Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks loomed up out of the void.
"You do not need the bandages," Langford said, a deep solicitude in his voice. "If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My thoughts would guide you to it."
"My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged," Joan replied. "You must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps."
"If it helps that's all that matters," Langford assured her. "Forget I put my oar in."
"Don't think about the ship for a minute," Joan said. "Make your mind a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it clearly I'll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now."
Joan paused, as though she didn't quite know how to make the complexity of the problem clear to her husband. "I can't explain the power," she said; "I know so little about 'time', far less than the physicists think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize 'time' as a stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in 'the past' and in the 'probable future'. They can travel along 'time' in either direction at will."
"But you do not think of it as an actual journey?" Langford asked; "you merely shut your eyes and see?"
Joan shook her head. "It isn't quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is never simple; it's accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It's a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging prisms. Objects get in the way and there's doubt, uncertainty. Sometimes it's sheer torment.
"Sometimes I can't see at all. And even when I can see there's a curious, almost terrifying sense of wrongness about it."
"You mean you feel guilty?"