It was more than blindness. A blind man, a man whose eyes have lost their function, at least remembers what things looked like. A man whose optic brain center has been damaged doesn’t. I could remember what I’d come out here for—to find out if there were masses near enough to harm us—but I couldn’t remember how to do it. I touched a curved glass surface and knew that this was the machine that would tell me, if only I knew its secret.

Eventually my neck got sore, so I moved my head. That brought my eyes back into existence.

When we got the bubble pressurized, Elephant said, “Where were you? You’ve been gone half an hour.”

“And lucky at that. When you go out there, don’t look up.”

“Oh.”

That was the other half of the problem. Elephant and I had stopped communicating. He was not interested in saying anything, and he was not interested in anything I had to say.

It took me a good week to figure out why. Then I braced him with it.

“Elephant, there’s a word missing from our language.”

He looked up from the reading screen. If there hadn’t been a reading screen in the bubble, I don’t think we’d have made it. “More than one word,” he said. “Things have been pretty silent.”

“One word. You’re so afraid of using that word, you’re afraid to talk at all.”

“So tell me.”

“Coward.”

Elephant wrinkled his brows, then snapped off the screen. “All right, Bey, we’ll talk about it. First of all, you said it, I didn’t. Right?”

“Right. Have you been thinking it?”

“No. I’ve been thinking euphemisms like ‘overcautious’ and ‘reluctance to risk bodily harm.’ But since we’re on the subject, why were you so eager to turn back?”

“I was scared.” I let that word soak into him, then went on. “The people who trained me made certain that I’d be scared in certain situations. With all due respect, Elephant, I’ve had more training for space than you have. I think your wanting to land was the result of ignorance.”

Elephant sighed. “I think it would have been safe to land. You don’t. We’re not going to get anywhere arguing about it, are we?”

We weren’t. One of us was right, one wrong. And if I was wrong, then a pretty good friendship had gone out the air lock.

It was a silent trip.

We came out of hyperspace near the two Sirius suns. But that wasn’t the end of it, because we still faced a universe squashed by relativity. It took us almost two weeks to brake ourselves. The gravity drag’s radiator fin glowed orange-white for most of that time. I have no idea how many times we circled around through hyperspace for another run through the system.