He came to a halt a meter away, and just floated there for a moment. The biomonitor showed him his racing heartbeat, and he could hear the adrenaline buzz in his ears. He started to raise his arm, fingers extending to touch the enigmatic surface, then paused. He hadn’t received permission, but if he checked before doing anything the EVA would take all day. The reason he’d been chosen was because of his contact experience. Not in this situation, he told himself evilly, and managed a small grin. His heart rate had slowed a little now, so he completed the motion. His fingers touched the surface.
For one twisted-up moment he imagined the barrier vanishing like a soap bubble, punctured by his ignorant touch. But it didn’t, and he chuckled slightly at the notion. By now he was drifting away, propelled by the slight contact; so he moved the joystick forward, and put his hand out again. This time the maneuvering pack held him in place.
“Okay, I’m touching it. No apparent reaction. Seems like ordinary solid matter, there’s none of that slight surface instability you get on our force fields.”
“Understood, Mac,” Oscar said. “We were all waiting for some demonic claw to come through and drag you in.”
“Hey, thanks for that.”
“My pleasure. You feel like applying some sensors for us?”
“Will do.” He reached down to the equipment clipped on his belt. One by one, he stuck sensor pads against the barrier, taking measurements. He had to hold each one in place. The high-temperature epoxy was no use at all. When he squeezed it out of the tube, it simply rebounded off the barrier like water splashing off Teflon. “We didn’t think that would work,” Oscar said. “There aren’t any atoms there for it to adhere to. Worth a try, though.”
“Sure, but I’m using up gas at quite a rate keeping these sensors applied.”
“Copy that. Please apply the meson rate detector.”
“Okay.” He settled the fat little cylinder against the surface. Once again that notion of there being something on the other side was strong in his mind. He was scratching away on the barrier like some mouse behind the baseboard, and the house cat was listening intently, unseen, just the thickness of an electron away. Irrational, he kept telling himself. But surely something knows we’re here? He twisted his head to one side until he could see the starfield. For a moment he was upright, pressed against a wall, with the night sky behind him, the ground lost beneath his feet. The vertical horizon between red and black was perfectly straight and clear. When he looked down, that same horizon was below his boots. A human mind simply couldn’t grasp the size of the thing. Whoever established this incredible artifact must have had a phenomenally compelling reason.
Defense? Confinement? The sweepstake on board was running eighty/twenty. Both implied aggression somewhere; again on a scale beyond human comprehension.
“You all right there, Mac?” Oscar asked.
He realized his heart was thudding again, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Sure, no problem. What’s next?”
“Exotic waveform detector. Tunde wants to know exactly where the infrared emission originates. That should help define the barrier interface with spacetime. “
“Sure.”
After forty minutes he placed the last sensor back on his belt, and jetted back to the shuttle. The physicists were pleased with the results; they had moved another step toward understanding the nature of the barrier. But as to how it was generated, and the why of it, they hadn’t got a clue.
Two days after Mac’s EVA, the morning departmental heads meeting decided that information gathering had progressed about as far as it could from a static observation point. Wilson was concerned that they weren’t making enough progress in other directions.
“We were sent here to establish the reason why the barrier was erected,” he told them somewhat formally after they’d had the usual roundup of results from the previous day. “Tunde, I know your teams are doing a great job on the characteristics of the barrier, but we need more than that. Now you’re identifying its quantum structure, is there any way we can reformat the hyperdrive to get us past?”
“No,” Tunde said. “In fact, I don’t think there is a way through. We might not be able to generate a barrier like this for ourselves, but we do understand enough about its properties to just about rule out any kind of circumvention through hyperspace. A wormhole simply cannot be opened through it.”
“What about forcing our way in?” Oscar asked. “Can we break through in real space?”
“Again, no. Absolutely not. Even if you could generate collapsed-state energy levels and apply them directly against the barrier, it wouldn’t have any effect. It’s not physical. It can’t be damaged or stressed in the way solid matter can. One day we might be able to manipulate quantum fields in such a way to destabilize a section, but that won’t be for a long time. To use a very bad pun, we haven’t even scratched the surface.”
“Then we must look for clues elsewhere,” Wilson said. “Admittedly, given the size we’re dealing with here, that can only be the most perfunctory search, but it must be done. We’re back to our original two theories: offensive or defensive. If the barrier is defensive, there may be signs of the attacking force left somewhere outside.”
“Signs, or the whole armada?” Oscar asked lightly.
“If they were here, they’d be investigating us by now,” said Antonia Clarke, the engineering chief. “We’ve created enough disturbance since we’ve arrived. Even a few perfunctory warning satellites scattered around the barrier would have found us.”
“Maybe,” Tunde said. “But we certainly haven’t located any active observation equipment. And it is a long time since the barrier went up. The threat might not exist anymore.”
“It’s only long on a human scale,” Oscar said.
“All right.” Wilson held up his hands to prevent any full-scale argument erupting. “If the attacking force or entity is still here, we need to find it—preferably without it seeing us, which I admit is a long shot; however, we have to try. If they’ve gone, then they might have left something behind. And if the barrier was put up for the opposite reason—to confine the star and its inhabitants—then we have an even greater chance of finding the builders. Therefore, I have decided we’ll take the Second Chance on a complete circumnavigation of the equator. We’ll stand off an AU and use the hyperdrive at low speed. If we take a week, the hysradar will be able to complete a very accurate scan of the surrounding space. Following that, and taking the worst-case scenario that we find nothing, we’ll fly to both poles and examine them. If after that we still draw a blank we’ll review the situation then.”
“Captain,” Tunde said. “I’d like to raise the issue of communication.”
“With whom?”
“Both our scenarios imply that there is some kind of sentient life to be found inside the barrier. Now that we’re this close it may be possible to attract their attention, possibly even initiate a dialogue.”
“How? I thought you said the barrier was impervious.”
“It is to everything except gravity.” He indicated the chief engineer. “I’ve discussed this with Antonia. It shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the energy configuration of the hyperdrive to create simple gravity waves. If the civilization inside has a working gravity detector, they should be able to pick it up.”
The notion surprised Wilson; given the analysis he’d been getting from the science teams since they’d arrived, he’d dismissed the notion of any attempted contact a long time ago. “How difficult would the adaptations be? I will not authorize taking the hyperdrive off-line at any time.”
“It’s a matter of programming,” Antonia said. “That’s all. Standard gravity wave emission would be a simple modification of the hysradar function. The ship’s RI can give us a reformatted routine within a couple of hours.”