“Am I suffering from boredism hallucinations or are the walls closer together than when we entered?” Nathaniel asks.

“Are you bored?” Doctor Bill asks.

“No,” Nathaniel answers.

“Then it can’t be boredism,” Doctor Bill says.

“I know. I was making a point,” Nathaniel responds.

Haticat walks over to the narrow spot and puts one hand on each wall. “It is smaller. I couldn’t reach before.” The four explorers have been touring a slot canyon on planet Dahk. Although they have been to Dahk before, it is a big planet of many biomes. Previously, they helped the Pogotail Seals and the Whitetail Dogs resist an invasion of giant shellfish. This time, they are exploring the slot canyons and seasonal riverbeds at the center of one of the continents. This slot canyon appears to be slowly closing.

“Let’s move,” Nathaniel says urgently and leads his crew forward out of the canyon. Soon they reach another narrow area. It is almost too narrow to squeeze through. “Come on.” They race to the final opening, but it is already mere centimeters wide.

“What now?” Haticat asks.

Nathaniel looks up. The narrow ribbon of sky above them is also shrinking. He tries to climb up the wall but it is too slippery. Fred opens his backpack and attempts to use his climbing hooks, but the material is too hard. Haticat tries to soften it with a laser, but it doesn’t work well. “I think I understand now why I detected traces of hydrogen chloride in the riverbed. This canyon is a stomach,” Doctor Bill says.

“And we’re a tasty breakfast,” Nathaniel says, still looking upward.

“What do we do now?” Haticat asks.

“I have an idea,” Nathaniel says.

“What?” Haticat asks.

“Explosives,” Nathaniel says.

“What?” Haticat repeats.

Several seconds later, the four explorers are blown out of the canyon riding a wave of superheated air, well protected by a trazonic force field. They land near a cliff below where centuries of dilute hydrochloric acid have eroded the rock, exposing fossils of daggertails, swamp trilobites, and other creatures. “Hey, look at this buried tree,” Haticat says. “Its branches look almost like a claw.”

“Cool,” Fred says, brushing some dirt off of it. “Hey, what’s this?” He finishes wiping the dirt off. The tree had grown into a strange shape. There are heads erupting from the trunk. Attached to the clawed branch is a face with fangs, large nostrils, and close-set eyes. Next to it are the clear faces of Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill.

Nathaniel’s ship speeds towards a small terrestrial planet sporting an elliptical ring of silvery white powder. The seas and land each cover about fifty percent of the surface, curling around each other to form hundreds of coves and peninsulas. The ship lands on the beach of one of the large islands. Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill step out onto the lemon-colored sand and take in the wonderful vista. The weather is warm yet breezy and neither too dry nor too humid. A few small clouds dot the sky. The ring is barely visible reflecting the sun‘s light in the midst of the blue sky. On one side the waves crash against the sand. On the other are trees with velvety pink trunks and purple leaves. “Planet Aeveon. Such a nice place. Let’s stay here a while,” Nathaniel says.

“I like it,” Haticat says.

They explore the beach for kilometers. They discover that only the very top of the sand is yellow. Kicking it reveals it to be bright tangerine underneath, which quickly turns yellow in the sun. Shaded sand takes longer to turn. They discover that rocks here are made of some sort of carbon-based elastic foam. They look just like granite but are soft and harmless. Nathaniel wades into the water a bit and discovers the white tile reefs, apparently built by flat, tessellated animals.

There are other animals here too. There are seal-like animals resting on the false rocks, clapping their tail flukes together in sounds of applause. There are swimming daggertails and running gerbils. There are animals wandering the beach resembling rabbits, deer, leopards, hippos, ferrets, and cattle. None of these animals have any eyes. They stumble along, bumping into trees, rocks, and each other as they go about their business, sometimes simply walking in circles. “Imagine living in such a wonderful place surrounded by all this beauty and not being able to see it or even know that it exists,” Haticat comments.

“Since the trees, sand, and rocks are so soft, and there are no cliffs in the topographical survey, it’s a relatively safe place where no eyes are required,” Doctor Bill says.

“Still, I’d hate not seeing. Sight has a rich complexity that sound and smell don’t,” Haticat says.

“Or maybe you lack the right ears and nose for experiencing it,” Nathaniel suggests.

“Maybe,” Haticat says.

“This star produces no infrared light,” Haticat says, standing on the platform side of the bed where the engines are.

“That’s impossible,” Nathaniel says next to him.

“Check for yourself.” Haticat steps away from the spectrograph. Nathaniel and Haticat discover a region of space with strange properties. Near the perimeter, the stars produce no radio waves. Near the center, they produce neither radio nor infrared. Changing course to get a better look, it quickly becomes obvious that it is not the stars that are unusual, but something in front of them much closer to the ship. It superficially resembles a black hole a mere kilometer across, but light of different wavelengths behaves differently at its boundary. Long wavelength radiation such as radio bends around it most easily, becoming completely blocked at a radius of 756 meters. Short wavelength radiation such as x-rays bend with less of an angle, and become completely blocked only at a radius of 410 meters.

“This is artificial gravity,” Nathaniel says.

“I’ve never heard of artificial gravity strong enough to trap light,” Doctor Bill mentions.

“Neither have I, but there’s a first time for everything,” Nathaniel says.

“What’s making it?” Fred asks.

“Probably a space station someone wants to keep hidden, so let’s take a look,” Nathaniel says. They land bed side down on the surface of a large metal ball where a layer of air has been trapped by the gravity. The gravity on the space station is much less than that further out, trapping the light. They bounce along in one fourth Earth gravity, exploring the surface. There are many other ships here of many designs. The explorers walk until they stop under a ship shaped like an inverted letter U.

“Freeze!” yells someone behind them. In seconds, they are surrounded by five Humanoids in black uniforms. They are blue skinned with completely black eyes. Each wears a camera embedded in the middle of their large bellies and carries some sort of energy rifle. “Disarm them,” one says. Their laser pistols are quickly confiscated.

“What’s going on here?” Nathaniel demands.

“I’m Captain Quill of the starship Zoyyix. Who are you?”

“Captain Nathaniel of the…uh…my ship,” Captain Nathaniel says. “We’re explorers.”

“I’ve never heard of the Myship, interesting name. You landed immediately after us. Were you following us?” Quill asks.

“No, we never saw you,” Nathaniel answers.

“So your timing is a coincidence?” Captain Quill asks.

“I believe that the time dilation of the gravity barrier causes time to run slower here such that days or even weeks might have passed outside while you exited your craft. Then, when we finally arrived, it would have seemed that it was immediately after,” Nathaniel suggests.

Captain Quill says, “You’re probably telling the truth, but I can’t allow you to leave and spread word of our location, so you’ll be joining my crew temporally. We’re explorers too; that’s what the cameras are for.”

“So what do you know about this place?” Nathaniel asks.

“Very little. It’s coordinates were found in a computer once owned by a being who called himself The Genius,” Captain Quill says.

“Oh, I’ve heard of him,” Nathaniel says.

“We believe all his best inventions are stored here,” Captain Quill says.

“They’ll probably be impossible to figure out,” Nathaniel says.

“I doubt it. My crew is made up of the most intelligent and most educated citizens from my planet. If anyone can understand it, they can,” Captain Quill claims.

A sixth member of the crew approaches. “Did you finish downloading the video files from the previous team?” the captain asks him.

“They were totally scrambled,” he replies.

“So we don’t even know if they made it inside?” another comments.

“Well, we’ll figure it out,” Quill says.

The ten explorers walk around until they find a structure with nine doors in it, each with a puzzle lock. One of the blue aliens steps forward to solve. He shuffles the squares around until it forms the correct picture and opens the door. “Come on,” Captain Quill says, but once the first crew member is through, the door slides shut and the lock retracts into the machine. They try knocking and they try the radio, but they cannot make contact.

“Whatever this strange metal is, it is impervious to all scans,” Doctor Bill reports.

“Let’s see if it’s impervious to this!” Captain Quill fires his energy rifle at the door. It squeals and whistles and the energy is absorbed and channeled away without the tiniest bit of damage.

“I guess we need to solve the puzzles,” Nathaniel says.

“These are very interesting trees,” Haticat says, looking them up and down. They are smooth-skinned and broad-leaved, some blue with green spots and some green with blue spots. Others are brown with long, droopy leaves hanging from the top of an unbranched trunk.

Doctor Bill holds his scanner high. “These two kinds of trees have radically different tissue structures.”

Nathaniel runs his fingers through the moss covering the ground. It is soft and fluffy. “Let’s walk this way.”

Soon the four explorers see a short, red stump in the midst of several brown trees. There are four very large roots stretching away from it as far as they can see. “Strange,” Doctor Bill says. “This plant seems to have metal fragments imbedded in it.”

“That’s because it’s a communication station,” one of the brown trees says.

“Oh, that makes sense,” Nathaniel responds.