“I might. I was one of the guys that saw to it they didn’t get back to celebrate.” Naran closed his eyes for an instant.
“Yeah. Way I heard it, you were the guy that wrapped ’em up. Too bad they didn’t get you on the job sooner. Maybe we wouldn’t have this mess on our hands now.” Dar Girdek shrugged.
“Anyway, they vaporized the city and a lot of area around it. That was bad, but the aftereffect is worse. We’ve got scholars beating their brains cells together, but all they can tell us is that there’s a big area up there just as psionically dead as an experimental chamber.” He grinned.
“I could tell ’em that much myself. It’s a sort of cloud. Goes turbulent, shoots out arms, then folds in again.
“We’d by-pass the whole thing, but it’s right on the main trade route. Only way around it is plenty of days out of the path, clear down around the middle sea and into the lake region. Then you have to go all the way back anyway, if you plan to do any mid-continent trading. And you still take a chance of getting caught in a swirl arm.”
[p 12]
Naran tilted his head. “So? Suppose you do get into a swirl? All you need to do is wait.” He smiled.
“You know. Just sort of ignore it. It’ll go away.”
“Uh huh. Sounds easy enough. It’s about what we do when we have to. But there are things living there. They can be hard to ignore.”
“You mean the carnivores?”
“That’s right. If you meet one of those fellow out in normal territory, he’s no trouble at all. You hit him with a distorter and he flops. Then you figure out whether to reduce him to slime or leave the carcass for his friends and relations.” He smiled.