When he was a boy, Wilson had enjoyed swimming. His parents had a small pool in their yard, and he’d used it every day. That didn’t stop him from continually nagging his parents to take him to the larger pool at the county sports center. He’d been nine on the day of that visit, he and a whole group of friends ferried out there by some harassed mother. With his skill and confidence he’d not been intimidated by the size or depth of the big pool, and was soon leading the others through the water. When he was in the deep end he dived to the bottom, sure he could touch the tiles. He made it easily enough, his strong strokes hauling him down away from the surface, popping his ears against the pressure twice on the way down before slapping his fingertips on the smooth blue tiles. Sound from the rest of the pool was curiously muted so far below, the thrashing feet above, dull, like the filtered blue light. Pressure squeezed him gently. So he started to swim up. And only then did he realize his mistake. He’d taken enough breath to get him down, but now his lungs were burning. Muscles twitched as the need to suck down fresh air swelled desperately. He began to claw frantically at the water, which did nothing to increase his terrible slow speed. The need for air became overwhelming. And his chest began to expand, lungs working to pull in that sweet oxygen. Wilson felt the water sliding up his nostrils like some unstoppable burrowing creature. Right that second he knew if it got any farther he would drown. It was enough to send his body into a frenzy, kicking and struggling. At the same time he found the discipline to stop his lungs from trying to inhale. Somehow he managed to break the surface without the water spilling any farther inside him. Only then did he suck down a huge breath of beautiful clean air, almost sobbing as the shock of what’d happened struck him. For a long time he’d clung to the side of the pool as big shivers ran up and down his body. Finally, he regained enough control to swim back out to his friends.
Even during his air force combat flights he’d never felt so scared as that whimpering child striking out for the side of the pool. Nothing had ever come close to re-creating that feeling. Until now. Now that same clammy sickness was gripping him just like it had his nine-year-old self as the reality sank in of how far away from anything they were. He started his ancient deep-breathing exercise routine, trying to calm his body before the shakes started.
“Modules disengaging,” Anna announced.
“Right, thank you,” Wilson replied a little too abruptly. His virtual hand stopped flicking through the camera sequence, and he concentrated hard on the images of the sensor modules. Something to do, something to shift his mind off the nothingness of outside. He felt his heart rate slow as he forced his breathing to a regular rhythm, though there was nothing he could do about the cold perspiration on his forehead. A text-only message popped up into his virtual vision, it was from Anna and read: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
FINE, he sent back. He didn’t look in her direction. Everyone else on the bridge seemed to be absorbed by their work, unaffected by what lay outside. He was the only one interstellar space was intimidating. That piqued him somewhat—enough to make him focus properly on his job.
The screen on his console showed him the forward section of the Second Chance. Doors on eight cylindrical bays had opened up, spaced equidistantly just behind the bow’s large sensor cluster. Modules like big metallized insects sprouting golden antennae were drifting out, glittering in the lights around the rim of each bay. Ion thrusters flared blue on the base of each one, pushing them away from the starship.
They traveled in an expanding circle, linked by laser and microwave, taking hours to reach their stand-off station. When they were fifty thousand kilometers out, their ion thrusters burned again, bringing them to a halt. As one, their dark protective segments peeled open, exposing delicate sensor instruments to the interstellar medium. Disks, blocks, booms, and lenses uncoiled on the end of electromuscle tentacles and began scanning space around Dyson Alpha. The big arrays back on the Second Chance correlated the results, combining them into a single image with extraordinarily high resolution in every spectrum.
For everyone waiting eagerly on board, the result was a big disappointment. Virtually no new information about the barrier was revealed. Its diameter was confirmed at twenty-nine point seven AUs. There was a moment of prayerlike silence on the bridge as that fact was absorbed. The surface was emitting in a very low infrared wavelength. Local particle density was slightly lower than average, indicating that solar wind emission from Dyson A and B was blocked. Nothing else could be detected.
