“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.

“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?”