We looked at each other, waiting. But there was nothing to say. Except, Elephant, look! We don’t have a hull no more! Isn’t that remarkable?

I sighed, turned to the control board, and began nursing the fusion drive to life. From what I could see of the ship, nothing seemed to be floating away. Whatever had been fixed to the hull must also have been fixed to other things.

“What are you doing, Bey?”

“Getting us out of here. Uh, you can scream now.”

“Why? I mean, why leave?”

He’d flipped. Flatlanders are basically unstable. I got the drive pushing us at low power, turned off the gravity drag, and turned to face him. “Look, Elephant. No hull.” I swept an arm around me. “None.”

“But what’s left of the ship is still mine?”

“Uh, yah. Sure.”

“I want to land. Can you talk me out of it?”

He was serious. Completely so. “The landing legs are intact,” he went on. “Our suits can keep out the radiation for three days. We could land and take off in twelve hours.”

“We probably could.”

“And we spent going on two months getting here.”

“Right.”

“I’d feel like an idiot getting this close and then turning for home. Wouldn’t you?”

“I would, except for one thing. And that one thing says you’re landing this ship over my unconscious body.”

“All right, the hull turned to dust and blew away. What does that mean? It means we’ve got a faulty hull, and I’m going to sue the hind legs off General Products when we get back. But do you know what caused it?”

“No.”

“So why do you assume it’s some kind of threat?”

“Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. I turned the ship until it was tail down to Cannonball Express. “Now. We’ll be there in three hours if you insist on landing. It’s your ship, just as you say. But I’m going to try to talk you out of it.”

“That’s fair.”

“Have you had space-pilot training?”

“Naturally.”

“Did it include a history of errors course?”

“I don’t think so. We got a little history of the state of the art.”

“That’s something. You remember that they started out with chemical fuels and that the first ship to the asteroids was built in orbit around Earth’s moon?”

“Uh huh.”

“This you may not have heard. There were three men in that ship, and when they were launched, it was in an orbit that took them just slightly inside the moon’s orbit, then out again and away. About thirty hours after launching the men noticed that all their ports were turning opaque. A concentration of dust in their path was putting little meteor pits all through the quartz. Two of the men wanted to continue on, using instruments to finish their mission. But the third man was in command. They used their rockets and stopped themselves dead.