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.
"Torran! Can you hear me?" But Teri felt with sickening certainty that he could not. For there was no longer any sign at all of Torran Veck. In a final split second he had vanished at monstrous speed into the granular unknown of the boundary wall.
Teri was now obliged to operate one-on-one in her argument with Julian Graves. She wished Torran could be there to offer his support, but in a way it didn't matter. Whether she could persuade Julian Graves or not would make no difference. She knew what she had to do, and she would do it.
She said. "You have more experience with the Bose Network than I do. Have you ever heard of a case where someone made a transition, and was delivered to an end point from which there was no escape?"
"I have not. But ships have disappeared."
"If we sit here and do nothing, in the future the
No Regrets
will be listed as one of them. We have a choice. We can stay and wait for something to happen, with no assurance that anything ever will—other than that we will eventually die. Or we can accept that the boundary itself contains some kind of Bose transition mechanism, but of a type never experienced in the Orion Arm. Remember, Councilor, you were the one who said that the Sag Arm may be stranger than we can imagine. I think that our decision should be an easy one: we follow Torran, and take the
No Regrets
up to and through the boundary."
"That might offer nothing more than a swifter and surer form of our demise."
"It might. But it makes no sense at all for this to be a Bose node if there is no way to leave it. And the obvious method of departure would be through another Bose transition."
"You make a logical argument." The blue eyes of Julian Graves were old and knowing. "Suppose, my dear, I tell you that I do not agree with you. What then?" He waited for a moment, then added, "Do not agonize over how to present your answer. I know it already."
He gestured to the pilot's chair. "It awaits you. All I say is, proceed slowly. Normally I would say, slowly and cautiously, but in our case the second qualifier does not apply. In our situation, caution no longer has meaning."
Perhaps not; but Teri was going to be as careful as she could. The
No Regrets
crept toward the outer wall, meter by slow meter. At last she began to feel directly the body forces that Torran had described. They were not unpleasant, nothing more than vibrations that sent contradictory and exciting tingles through different parts of her. In other circumstances, a woman could get to like that sort of thing.
She halted the forward progress of the ship. "This is almost at the point where Torran lost control. He said '
Damnation!
,' whirled around like a spinning-top, and vanished. I don't notice anything changing. Do you see any differences?"
"Only the big one—why did it happen to Torran, when it isn't happening to us."
"Unless you object, I propose to take us closer."
"I object in many ways. But continue."
Teri glanced at the range sensor. The boundary wall was less than a hundred meters away. Her comment to Julian Graves had not been accurate. Already they were past the point where Torran had encountered trouble. The drive was working harder to hold their position, but still it was nowhere near its limits.
They crept on—and on. Teri felt the force on her body continue to increase, but it was quite tolerable. She had endured two or three times as much in training, with no ill effects. This was, however, inexplicably different from what had happened to Torran.
Closer and closer. At last, Teri said, "Councilor, that's it."
"That is what, my dear?" Julian Graves's face, under a force of two and a half gees, was even more strained and gaunt than usual.
"We have reached the boundary. The bottom part of the ship is in contact."
"Are you sure of that? What happens if you reduce the drive?"
Teri decreased the thrust little by little. She felt no change at all in the forces on her body. The ship was resting on part of the boundary wall, and being supported by it.
She cut the drive all the way, and looked across at Julian Graves. "We are here, and we have gone as far as we can go. The
No Regrets
is at rest on the boundary wall of this enclosure. The very same wall, in the very same spot that Torran went through. Any ideas?"
A field of two and a half gees was much harder on Julian Graves than on the younger and fitter Teri. He sat crumpled in his chair, gloved hands gripping the arm rests.
"Oddly enough, I do. It involves, however, a somewhat dangerous suggestion."
"More dangerous than the fix that we are in?"
"Perhaps not. You have a right to offer an opinion on that point. As you pointed out to me earlier, I have much experience in the use of the Bose Network. A Bose transition is always limited by two different factors. First, and rather obviously, an object cannot enter a Bose node if its size exceeds the physical dimensions of the entry point. In our case, we don't know what that dimension might be, although it appears to be very large. However, the second limiting element is just as important. An object cannot enter a Bose node for a transition if the
exit
node is smaller than the object to be transferred."
"You think that Torran—"
"—was small enough for both the entry and the exit nodes to accommodate him. Yes. But the
No Regrets
, much bigger than a human suited figure in every way, exceeds the exit node capacity. A transition will not be permitted."
Teri glanced across the control board's array of instruments. The drive of the
No Regrets
had easily enough power to lift them away from the boundary wall and accelerate back to the middle of the closed region.
"How confident do you feel that the problem lies in the size of the Bose exit point?"
"Confident? Why, I am confident of nothing. What I am suggesting is a theory, and like any theory it may be wrong."
"People act based on theories."
"Indeed they do. Some of them die as a result." Julian Graves struggled to his feet. "And if I sit here much longer with two and a half gees pressing this old body into the seat, I will feel as though I myself am dying. Come on, my dear. It is time for us to leave the
No Regrets
."
"Right now?"
"If not now, when?"
"But you always say that thought should
precede
action and we should evaluate every alternative."
"Correct. But when there is only one course of action available and no alternative, making a decision becomes easy."
He headed for the airlock. Teri, struggling under the load of a body two and half times its normal weight, followed.
At the outer wall Julian Graves did not hesitate. He stepped forward, and dropped like a stone. He was gone before Teri could look down and follow the line of his fall.
Poised on the edge, she found action difficult. It sounded easy to take one step forward, but what if that single step was the last one you would ever take, and the airlock of the
No Regrets
the last sight that your eyes would ever see?
Teri decided that the time for thinking, especially thinking like that, was over. It was time to act—and maybe to pray.
She stepped out of the airlock.
"Quite true, Captain. It's as you say, we
could
leave here today. But there's no one in his right mind as
would
leave here today."
Claudius was sitting at his ease in the aft control cabin. His body was coiled down on a wide chair and he held a small bowl in his upper two arms. From time to time he raised the smoking bowl to his face, and sniffed deep. When he did so his single slate-gray eye rolled in its socket.
"You see," he went on, "you're not dealing with something simple and predictable here, like the Great Galactic Trade Wind. Oh, no. Otherwise we'd have been out of here days ago. But I know the route from Pompadour to Marglot like the tip of my own tail, and I'm telling you, there's real dangers if you try to make the jump at the wrong time."
"Dangers of what?" Louis was feeling mightily frustrated. It didn't take pheromones to guess that the Chism Polypheme was not telling the truth, but Atvar H'sial's silent,
"He's lying, you know,"
was an added irritant.
"Oh, things I doubt that you beings from the Orion Arm have ever seen. Space reefs and sounders, stuff that can swallow a ship up quick as a wink."
"He's lying, Louis."
Atvar H'sial was crouched beyond the open door, out of sight.
"Hell, I realize that. You don't need to keep sticking me with it every ten seconds. But what am I supposed to do? Explain that a Cecropian is secretly listening, and she always knows if a Polypheme is telling the truth or not? I'd rather keep that sort of knowledge for use in emergencies." To Claudius he said, "What's your plan, then? Stay here in orbit forever, 'til we run out of supplies an' starve to death?"
"No, no. I'll know when it's the right time to go."
"How?"
"Experience, and what I pick up from other Chism navigators. It's hard to explain to anyone who isn't a Polypheme. But I was thinking maybe I ought to be taking another trip down to the surface."