Hikonojo Ohashi, Francine's opposite number with the Japanese-Korean and Sino-Tibetan team, already sat at his place on the other side of the table. The Japanese psychologist was grasping, pen fashion, a thin pointed brush, making notes in ideographic shorthand. Francine closed the door. Ohashi spoke without looking up: "We're early." He was a trim, neat little man: flat features, smooth cheeks, and even curve of chin, remote dark eyes behind the inevitable thick lenses of the Oriental scholar. Francine tossed her briefcase onto the table, and pulled out a chair opposite Ohashi. She wiped away the grit with a handkerchief before sitting down. The ever present dirt, the monotonous landscape, her own frustration--all combined to hold her on the edge of anger. She recognized the feeling and its source, stifled a wry smile. "No, Hiko," she said. "I think we're late. It's later than we think." "Much later when you put it that way," said Ohashi. His Princeton accent came out low, modulated like a musical instrument under the control of a master. "Now we're going to be banal," she said. Immediately, she regretted the sharpness of her tone, forced a smile to her lips. "They gave us no deadline," said Ohashi. "That is one thing anyway." He twirled his brush across an inkstone. "Something's in the air," she said. "I can feel it." "Very much sand in the air," he said. "You know what I mean," she said. "The wind has us all on edge," he said. "It feels like rain. A change in the weather." He made another note, put down the brush, and began setting out papers for the conference. All at once, his head came up. He smiled at Francine. The smile made him look immature, and she suddenly saw back through the years to a serious little boy named Hiko Ohashi. "It's been seven months," she said. "It stands to reason that they're not going to wait forever." "The usual gestation period is two months longer," he said. She frowned, ignoring the quip. "But we're no closer today than we were at the beginning!" Ohashi leaned forward. His eyes appeared to swell behind the thick lenses. "Do you often wonder at their insistence that _we_ communicate with _them_? I mean, rather than the other way around?" "Of course I do. So does everybody else." He sat back. "What do you think of the Islamic team's approach?" "You know what I think, Hiko. It's a waste of time to compare all the Galactics' speech sounds to passages from the Koran." She shrugged. "But for all we know actually they could be closer to a solution than anyone else in...." The door behind her banged open. Immediately, the room rumbled with the great basso voice of Theodore Zakheim, psychologist with the Ural-Altaic team. "Hah-haaaaaaa!" he roared. "We're all here now!" Light footsteps behind Zakheim told Francine that he was accompanied by Emile Goré of the Indo-European Latin-Root team. Zakheim flopped onto a chair beside Francine. It creaked dangerously to his bulk.