"That would spoil the fun," Carrolson said. "Go ahead."

Patricia pushed one foot forward, then put her weight onto the sloping, sandy soil.

"All the way," Lake urged.

She sighed and walked into the dimple. Ten meters from the rim, feeling peculiar, she looked back. Her body was not inclined at the same angle as the others. Dizzy, she tried to right herself and almost fell over. The natural stance was along the radius of curvature, as if the corridor force followed the curve of the bowl. Yet there was no local distortion of space registering on the multi-meter. The rest of the group followed after.

In the shadow of the floating dish was a slightly protruding bronze-colored plug about half as wide. Takahashi walked across the plug to show it was safe. Patricia followed, multi-meter again at the fore. No change.

"Any idea what holds the dish up?" she asked. Farley and Carrolson shrugged. The marines sat in the sand around the well, looking bored.

"That may not be an appropriate question," Takahashi said. "Look at the material of the dish and plug—up close. As far as we can tell, it's the same stuff as the corridor walls."

Patricia kneeled and ran her hands along the plug's surface. The color was not uniformly bronze. There seemed to be red and green streaks, even spots of black, merging, separating and twisting in the surface like worms.

"This stuff is geometry, too, then?" Patricia asked.

"It isn't matter," Carrolson said. "We ruled that out just after the wells were discovered."

"It took us all some time to get used to the idea of using space as a building material," Takahashi said. Farley nodded emphatically.

"Not at all," Patricia said coolly. "I wrote about it four years ago. If nested universes are somehow kept from assuming one definite state, a barrier against penetration will form due to continuous opposed spatial transforms."

Takahashi smiled but Carrolson and Farley simply stared. "So," Takahashi said, "nothing supports the dish. It doesn't have any real existence. It's simply a shaped jam-up of probabilities. Makes perfect sense."

"Oh," Farley said.

Lake sat in the middle of the plug, Apple lying across his knees. "I'm just a small-town boy from Michigan," he said. "But it sure feels solid. It isn't even slippery."

"Good point," Patricia said. She reached down to feel it with her palms. "There apparently isn't total separation of probabilistic states. Some interaction between matter and the surface is allowed, besides resistance to intrusion." She put her multi-meter directly on the surface. The value of pi fluctuated wildly, then stabilized: 3.141487233 continuous. "Pi's down," she said. She invoked the other constants. "Gravitational constant is nominal, speed of electromagnetic radiation is nominal and stable."

"Slash aitch?" Carrolson asked.

"The same. What purpose do the wells serve?"

"This circuit is capped, so it serves no purpose we can determine."

"The wells may give access to something outside the corridor," Takahashi said. "We decided against finding out where they lead. But the wells were not plugged, and the sand was kept out of the central hole by a spongy field of force, nature unknown. The only thing we could see was red light coming up out of each well. We sent a little drone helicopter into one well. It didn't come back. Our viewing angle was such that we couldn't see it after it traveled about ten meters. We decided against sending anybody after it."