_Like a great uncouth bear!_ she thought. "Do you always have to be so noisy?" she asked. Goré slammed the door behind them. "Naturally!" boomed Zakheim. "I am noisy! It's my nature, my little puchkin!" Goré moved behind Francine, passing to the head of the table, but she kept her attention on Zakheim. He was a thick-bodied man, thick without fat, like the heaviness of a wrestler. His wide face and slanting pale blue eyes carried hints of Mongol ancestry. Rusty hair formed an uncombed brush atop his head. Zakheim brought up his briefcase, flopped it onto the table, rested his hands on the dark leather. They were flat slab hands with thick fingers, pale wisps of hair growing down almost to the nails. * * * * * She tore her attention away from Zakheim's hands, looked down the table to where Goré sat. The Frenchman was a tall, gawk-necked man, entirely bald. Jet eyes behind steel-rimmed bifocals gave him a look of down-nose asperity like a comic bird. He wore one of his usual funereal black suits, every button secured. Knob wrists protruded from the sleeves. His long-fingered hands with their thick joints moved in constant restlessness. "If I may differ with you, Zak," said Goré, "we are _not_ all here. This is our same old group, and we were going to try to interest others in what we do here." Ohashi spoke to Francine: "Have you had any luck inviting others to our conferences?" "You can see that I'm alone," she said. "I chalked up five flat refusals today." "Who?" asked Zakheim. "The American Indian-Eskimo, the Hyperboreans, the Dravidians, the Malayo-Polynesians and the Caucasians." "Hagglers!" barked Zakheim. "I, of course, can cover us with the Hamito-Semitic tongues, but...." He shook his head. Goré turned to Ohashi. "The others?" Ohashi said: "I must report the polite indifference of the Munda and Mon-Kmer, the Sudanese-Guinean and the Bantu." "Those are big holes in our information exchange," said Goré. "What are they discovering?" "No more than we are!" snapped Zakheim. "Depend on it!" "What of the languages not even represented among the teams here on the international site?" asked Francine. "I mean the Hottentot-Bushmen, the Ainu, the Basque and the Australian-Papuan?" Zakheim covered her left hand with his right hand. "You always have me, my little dove." "We're building another Tower of Babel!" she snapped. She jerked her hand away. "Spurned again," mourned Zakheim. Ohashi said: "_Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech._" He smiled. "Genesis eleven-seven." Francine scowled. "And we're missing about twenty percent of Earth's twenty-eight hundred languages!" "We have all the significant ones," said Zakheim. "How do _you_ know what's significant?" she demanded. "Please!" Goré raised a hand. "We're here to exchange information, not to squabble!"