There was no pressure against the seat of the pants, no crawling sensation in the pit of the stomach, no feel of motion. But Elephant, who was talking about a Jinxian frail he’d picked up in a Chicago bar, stopped just as she was getting ready to tear the place apart because some suicidal idiot had insulted her.

Somebody heavy was sitting down on the universe.

He came down slowly, like a fat man cautiously letting his weight down on a beach ball. From inside the bubble it looked like all the stars and nebulas around us were squeezing themselves together. The Outsiders on the ribbons outside never moved, but Elephant said something profane, and I steeled myself to look up.

The stars overhead were blue-white and blazing. Around us, they were squashed together; below, they were turning red and winking out one by one. It had taken us a week to get out of the solar system, but the Outsider ship could have done it in five hours.

The radio spoke. “Sirs, our crewmen will remove your ship from ours, after which you will be on your own. It has been a pleasure to do business with you.”

A swarm of Outsider crewmen hauled us through the maze of basking ramps and left us. Presently the Outsider ship vanished like a pricked soap bubble, gone off on its own business.

In the strange starlight Elephant let out a long, shaky sigh. Some people can’t take aliens. They don’t find puppeteers graceful and beautiful; they find them horrifying, wrong. They see kzinti as slavering carnivores whose only love is fighting, which is the truth, but they don’t see the rigid code of honor or the self-control which allows a kzinti ambassador to ride a human-city pedwalk without slashing out with his claws at the impertinent stabbing knees and elbows. Elephant was one of those people.

He said, “Okay,” in amazed relief. They were actually gone. “I’ll take the first watch, Bey.”

He did not say, “Those bastards would take your heart as collateral on a tenth-star loan.” He didn’t see them as that close to human.

“Fine,” I said, and went into the control bubble. The Fast Protosun was a week away. I’d been in a suit for hours, and there was a shower in the extension bubble.

If Elephant’s weakness was aliens, mine was relativity.

The trip through hyperspace was routine. I could take the sight of the two small windows turning into blind spots, becoming areas of nothing, which seemed to draw together the objects around them. So could Elephant; he’d done some flying, though he preferred the comfort of a luxury liner. But even the best pilot occasionally has to drop back into the normal universe to get his bearings and to assure his subconscious that the stars are still there.