noticeable deviations, Captain," came the voice from the bridge again.

"Very well," Captain Hawkins replied, breaking the brief silence between the two men. Then he went on, "Broussard, have you ever been out there in that stuff? Oh, I don't mean like now, in a ship or a rescue craft. I mean in a spacesuit, all by yourself."

The psychologist shook his head. "No, I never have." He paused for just a second, then added, "What's it really like?"

There were times, Hawkins thought, when even the phrasing of a simple question on Broussard's part carried a slight sting. But like the brief pain that accompanies the probing point of a hypodermic needle, the tiny barbs contained in the man's questions were soon forgotten. Hawkins smiled. "It's my own private guess of what hell will turn out to be. 'God forsaken,' did we say? That's just about it. We stopped to repair a ship once, and some of us had to go outside to work on it. I guess I was out there for less than three hours—no more than that. And yet I was almost a madman by the time they hauled me back inside. I can't explain why." His voice trailed off into nothingness. "I guess it was just the blackness that did it."

"Six minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

"Very well." For the first time Hawkins turned to face the psychologist. "During my training at the Academy they locked me up in a closet once, just as a joke. I was without light for hours, but it was nothing like that out there. You should know, Broussard. Why does it look so much blacker in that window now than any other black I've ever seen?"

Broussard looked the man over carefully before answering, wondering just exactly what sort of reply might be called for. "I think the reason is that you've got close to optimum conditions for it here in the observatory," he said momentarily. "You always get the blackest shade of black inside a ring of white light. Look at the window." Hawkins turned to do as directed. "There you've got a white frame surrounding the complete absence of light. That's just about as good as you can get. No wonder it looks so black to you."

Hawkins shook his head, not so much in disbelief as in wonder.

"As a matter of fact," the psychologist continued almost in a hurry. "If you stayed out in subspace all by yourself, with no ship near you and no light of your own, after a while it wouldn't seem black to you at all. You'd get cortical 

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