Crashlander

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.

More than half the view was empty space. I found myself looking thoughtfully at the air lock. It was behind and to the left, a metal oblong standing alone at the edge of the deck, with both doors tightly closed. The inner door had slammed when the pressure dropped, and now the air lock mechanisms guarded the pressure inside against the vacuum outside in both directions. Nobody inside to use the air, but how do you explain that to a pressure sensor?

I was procrastinating. The ship was aimed; I clenched my teeth and sent the ship into hyperspace.

The Blind Spot, they call it. It fits.

There are ways to find the blind spot in your eye. Close one eye, put two dots on a piece of paper, and bring the paper toward you, focusing on one of the dots. If you hold the paper just right, the other dot will suddenly vanish.

Let a ship enter hyperspace with the windows transparent, and the windows will seem to vanish. So will the space enclosing them. Objects on either side stretch and draw closer together to fill the missing space. If you look long enough, the Blind Spot starts to spread; the walls and the things against the walls draw even closer to the missing space until they are engulfed.

It's all in your mind, they tell me. So?

I turned the key, and half my view was Blind Spot. The control board stretched and flowed. The mass-indicator sphere tried to wrap itself around me. I reached for it, and my hands were distorted, too. With considerable effort I put them back at my sides and got a grip on myself.

There was one fuzzy green line in the plastic distortion that had been a mass indicator. It was behind and to the side. The ship could fly itself until Elephant's turn came. I fumbled my way to the manhole and crawled through.

* * *

Hyperspace was only half the problem.

It was a big problem. Every twenty-four hours one of us had to go out there, see if there were any dangerous masses around, drop back to normal space to take a fix and adjust course. I found myself getting unbearably tense during the few hours before each turn. So did Elephant. At these times we didn't dare talk to each other.

On my third trip I had the bad sense to look up — and went more than blind. Looking up, there was nothing at all in my field of vision, nothing but the Blind Spot.

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.