In the morgue, Dr. Y Chi Tung, who still slept peacefully as he had since the moment he reached his hammock, muttered quietly in his sleep, "Confusion--" * * * * * Mike snapped awake and glanced guiltily at the clock. Six hours had passed. A situation report from the Cow was the first thing on his agenda any time that he had been out of contact for any length of time, flare or not. It was not his job to be in constant contact with the complete situation of the ship and its vast complexities; he was not the captain. Nor was it in the manuals that he should have access to the computer's huge memory banks and abilities other than through "channels"--i.e., Bessie. But the book definition of the information he needed for his job, and his own criteria, were somewhat different, and he had built on Earth and installed shortly after he came aboard, a subcontrol link which put him in direct contact with the placid-Cow. His original intention in rigging the link had been to use the calculator for that occasional math problem which might be more quickly resolved with her help; but then the criteria of needed information, curiosity, or both, had got the better of him, and the secret panel hidden in the legitimate control panels of an engineer's console was actually quite a complete link, covering all of the Cow's multiple functions without interfering in any was with Bessie's control links, or revealing its existence. This linkage gave Mike the only direct access to the computer's store of information and abilities other than that of the operator at the control console. And Mike's secret pride was the vocoder circuit with which he had terminated his link, originated because a teletype system similar to that used at the control console would have been too obvious; and his nimble fingers got all tangled up on a keyboard anyhow. Bessie might speak to the Cow through the teletype link and switches of her control console, but only Mike had the distinction of being able to speak directly to the big computer, and get the complacent, somewhat mooing answers; and only Mike knew of the existence of the vocoder aboard. It had taken some care to get used to the literal-minded conversation that resulted; but eventually Mike felt he had worked out a satisfactory communications ability with the overly obvious "cow." What he wanted now was a situation report. If he simply asked for that, however, he'd have received such miles of data that he'd have been listening for hours. So instead he broke his question down into the facets that he needed. In a few minutes he had elicited the information that the solar flare was now predicted to be terminated and the major part of the flare protons past their solar orbital position within another ten hours; that Earth co-ordinates had shifted, indicating their own orbital shift to be a trifle over thirty-seven kilometers north in the past eight hours.