“Well, that’s out, then.” Cloud frowned in concentration, the fingers of his left hand drumming almost soundlessly on the table’s plastic top. “Nadine, you can’t send simultaneously to both Vesta and me, because we can’t tune ourselves into resonance with you, as a real telepath could. However, could you read me and send my thoughts to Vesta, and do it fast enough to keep up? As fast as I talk, say?” “Oh, easily. I don’t have to tune sharply to receive—unless there’s a lot of interference, of course—and even then, Vesta can read my shorthand. She learned it before we met you.” “Hm . . . m. Interesting. Let’s try it out. I’ll think at you, you put it down in shorthand. You, Vesta, tape it in Spanish. Get your notebook and recorder . . . ready? Let’s go!” There ensued a strange spectacle. Cloud, leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed, mumbled to himself in English, to slow his thoughts down to approximately two hundred words per minute. Nadine, paying no visible attention to the man, wrote unhurried, smoothly-flowing—most of the time—symbols. Vesta, throat-mike in place and yellow-eyed gaze nailed to the pencil’s point, kept pace effortlessly—most of the time. “That’s all. Play it back, Vesta. If you girls got half of that, you’re _good_.” The speaker came to life, giving voice to a completely detailed and extremely technical report on the extinction of an imaginary atomic vortex, and as the transcription proceeded Cloud’s amazement deepened. It was evident, of course, that neither of the two translators knew anything at all about many of the scientific technicalities involved. Nevertheless the Manarkan had put down—and Vesta had recorded in good, idiomatic Galactic Spanish—an intelligent layman’s idea of what it was that had been left out. That impromptu, completely unrehearsed report would have been fully informative to any expert of the Vortex Control Laboratory! “Girls, you _are_ good—_very_ good.” Cloud paid deserved tribute to ability. “First chance we get, I’ll split a bottle of fayalin with you. Now we’d better hit the sack. We land early in the morning, and since we’re going to stay here a while we’ll have to go through quarantine and customs. So pack your bags and have ’em ready for inspection.” They landed at the spaceport of Tommie’s home town, which Cloud, after hearing Vesta’s literal translation of its native name, had entered in his log as “Mingia.” They passed their physicals and healths easily enough—the requirements for leaving a planet of warm-blooded oxygen-breathers are so severe and so comprehensive that the matter of landing on a similar one is almost always a matter of simple routine. “Manarkan doctors we know of old; you are welcome indeed. We see very few Tellurians or Vegians, but the standards of those worlds are very high and we are glad to welcome you. But Chickladoria? I never heard of it—we’ve had no one from that planet since I took charge of this port of entry. . . .”