The operator showed an expression which plainly said it was about time, and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down. Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slow three-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for ten miles in Eden's atmosphere should be blaring. The supervisor stood and watched while he transferred the gnawing at his knuckles to his fingernails. He waited, with apprehensive satisfaction, for some angry colonist to come through and scream at them to turn off that unprintable-phrases siren. He braced himself and worked up some choice phrases of his own to scream back at the colonist for neglecting his duty--getting Extrapolation Headquarters here on Earth all worked up over nothing. He wondered if he dared threaten to send an Extrapolator out there to check them over. He decided the threat would have no punch. An E would pay no attention to his recommendation. He knew it, and the colonist would know it too. He began to wonder what excuse the colonist would have. "Just wanted to see if you home-office boys were on your toes," the insolent colonist would drawl. Probably something like that. He hoped the right words wouldn't fail him. But there was no response to the siren. "Lock the key down," he told the operator. "Keep it blasting until they wake up." He looked down the room and saw that a couple of the near operators were now frankly listening. "Get on with your work," he said loudly. "Pay attention to what you're recording." It was enough to cause several more heads to raise. "Now, now, now!" he chattered to the room at large. "This is nothing to concern the rest of you. Just a delayed report, that's all. Haven't you ever heard of a delayed report before?" He shouldn't have asked that, because of course they had. It was like asking a mountain climber if he had ever felt a taut rope over the razor edge of a precipice suddenly go slack. "But there's nothing any of you can do," he said. He tried to cover the plaintive note by adding, "And if you louse up your own messages ..." But he had threatened them so often that there was no longer any menace. He spent the next ten minutes hauling out the logs of Eden to see if they'd ever been tardy before. The logs covered two and a fraction years, two years and four months. The midgit-idgit scanner didn't pick up a single symbol to show that Eden had been even two seconds off schedule. The first year daily, the second year weekly, and now monthly. There wasn't a single hiccough from the machine to kick out an Extrapolator's signal to watch for anything unusual. Eden heretofore had presented about as much of an _outré_ problem as an Iowa cornfield. "You're really sure your equipment is working?" he asked again as he came back to stand behind the operator's chair. "They haven't answered yet."