Gregory Pelton
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Gregory Pelton is a fictional character from the short story "Flatlander", by Larry Niven. The story is part of Niven's Known Space series.
Gregory Pelton is nicknamed "Elephant", and the name is appropriate; he is huge, strong, stubborn, plodding, and dangerous to be around when he's angry. He is also one of the wealthiest men on Earth (his great-to-the-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth, a teleportation device) and he longs for adventure. He wants to do something noteworthy to distinguish himself from Earth's billions of other "flatlanders" (inheriting money doesn't count), so he and his friend Beowulf Shaeffer consult the mysterious aliens known as the Outsiders, for a very large fee, and ask them to find an "unusual and challenging" location to visit... and Elephant does not want to know what makes it unusual or challenging (a second question would double the price). After all, he tells Shaeffer, he has a General Products hull and is a seasoned space traveller; what can go wrong?
(Beowulf hates when people ask that question.)
The star system (more accurately, a protostar) the Outsiders told them of is travelling far faster than a normal star, indicating it may be extragalactic (that's not the unusual thing). Even with Pelton's powerful personal starship, it takes weeks to match orbits, and then they find that the star is much hotter than usual, and its only planet is radioactive (that's not the unusual thing either). While preparing for landing, Elephant mocks Beowulf for what he perceives as his paranoid tendencies, like wearing a spacesuit inside an indestructible spaceship hull. But Shaeffer's caution pays off when the hull suddenly disintegrates around them! Bey barely manages to get Elephant into an airtight chamber in time to save his life. Then comes the hard part; Shaeffer has to pilot the ship home with no hull, nothing to shield him from the mind-bending sight of what spacers call the "blind spot", the effect the sight of hyperspace has on the unprotected human mind.
It isn't until later that they (and the reader) figure out what really happened; the star system they entered was made of antimatter (and that was the unusual thing the Outsiders attempted to sell them in addition to the location, an offer Elephant didn't find deserving of an additional million stars). Thus, the heat and radiation (from interstellar dust and gasses annihilating themselves on the particles of antimatter in the star's solar wind). And thus also the dissolving of the hull; for, as the representatives of General Products tell them after Elephant angrily calls to get his money back, if enough of the atoms of the hull are lost to antimatter, the massive enhanced bonding of the hull's supermolecule simply unravels. If they had landed as planned, they would have gone up in a blaze of short-lived glory. Though they blackmail General Products (in the time-honored Puppeteer business practice) with the information that GP hulls are not in fact indestructible as advertised, making a tidy profit in the process, both our heroes are left feeling somehat sheepish about their actions, especially Beowulf. After all, you couldn't expect Elephant to know any better... he's just a flatlander.
