And Stephen, looking around them, saw that the cloud had, indeed dispersed; and that in its place a vast curtain of shifting, rippling light had arisen, extending upward beyond sight and imagination, to the left and to the right, all around the circle of the horizon, shutting them in, shutting the rest of the universe out. Impenetrable. Indestructible.
"You knew of this," Stephen accused. "That's why you brought me here."
"I admit that there were rumors that such a project might be attempted today. The underworld has ears," Turpan said. "That we arrived just in time, however, was merely a circumstance. And even you, my stolid friend, must admit the beauty of the aurora of a Molein Field."
"We are lost," Stephen said, feeling stricken. "A distortion barrier endures forever."
"Fah!" the Bedchamber Assassin replied. "We have a green island for ourselves, which is much better, you'll agree, than being executed. And let me tell you, there are many security officials who ache to pump my twitching body full of the official, but deadly, muscarine. Besides, there is a colony here. Men and women. I intend to thrive."
But what of me! Stephen wanted to cry out. I have committed no crime, and I shall be lost away from my books and my work! However, he pulled himself together, and noted pedantically that the generation of a Molein Field was a capital offense, anyway. (This afforded little comfort, in that once a group of people have surrounded themselves with a Molein Field they are quite independent, as Turpan had observed, of the law.)
When they had withdrawn a few yards from the skimmercar, Turpan sighted upon it with the moisture rifle and the plastic hull melted and ran down in a mass of smoking lava. "The past is past," Turpan said, "and better done with. Come, let us seek out our new friends."
There were men and there were women, clamorously cheerful at their work, unloading an ancient and rickety ferrycopter in the surprise valley below the cliffs upon which Stephen and Turpan stood. Stephen, perspiring for the first time in his life, was almost caught up in their enthusiasm as he watched that fairy village of plasti-tents unfold, shining and shimmering in the reflected hues of the Molein aurora.
When Turpan had satisfied himself that there was no danger, they descended, scrambling down over rough, shaly and precipitous outcroppings that presented no problem for Stephen, but to which Turpan, oddly enough, clung with the desperation of an acrophobe as he lowered himself gingerly from crag to crag—this slightly-built young man who had seemed nerveless in the sky. Turpan was out of his métier.