Chapter Fifty
Nearly a standard year had gone by since Hal had come back to the Final Encyclopedia; and the knowledge he had dug out and forged in that time into new tools for his mind weighed far more heavily on his spirit than he could have imagined, twelve months before. It had enabled him to reach deeper into himself than he had thought possible in such a short time but it had also woken inner, sleeping gods and devils that he had not suspected himself of harboring. He understood now not only who he was, but also what he must do, and neither of those understandings were easy burdens to carry.
He sat, his chair float seemingly adrift in space above the eastern hemisphere of the Dorsai. What he looked at was a simulation. No clouds were visible, but innumerable tiny white lights were scattered across the face of the numerous islands that made up the land mass of that sea-girt world; and it was these lights that Hal was considering.
Each of the lights stood for a pad on which a full-sized spacecraft could land and take off - always assuming there was a man or woman of the Dorsai, or an equivalently skilled pilot, at the controls, to justify the risks in handling such a vehicle on and off surface. There were others besides Dorsai pilots who could bring deep space vessels safely to a planetary surface, of course; but it was an uncommon skill.
The great number of pads he now looked at was therefore not surprising, considering the world they were on. Harmony, with its two fitting yards, of which one had been put out of action when he left, and with only two other pads where heavy spacecraft could be landed, was more typical of the other thirteen inhabited planets. Hal rotated the image of the Dorsai to show its western hemisphere; and the lights that signalled pads were as numerous there, as well.
The only other worlds that approached Dorsai in their numbers of landing places were the two Exotic planets of Mara and Kultis; but both of these together did not have as many spacecraft pads as those he had just been observing. The large number on the Dorsai, of course, were attributable to the nearly three centuries in which Dorsai had been not merely a supplier of professional soldiers, but full of training areas for them. Expeditionary forces were normally not only assembled but worked into shape close to the home areas of the officers who had undertaken the contract that would employ all of them.
Hal coded for a list of the pads he had been looking at, with their locations and their distances from nearby concentrations of the Dorsai populace; and as he did so, there was the sound of a single musical chime and a voice spoke to him from among the stars.
"Hal? Jeamus Walters. I can drop in now, if you're ready for me."
"Come ahead," said Hal.
He touched the invisible console at his fingertips, staying the list and re-evoking his normal working surroundings. The image of the Dorsai vanished and the small carrel off his own room in the Final Encyclopedia came into existence around him - walls, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The carrel was a tiny place - hardly more than a cubbyhole; and his main room beyond was not much more - almost a single-room office, with bedroom furniture recessed in the walls, and perhaps enough space to gather at most five or six people on floats in close conversation. A moment later, the door chimed on a deeper note than the phone had used to announce Jeamus Walters' call.
"Come on in," said Hal. The door opened to admit a short, broad man with thin blond hair on a round skull and a pleasant middle-aged face.
"Sit down," said Hal. "How much time have you?"
"As much as you want, now," said Jeamus. "We were just doing a periodic checkover when you called, earlier."
Hal touched his console and one side of the room blanked out to show the Final Encyclopedia from the outside; the image was enough to fill the space that had been between ceiling and floor, its gray, misty protective screen looking close enough so that either man could reach out and touch it.
"I haven't had time to learn much about it," said Hal, looking at the protective screen. "Periodic checkover, you said? I thought the screen was self-sustaining?"
"It is, of course," said Jeamus. "Once created, it's independent of anything else in the universe. Just as the same thing in phase-shift form would have to be independent of the universe, or it couldn't move spacecraft around in it. But one of the things that that independence means, is that if we constructed a screen around the Encyclopedia and did nothing more, we'd immediately begin to move out from inside it, as we travelled along with the rest of the solar system, here. So we have to arrange to have it move with us; or we'd destroy ourselves trying to go through it, just like anything else would destroy itself trying to get through it at us. Consequently, we arrange for it to move with us; which takes a certain amount of controlling - as does making irises available, opening and closing them, and all the rest of that business - "
He broke off, looking at Hal.
"You didn't ask me in just to hear me lecture on the phase-screen, though, did you?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," said Hal. "I've got some questions about it. How large can you make it? I mean, how large an area can you enclose and protect?"
Jeamus shrugged.
"Theoretically, there's no limit," he said. "Well, yes, of course there's the limit imposed by the size of the power source needed to create the protective sphere and keep adjusting it; and you have to keep adjusting, even if you're creating it to be set adrift in the universe; because sooner or later it'd begin to break down under the anomalies inherent in being a timeless system existing in a temporal universe."
"What's the practical limit, then, approximately?" Hal asked. "Suppose we just wanted to expand the sphere around us now and keep expanding it as far as we could."
Jeamus ruffled the thin hair on the back of his head, thoughtfully.
"Well," he said, "theoretically, we could make it a number of times as large as the solar system, given the power of our available sun - but actually, as soon as we reached the size of Earth's orbit we'd have the sun inside it with us - " he broke off. "I'd have to figure that."
"But," said Hal, "there'd be no problem in making it large enough to enclose a single world - practically speaking?"
"Well, no… there shouldn't be," said Jeamus. "You'd run into some control problems. Something like that's never been considered. We've got some pretty interesting problems even now, just with the Encyclopedia here, as far as ingress and egress go. Also, we have to open irises toward the sun, for example, at regular intervals, to draw power… what I mean to say is, the controls for a sphere any larger would have to be very complex, not only for maintenance, but for making irises when and where you wanted them. I suppose you're assuming just about the same proportion of in and out traffic as we have here? Because any differences - "
"No different, for now," said Hal. "Could you run me up some figures for a world, say, just a little larger than Earth?"
"Of course," said Jeamus. He was staring at Hal. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what all this is about?"
"If you don't mind."
"Oh, I mind." Jeamus ruffled his back hair again. "I'm as curious as the next person. But… give me a week."
"Thanks," said Hal.