"And so?" Hugh asked suspiciously.
"No matter how we go in," Ren smiled, "we'll smash the ship and kill everybody—and we'll land safely."
"Are you crazy?" Hugh snorted.
"I—I'm not quite sure," Ren said seriously. "I think that we've run across a bit of matter that works from different basics than what we are used to. You might call it a different metaphysics. That's what it really amounts to."
A pain of remembrance appeared on his face.
"That's why I didn't get my degree," he said softly. "I insisted that it might be possible there were no absolute rules underlying all reality, but only relative rules that might be changeable. In other words, I questioned the validity of asserting that natural law was universal. They flunked me in stability."
"Yes, I know," Commander Dunnam said sympathetically. "One of the most unjust rules of modern education in the opinion of many, but no way of changing it unless the educators themselves did it. Since they all passed O.K. in stability, they think everyone else should. Maybe they're afraid they would be considered unstable if they wanted to make such a major change."
Ren glanced toward the screen that showed the magnified image of the interstellar wanderer, and back again to the commander.
"Of course," he said, "I'm trying to use ordinary basics transposed onto the basics of this system, which is wrong. Or it may be right. It might be better if we just turned around and went back. There's no way of knowing ahead of time whether we'd be killed on landing or not."