“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.”

“Then we can trade off. But if you change your mind, let me know that instant. A lot of good men have left their marbles in the Blind Spot, and all they had were a couple of windows.”

“I believe you. Indeed I do, sir. How do we work it?”

“We’ll have to chart a course through the least dense part of space. The nearest inhabited world is Kzin. I hate to risk asking help from the kzinti, but we may have to.”

“Tell you what, Bey. Let’s at least try to reach Jinx. I want to use that number of yours to give the puppeteers hell.”

“Sure. We can always turn off to something closer.”

I spent an hour or so working out a course. When I’d finished, I was pretty sure we could navigate it without either of us having to leave the bubble more than once every twenty-four hours to look at the mass indicator. We threw fingers for who got the first watch, and I lost.

We put on our suits and depressurized the bubble. As I crawled through the manhole, I saw Elephant opaqueing the bubble wall.

I squeezed into the crash couch, all alone among the stars. They were blue ahead and red behind when I finished turning the ship. I couldn’t find the protosun.