She quieted down immediately. Ryo glanced around and noticed that of the two dozen or so passengers on the shuttle, perhaps a fourth of them wore glazed looks and sat in their saddles as if in a trance. He’d been too absorbed by the view outside to notice it earlier. Now he looked questioningly at Wuu.

“The lady in distress experienced a severe attack of Outside. It particularly affects hive dwellers who spend most of their lives underground. An ancestral carryover that some of the race is still heir to, when we dwelt almost exclusively below ground and when to venture outside was to expose oneself to the prowling carnivores that then roamed the whole surface of Hivehom. This is probably her first flight and she suppressed the feeling as long as she could.”

“What about those?” Ryo indicated the strangely subdued passengers.

“The same problem, but those are experienced travelers. Certain drugs safely counteract the Outside. The side effects are minimal but obvious. He turned to inspect Ryo.

“You feel no fear, no sense of panic?”

“Not a thing.”

“Have you looked out the port?”

“I’ve been doing little else.

Wuu made a gesture of third-degree confidence mixed with mild curiosity. “Most Thranx on a first extraatmospheric journey experience a certain amount of mental discomfort. After repeated travel the discomfort passes. Some, of course, feel nothing. They are the exception rather than the rule. As I mentioned, I’ve done considerable traveling and therefore feel nothing at all. As for yourself, I should not be surprised that you are the exception in this way as well as in others.”

‘‘Open spaces have never bothered me,” Ryo explained. “That was one of the things, I think, that helped me to advance so rapidly in my profession.”

“Ah yes, the exploiter of new agricultural land. You put food on my table, so I won’t start in on the morality of butchering Willow-wane’s native jungle simply to plant asfi.”

It developed that Ryo was not quite as immune to the vagaries of Deep Space travel as he first thought. When the ship passed beyond the last of the system’s six planets and shifted into Space Plus he fell prey to the same nausea as everyone else, experienced or otherwise.

The stars became streaks and their colors changed as if they were being viewed through a shaded prism. Once the nausea passed there was ample time to enjoy the luxuries of middle-class shipboard life.

Days and nights fled apace, with the only indication of movement coming from the slowly changing starfield.

Eventually the passengers had to return to their cabins a last time. The ship dropped from Space Plus into normal space, stomachs were wrenched, and the stars resumed their normal colors and positions and shapes.

Ahead lay a bright and somehow familiar sun. There were twelve planets in the Hivehom system, the home world fully inhabited, of course, and three others less so. Several timeparts passed and then they were in orbit around Hivehom. The home world of the Thranx. The spawning place. The where-we-all-come-from.