeking a star role and pushing her into the background. It didn’t feel like that anymore. Nothing specific had happened to make it so, but now she and Torran were a team who would share risks and rewards. Except that she would not in this case be sharing the risk—that would all be Torran’s.
She didn’t intend to argue the point directly. Talk of risk, or of sharing risks, might make safety-conscious Julian Graves veto the whole idea. She waited in silence, until finally the councilor nodded.
“Very well. You may go outside and investigate. But nothing foolhardy. If you find something inexplicable, turn around and come back.”
Good advice from Julian Graves, but if Teri understood Torran at all—and she was learning hour by hour what made the man tick—he would not follow it. The job of a survival expert was to take risks, rather than exposing the whole party to them. Teri knew what she would do in Torran’s circumstances, and the thought was a bit scary.
Teri also needed an answer to a question that might arise in another set of circumstances: What would she do if, while Torran was outside, he did get into serious difficulties?
“Nothing unusual at the moment.” Torran’s voice came on cue, exactly as if he had heard her inner thoughts and was reassuring her. He had not wasted a moment after Julian Graves’s go-ahead. Already he was leaving the No Regrets. “I’m checking the drive setting I need from my suit to compensate for the body force I’m feeling from the boundary. It is exactly the same as the ship is experiencing. I’m going to take myself a little closer to the wall.”
Teri and Julian Graves watched the suited figure slowly diminish in size. Was it Teri’s imagination, or did the outline of Torran’s suit seem a little blurred, as though it was out of focus? She blinked, but the slight fuzziness remained.
“Torran, we’re getting an odd optical effect here. Your image shows indistinct edges.”
“I know. I can’t feel it, but my suit sensors insist that I am experiencing a small high-frequency oscillating acceleration. The strange thing is, it’s not in the direction of the boundary—it’s at right angles to that.”
“Torran Veck, do not place yourself at any increased risk.”
“I won’t, Councilor. I’m a survival specialist, and I’m as keen to survive as anyone. I now show a distance from the boundary of two hundred and seventy meters. The total body forces on me suggest that I can go to less than a third of that, and still accelerate safely back to the No Regrets. I’ll take it slow.”
Torran’s figure in its protective suit began to shrink in size. Teri found that she could no longer make out details. Arms, legs, trunk, and head had changed from clear black outlines to gray blurs.
“Torran, we can’t see you clearly any more.”
“I believe it. There are differential accelerations on different parts of my suit, and now I can actually feel them. There’s a high-frequency torque, as though parts of me are being twisted in different directions. The overall body force is quite tolerable. I can go a good deal closer with no danger.”
Teri thought, how can he know that, when we are in a situation that no human has ever experienced before? Julian Graves said, “That’s far enough. Torran, come back. We need to do an evaluation of what you have found so far. You can always go out again when we are finished.”
“Sure.” But that single word wasn’t quite right when it came to Teri’s ears. It was distorted, as though sounds, like images, were suffering interference on their way to the No Regrets. She heard one more drawn-out and garbled word—"Da-a-amn-a-a-ation!” Then Torran’s blurred figure pinwheeled as though spinning fast around a central axis. At the same time it shrank in size.