The skipper puzzled through the copy of Ernest's master's thesis. The lad--he was twenty-three then--had devoted it to children's folklore. The skipper, admittedly a simple man, wasn't sure it contributed profitably to the world's knowledge to spend a year in the study and explanation of _Winnie the Pooh_, or _Step on a crack/Break your mother's back_, or _The Wizard of Oz_. The skipper had gone to Space Prep at the age of fourteen and later to the Academy itself and there were obviously wide areas of childhood that had passed him by. He'd never heard of _Struwwelpeter_, for instance, or _Ibbety bibbety gibbety goat_, and he wondered if a grown man who immersed himself in this sort of thing was the one for the job. What was worse was that Hotaling, according to the University yearbook, was a poet. But when the skipper interviewed Hotaling and found him to be a lean, muscular young man who'd obviously had a haircut in the past week and who laughed genuinely at one of the skipper's more purple stories, he signed him on immediately. The skipper had one last thought. "You don't keep bees, do you?" "Not even in my bonnet," Ernest said. "Then we'll get along. Just keep your nursery rhymes to yourself." "Aye, aye, sir," said Ernest. * * * * * "Look," Ernest told the skipper, "I've studied their literature, if that's what it is, until I'm saturated with it. Maybe it doesn't make sense to you but I've worked out a sort of pattern. It's an alien culture, sure, and there are gaps in it, but what there is fits together." "All right," the skipper said. "I'm not questioning your findings. I just want to know why it has to be in that ridiculous rhyme." "Because they were a poetic people, that's why. And it doesn't _have_ to be in rhyme. I could give you the literal translation, but it was rhymed originally and when I make it rhyme in English too you get a more exact idea of the kind of people they were." "I suppose so," the skipper said. "As long as we don't have to report to the Flagship in the sonnet form I guess I can put up with it. I just don't want to become the laughing stock of the fleet." "It's no laughing matter," Ernest said. "It's pretty tragic, in any number of ways. In the first place, as Rosco suspected, they communicated by radio. But they had no privacy and couldn't hide anything from anybody. They were always listened in on by the big boys in the palace." "How do you know?" "By the coil I worked from. It's a listening-storing device. These aren't official records I've transcribed; they're the everyday expressions of everyday people. And every one of them had been taken down and stored away, presumably so it could be used against the person who expressed it, if it ever became necessary. "But they couldn't always get through to the person they wanted to reach, even though they got through to the coil. Here's a sad little lover's lament, for instance: