“You got the wind up?”

“A little. Just enough.”

“Anything for a friend. You go first.”

There was just room to get our suits on one at a time. If the inner air lock door hadn’t been open, there wouldn’t have been that. We tried leaving our helmets thrown back, but they got in our way against the crash couches. So we taped them to the window in front of us.

I felt better that way, but Elephant clearly thought I’d flipped. “You sure you wouldn’t rather eat with your helmet on?”

“I hate suit food syrup. We can reach our helmets if we get a puncture.”

“What puncture? We’re in a General Products hull!”

“I keep remembering that the Outsiders knew that.”

“We’ve been through that.”

“Let’s go through it again. Assume they thought we might be killed anyway if we weren’t prepared. Then what?”

“Gronk.”

“Either they expected us to go out in suits and get killed, or they know of something that can reach through a General Products hull.”

“Or both. In which case the suits do us no good at all. Bey, do you know how long it’s been since a General Products hull failed?”

“I’ve never heard of it happening at all.”

“It never has. The puppeteers offer an enormous guarantee in case one does. Something in the tens of millions if someone dies as a result.”

“You’re dead right. I’ve been stupid. Go ahead and take off your suit.”

Elephant turned to look at me. “And you?”

“I’ll keep mine on. Do you believe in hunches?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. Except just this once.”

Elephant shrugged his shaggy eyebrows and went back to his telescope. By then we were six hours out from the nameless planet and decelerating.

“I think I’ve found an asteroid crater,” he said presently.

“Let’s see.” I had a look. “Yah, I think you’re right. But it’s damn near disappeared.”

He took the telescope back. “It’s round enough. Almost has to be a crater. Bey, why should it be so eroded?”

“It must be the interstellar dust. If it is, then that’s why there’s no atmosphere or lithosphere. But I can’t see the dust being that thick, even at these speeds.”

“Put it—”

“Yah.” I reached for my list.

“If we find one more anomaly, I’ll scream.”

Half an hour later we found life.

By then we were close enough to use the gravity drag to slow us. The beautiful thing about a gravity drag is that it uses very little power. It converts a ship’s momentum relative to the nearest powerful mass into heat, and all you have to do is get rid of the heat. Since the ST∞’s hull would pass only various ranges of radiation corresponding to what the puppeteers’ varied customers considered visible light, the shipbuilders had run a great big radiator fin out from the gravity drag. It glowed dull red behind us. And the fusion drive was off. There was no white fusion flame to hurt visibility.