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— or do we take on the whole structure?" The software, I knew, was busy assessing the relative difficulty of the tasks.
    Yuen replied at once, "Seal the border, nothing more. You mustn't destroy this." He turned to me, imploringly. "Would you smash up a fossil of Australopi-thecus'? Would you wipe the cosmic background radiation out of the sky? This may shake the foundations of all my beliefs — but it encodes the truth about our history. We have no right to obliterate it, like vandals."
    Alison eyed me nervously. What was this — majority rule7 Yuen was the only one with any power here; he could pull the plug in an instant. And yet it was clear from his demeanor that he wanted a consensus — he wanted our moral support for any decision.
    I said cautiously, "If we smooth the border, that'll make it literally impossible for IA to exploit the defect, won't it?"
    Alison shook her head. "We don't know that. There may be a quantumlike component of spontaneous defections, even for statements that appear to be in perfect equilibrium. ''
    Yuen countered, "Then there could be spontaneous defections anywhere — even far from any border. Erasing the whole structure will guarantee nothing."
    "It will guarantee that IA won't find it! Maybe pin-point defections do occur, all the time — but the next time they're tested, they'll always revert. They're surrounded by explicit contradictions, they have no chance of getting a foothold. You can't compare a few transient glitches with this . . . armory of counter-mathematics!"
    The defect bristled on the screen like a giant caltrop. Alison and Yuen both turned to me expectantly. As I opened my mouth, the work station chimed. The software had examined the alternatives in detail: destroying the entire far side would take Luminous twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds — about a minute less than the time we had left. Sealing the border would take more than an hour.
    I said, "That can't be right."
    Alison groaned. "But it is! There's random interference going on at the border from other systems all the time — and doing anything finicky there means coping with that noise, fighting it. Charging ahead and pushing the border inward is different: you can exploit the noise to speed the advance. It's not a question of dealing with a mere surface versus dealing with a whole volume. It's more like . . . trying to carve an island into an absolutely perfect circle, while waves are constantly crashing on the beach — versus bulldozing the whole thing into the ocean."
    We had thirty seconds to decide — or we'd be doing neither today. And maybe Yuen had the resources to keep the map safe from IA, while we waited a month or more for another session on Luminous — but I wasn't prepared to live with that kind of uncertainty.
    "I say we get rid of the whole thing. Anything less is too dangerous. Future mathematicians will still be able to study the map — and if no one believes that the defect itself ever really existed, that's just too bad. IA is too close. We can't risk it."
    Alison had one hand poised above the keyboard. I turned to Yuen; he was staring
    at the floor with an anguished expression. He'd let us state our views — but in the end, it was his decision.
    He looked up, and spoke sadly but decisively.
    "Okay. Doit."
    Alison hit the key — with about three seconds to spare. I sagged into my chair, light-headed with relief.
    We watched the far side shrinking. The process didn't look quite as crass as bulldozing an island — more like dissolving some quirkily beautiful crystal in acid. Now that the danger was receding before our eyes, though, I was beginning to suffer faint pangs of regret. Our mathematics had coexisted with this strange anomaly for fifteen billion years, and it shamed me to think that within months of its discovery, we'd backed ourselves into a comer where we'd had no choice but to destroy it.
    Yuen seemed transfixed by the process. "So are we breaking the laws of