"Oh, stop looking for a dangling neurosis somewhere, Broussard," Hawkins said, managing a smile. "You know quite well that I've got absolutely nothing at all against the use of subspace for 'rapid transportation,' so to speak. It's just that I'm the sort of man who likes to know where he's going all the time. And out here, in this stuff, you lose your sense of direction. There's no up, no down, no in between. It took spacemen a long time to get accustomed to the wild freedom they found out in the middle of normal space. But at least there you could always head for a star if you got lost. Out here ..." He gestured futilely towards the blackness staring in at them from the window. They stood silently contemplating it for several moments.
"Eight minutes until zero. No 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 adaptation, and things would just look gray. And not too long after that, you'd stop 'seeing' entirely, as we think of seeing. Or, as a friend of mine once said, under those conditions you'd 'see' as much with your elbows as you would with your eyes. Funny, isn't it? We usually think of black as being the absence of light. And yet, in order to 'see' black, we've got to have at least a little light around every once in a while."