After he was gone, though, Stern, gloomy and impatient, wondered whether the younger man's optimism was justified. Suppose the Commander refused and he had to wait more than three months, cooped up and in coventry, before he could find out whether he was right? This project had turned out to be one of psychology rather than semantics but everything, absolutely everything, would be affected if he--. The intercom speaker grated in response to someone's breath. "Stern to Commander's quarters on the double!" shouted Linder. Grinning with relief, he jumped up, at the same time unlocking a reel of magnetic tape from the projector housing. He hurried along the catwalk to the bow where the Commander was waiting, scowl and all. "No time for apologetic chit-chat," Linder snapped. "Crawford here has spoken to me and I'm interested. Not convinced, just interested. What do you propose doing?" "I need the projector to test out my wider conclusions, sir." "You have one in your cabin, don't you? Your inventory statement should show you do." "It can't project a reel at slow enough speed, sir. It wasn't designed for the kind of analysis I'm suggesting." "Oh," he muttered half-mockingly, glancing toward Barnes, "so you have a reel with you?" "Yes, and several more back in the cabin. They're blur pictures, garbles we picked up when we were hovering above Nodar." "You're wasting the Commander's valuable time," Barnes shouted. "All nonsense if you ask me!" "Only because you have a one-tracked mind." Stern laughed at his own remark. "That may turn out to be very funny in the next few minutes." "Get on with it, Stern, before I change _my_ mind," ordered the Commander. "Yes, sir!" He quickly slipped the reel onto the projector and, setting it for a very slow speed, turned the machine on. The screen showed the usual Nodarian television blur. "There you are," Barnes said, "a complete waste of time!" Disregarding him, Stern twisted the speed dial into slower and slower positions; all the while watching the screen. Suddenly, as projection speed came down to six percent of the speed at which it had originally been received, they all gasped. They seemed to be looking at the performance of some kind of drama with perfectly normal human characters but the figures were sufficiently transparent for another set of characters with another distinctive background to be seen behind them and these seemed to be acting out a separate drama. All the while equally transparent complex equations, charts and diagrams were pouring across the screen. "That's what _we_ find to be a blur!" observed Stern. "They speed up their picture signal during transmission," Linder said, "and slow it down at the receiving end." He stopped, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "No, that can't be it. In the Reception Center Building and at their Central, too, they were looking _directly_ at such blurs!"