Even with the knowledge they had been able to amass during the voyages of the SDFs-1 and -3 and with what little they had been able to beg, borrow, and steal from the Sentinels, the fortress's chief astrogators still considered themselves among the Quadrant's least experienced travelers.  So while the void they had been folded into presented a novel challenge, there was no sure way of ascertaining whether this "newspace" - as it had been termed - was not just some commonplace occurrence among the more well traveled.  To this end, interviews with those Sentinels aboard - Kami, Learna, Lron, Crysta, Baldan, Gnea, and others - had thus far proved unenlightening, a not entirely unexpected development given that the original crew of the starship Farrago had never been top-notch spacefarers to begin with.

Lang nevertheless had gone about his investigation of the ship's environment with unflagging confidence and textbook determination.  The results of Jack Baker's brief extravehicular recon were in.  Exterior background temperatures and the velocity of light had been measured and found to be constant; the fortress chronometers were still functioning.  Physical laws inside the ship - and within a radius of a half million kilometers from it - were in fact operating much as they should have.  It was simply that the stars - indeed, space itself - had disappeared.

The SDF-3's reflex engines were functioning, but there was still nowhere for the fortress to go.

"I'm inclined to favor the hyperspace hypothesis," Lang was saying, eyes glued to an immense tabletop display screen in his office.  Rem stood behind him, just off to one side, the handsome features of his pale face highlighted by the screen's intermittent flashings.  "We've somehow become trapped in the fold corridor itself."

Rem grunted noncommittally.  "You're dismissing the popular notion, then - the one circulating through the ship?"

"What, that we're all actually dead?  I certainly am."

No one knew just how the rumor got started, but it seemed that the results of a survey taken of some two hundred crewpersons had revealed remarkable similarities in their fold, space lace experiences.  These included feelings of tranquillity, out-of-body experience, the encountering of a presence or a deceased relative in a dark tunnel, a sudden urge to review one's life, a warm and accepting light at the end of the tunnel, and a brief merging with that light prior to an immediate return to physicality.

"If we were all dead," Lang continued, "we probably wouldn't have returned at all."

"And how to prove it in any case?" Rem said, smiling.  "Against what can we measure nonexistence?"

Lang turned to regard the Tiresian, pleased that he had finally succeeded in spiriting him away from Minmei, if only for a short while.  One would have thought the strangeness of the ship's predicament alone would have been enough to pique Rem's interest, but the Zor-clone had agreed to a conference only after Lang had made mention of the vanished Protoculture.