Adams nodded. "That's right. A secret system in a galaxy that held few secrets from Man any time he wanted to go out and take the trouble to solve them.
"We've run into all sorts of weird things, of course. Planetary conditions that, to this day, we haven't licked. Funny, dangerous life. Economic systems and psychological concepts that had us floored and still give us a headache every time we think of them. But we always were able, at the very least, to see the thing that gave us trouble, to know the thing that licked us. With Cygni it was different. We couldn't even get there.
"The planets are either cloud-covered or screened, for we've never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a few billion miles of the system you start sliding." He looked at Clark. "That's the right word, isn't it?"
"There's no word for it," Clark told him, "but sliding comes as close as any. You aren't stopped or you aren't slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it would be something slicker than ice. Whatever it is, it doesn't register. There's no sign of it, nothing that you can see or nothing that makes even the faintest flicker on the instruments, but you hit it and you slide off course. You correct and you slide off course again. In the early days, it drove men mad trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line."
"As if," said Adams, "someone had taken his finger and drawn a deadline around the system."
"Something like that," said Clark.
"But Sutton got through," said Anderson.
Adams nodded. "Sutton got through," he said.
"I don't like it," Clark declared. "I don't like a thing about it. Someone got a brainstorm. Our ships are too big, they said. If we used smaller ships, we might squeeze through. As if the thing that kept us off was a mesh or something."
"Sutton got through," said Adams, stubbornly. "They launched him in a lifeboat and he got through. His small ship got through where the big ones couldn't."