“Remember, materials weren’t as durable in those days, and nothing they were using had been well tested. The men stopped their ship in the orbit of the moon, which by then was 230,000 miles behind them, and called base to say they’d aborted the mission.”

“You remember this pretty well. How come?”

“They drilled these stories into us again and again. Everything they tried to teach us was illustrated with something from history. It stuck.”

“Go on.”

“They called base and told them about their windows fogging up. Somebody decided it was dust, and someone else suddenly realized they’d launched the ship through one of the moon’s Trojan points.”

Elephant laughed, then coughed. “Wish I hadn’t breathed so much vacuum. I gather you’re leading up to something.”

“If the ship hadn’t stopped, it would have been wrecked. The dust would have torn it apart. The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.”

“Sounds paranoid.”

“Maybe it does to a flatlander. You come from a planet so kind to you, so seemingly adapted to you, that you think the whole universe is your oyster. You might remember my neutron star story. I’d have been killed if I hadn’t understood that tidal effect in time.”

“So you would. So you think flatlanders are all fools?”

“No, Elephant. Just not paranoid enough. And I refuse to apologize.”

“Who asked you?”

“I’ll land with you if you can tell me what made our hull turn to dust.”

Elephant crossed his arms and glared forward. I shut up and waited.

By and by he said, “Can we get home?”

“I don’t know. The hyperdrive motor will work, and we can use the gravity drag to slow us down to something like normal. Physically we should be able to do it.”

“Okay. Let’s go. But I’ll tell you this, Bey. If I were alone, I’d go down, and damn the hull.”

So we turned tail and ran, under protest from Elephant. In four hours we were far enough from Cannonball Express’s gravity well to enter hyperspace.

I turned on the hyperdrive, gasped, and turned it off just as fast as I could. We sat there shaking, and Elephant said, “We can inflate the bubble.”

“But can we get in?”

“It doesn’t have an air lock.”

We worked it, though. There was a pressure-control dial in the cabin, and we set it for zero; the electromagnetic field that folded the bubble would now inflate it without pressure. We went inside, pressurized it, and took off our helmets.

“We’re out of the radiation field,” said Elephant. “I looked.”

“Good.” You can go pretty far in even a couple of seconds of hyperdrive. “Now, there’s one thing I’ve got to know. Can you take that again?”

Elephant shuddered. “Can you?”

“I think so. I can do all the navigating if I have to.”

“Anything you can take, I can take.”

“Can you take it and stay sane?”

“Yes.”