The three don’t want to go. Tefler is worried about medical risks, Tal fears she'll bungle the mission, and Harrin wants to stay at his desk doing cosmology problems. But Janeway gives them no choice. She also gives them Palm Pilot-like devices with their instructions for the upcoming away mission.

The away mission begins. Tal is depressed because Janeway double-checks everything she does. Harrin is actively rude to the Captain, whom he considers his intellectual inferior despite her apparent grasp of much of his cosmological jargon. There is sarcasm, bitterness.

Suddenly, with a jolt, the Flyer smacks into a "spatial fluctuation" from an unknown source, and is left drifting, warp engines offline and unable to contact the mother ship.

Harrin believes they were hit by a "dark matter proto-comet," something on which he'd written a paper. It's attracted to the antimatter of the Flyer's engine, but he emphasizes the object is a "mindless astrophysical phenomenon," not something sentient.

Nonetheless, its force is "nontrivial," so another hit could rip off the hull.

Tal worries that her pathetic lack of computer savvy -- merely an annoyance on Voyager -- will get them all killed "out here." She tells Janeway she only got through the academy by cramming, and because Starfleet was eager for Bajoran applicants. Janeway tries to be reassuring, but this effort falls flat.

Tension grows. Harrin yells at Tefler for getting distracted. Tefler taunts Harrin for his lack of friends.

Traveling slowly, on the backup impulse engine, the Flyer works its way toward a giant gas planet that has radiogenic rings that could provide some fuel for the warp drive. But something hits them again.

Janeway tries a hailing message, despite Harrin's insistence that no intelligent life form is out there. Suddenly there's a hissing sound. Moreover, Tefler turns green and briefly vanishes -- and when he returns has some kind of life form crawling beneath the flesh of his neck.

After some turmoil, they manage to extract the alien -- a sluglike creature. It crawls onto a computer console. Harrin shoots it, defying a direct order from Janeway. Tefler, having formed a psychic bond with the entity, translates what it was thinking before its untimely death: "Do not belong."

There is little time to contemplate the ambiguity of that, because a hissing horde of aliens is in pursuit. The Flyer takes refuge amid the debris of the gas giant's rings. There is talk. Tefler, having undergone this ordeal, may have shed his hypochondria.

Janeway wants the three crew members to use the escape pod while she stays aboard the Flyer and distracts the aliens. But Tal and Tefler refuse. They may be incompetents but they’re the only crew she has just now.

Harrin goes it alone; Janeway wishes him luck. But, it soon emerges, he's not saving himself without regard to the others but rather taking on the aliens single-handedly so the Flyer can escape. He wants to know "a few seconds of real life," rather than the hollow calculations of astronomical theory.