“I’m not sure if I can see it,” Wilson murmured quietly. “My inserts give me a perfect image in infrared. But when I cancel that, I think I can see it. If it’s there, it’s like a flat cloud of the darkest red ever. Maybe I’m just imagining it because I know that’s what it should look like. And it looks as if it’s just in front of my nose.”
“On this scale, it is,” she whispered back. “We’re not even a germ to a basketball.”
“Can you see it?”
“I don’t know.” Stupid though the action was, she leaned forward slightly, squinting. Her inserts were off now, and there might well have been some kind of ultradark vermilion haze out there in front of the nose, the kind of luminosity you got from a single candle lighting a cathedral. “It’s like a ghostlight.”
“Humm. I always thought I had quite good eyes. I’ll have to get them resequenced next time I go into rejuve.” He waved his hand in front of his face to see if that made any difference, if he could see the outline of his fingers against the obscure emission. There was too much secondary lighting in the observation gallery to be certain. “Whether I can see it or not, I can certainly feel it. The damn thing’s spooky, like something lurking just outside your thoughts.”
She curled her arm around his. “Come on, it’s been a long day. Time you got some rest.”
He grinned. His teeth were just visible in the gloaming. “I’m too tired and strung out to argue.” He allowed himself to be led toward the door.
“Strung out? You?”
“Yeah. We spent a year getting this ship built. I spent three hundred years waiting for something this important to happen to me again. I wanted something there when we came out of hyperdrive, something positive that I could see and understand. When we set down on Mars, there was all this alien geology surrounding me. It was strange, and even beautiful after a fashion, and nobody really knew anything about it. But you could break open a rock with a hammer, and see the minerals and strata inside. We had a knowledge base that could take that information and pin down what kind of rock it was, what event produced it. It was all in my head, information I could apply.”
They were alone in the corridor, so she stood on her toes and kissed him. “You poor old thing.”
Wilson smiled, sheepish now. “Yeah well, I guess I’m just intimidated, that’s all. The size of this fucker is mind-warping. I really shouldn’t let it get to me.”
“I know, whacking this with a hammer isn’t going to help.”
“No.” He kissed her back. “I bet it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, though.”
Five days later, Wilson allowed the Second Chance to move up to fifty thousand kilometers above the barrier. They used the plasma rockets, accelerating in at a fiftieth of a gee, then stopped and flipped over to decelerate. The physicists were very keen to see what would happen when the exhaust sprayed against the surface. The simple answer was nothing. Satellites hovering centimeters above the barrier observed the residue of gas and energized particles strike the surface and rebound. There was no heat or momentum transfer. No effect. Gigabytes flowed back up the microwave links between satellites and starship, expanding the already vast database on the barrier. A huge quantity of sensor log files were stored in the RI array, almost all of them containing negative information. Every member of the science crew could tell Wilson what it wasn’t; they could explain its properties at great length. What nobody could tell him was how it was generated, nor from where. And they certainly didn’t know why it existed.
But then, he told Anna charitably one night, they had only been there for five days. He shouldn’t expect miracles.
The starship hung above the stubborn barrier for another eight days, picking at it with various beams of radiation, like a small child with an intriguing scab, eager to see what lay beneath. Their wormhole generator distorted spacetime in many convoluted perturbations, the wave function of each one bouncing off the near-invisible surface without any significant resonance pattern. During that time, their only major discovery was the planets inside the barrier. Tunde confirmed that gravitational readings showed two gas giants and three small solid planets were orbiting the star, with indications of several large asteroids. It livened up the daily department heads meeting when he told them that one of the solid worlds was within the life band, the distance from the star that would allow carbon-based life to evolve should the planetary conditions be favorable, such as the availability of water and a decent atmospheric pressure.
