“I wish I could get some deeper magnetic soundings,” he said. “If we can see what’s coming at us from below, we’ll have nothing to worry about. I just don’t want any surprises.”

Tam studied the pads. On every side was searing pink glare. There was nothing to see beyond the tunnel walls.

“We really need to extend our sensory range,” said Anjin. “That’s my next priority, even before we get the jets working.”

“But we’re all right for now?”

“I hope so, Skipper. But no surprises, please.”

Just then the glare vanished and the horizon of the Sim shone on every quarter, seeming nearer and flatter than the Earth’s would appear to a man standing in the middle of the Sahara. Tam had enough time to realize that they had just exited the flare, and to identify three more streamers looming up ahead, and to understand that each must be standing higher than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, before the whole cabin shifted and the wall met her shoulder with a bone-cracking bang.

“See what I mean?” said Anjin. He reduced power to the fields forward and below, and eased the ship-comet’s quakings until it was smoothly under way once more. Tam, who was nursing her shoulder with her one good arm, lifted her eyes and at once forgot her injuries. The ship was heading directly toward a streamer that had grown to fill even the widest angle pad’s field of vision. She judged that they would reach it in less than fifteen seconds, but then saw that Anjin had already applied his experience of the previous flare to new instructions for the field generators—which he called down through the pads with more than five seconds to spare. Single-handedly, he was rendering the Sim more awe-inspiring than dangerous.

They entered the flare with barely a ripple, and no unpleasant tearing noises. When they exited less than a minute later, Sargenti-Peterson merely bobbed up and down two times before Anjin steadied her out and found the way ahead clear of flares.

“Thanks, Anjin—good piloting. But I hope we don’t run into many more of those.”

“We probably will, Skipper. But the next time we’ll be ready for them—especially with a little sensory extension.”

Anjin had already worked out, in his mind, plans for new scanners. Given proper instructions, the robot factories would have them built within the hour. Now that the danger had passed, he would study the flares almost at leisure, searching for details that might improve their chances at lower altitudes, in the thin layer of glowing pink gas called the chromosphere, where visibility was bound to be no better than inside a flare.

He had already uncovered at least one major surprise, although in hindsight it should have come to him as no surprise at all. The temperature inside the columns of flame had actually dropped precipitously, owing to the shielding from rays at the Sun’s surface by all those mountains of gas. Seen from a great height—say, from the orbit of Mercury— the flares would have appeared as dark spots on the Sun’s surface; not because they were actually dark but because they were so vastly outshone by their surroundings. The open spaces of the solar corona were hot enough to blacken anything, whereas the inside of a solar flare was, by comparison, only good for warming hors d’oeuvres. For similar reasons, the chromosphere into which he hoped to take Sargenti-Peterson would, paradoxically it seemed, provide cooler surroundings in spite of its being nearer the Sun’s surface.