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"I'd be happy to, of course," Danchekker managed finally in a flat voice.
The sides of Danchekker's mouth moved upward mechanically to bare his teeth, but the rest of him remained immobile. Only then did Hunt see the look of stark horror in the eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. Then the pieces of what must have happened fell suddenly into place. Hunt grabbed his napkin from the table and clasped it to his mouth with a spluttering sound which he disguised as a cough. Rita, to one side, saw the expression that he was struggling to conceal.
"What is it?" she hissed in his ear. "What's so fu
"I'll tell you later," Hunt muttered, brushing away a tear.
CHAPTER FIVE
One of the things about working for Gregg Caldwell that suited Hunt was that Caldwell was able to function within a large bureaucracy without acquiring the mind-set of one. Through his career as a nucleonics scientist in England before joining UNSA, Hunt had found that small groups of capable and dedicated individuals were more effective than the armies assembled for large, managerially inaugurated research projects, where too much energy tended to be dissipated fruitlessly on communicating more and more about less and less. Caldwell expressed it succinctly by saying, "If a ship takes five days to cross the Atlantic, it doesn't mean that five ships will do it in one day." Danchekker was necessarily led to the same philosophy, since the number of people he was typically able to tolerate limited the effective horizons of his personal work space in any case.
The team hastily organized in the course of the following week comprised just four more people in addition to the two senior scientists, Hunt being nominally designated the head, since the subject was Multiverse physics, and physics was-literally-his department. Accompanying him would be Duncan Watt, his longstanding assistant from the Navcomms days, who had also moved to Goddard, while Danchekker in like fashion would be taking Sandy Holmes, one of the few individuals to have mastered his filing system, and who could decipher his notes. Duncan and Sandy had also accompanied Hunt and Danchekker to Jevlen on the investigation of mass psychoses that had led to the discovery of the Entoverse. Josef So
So
"What can I tell you?" Danchekker answered. Which was as good a way as any of saying something while saying nothing.
Thurien interstellar transportation worked on the same basis as their communications, which involved spi
The Thurien craft that took Hunt and the earlier group to Jevlen had been immense-more in the nature of a mini artificial world that Thuriens used for long stays in remote parts of the Galaxy, and in which some chose to reside permanently. The Ishtar, by contrast, was more in keeping with what most Terrans would have thought of as the dimensions of a "ship." It grew larger on the forward display screen inside the cabin as the shuttle from Virginia closed: bright yellow-gold in color, sleek and streamlined, flaring out into two crossed, curvy delta forms at the tail, designed like most Thurien craft for descent through planetary atmospheres without the rigmarole of intermediate transfers in orbit. At Earth, however, the several pla
A small reception committee of Thuriens was waiting to greet the arrivals inside the entry port. The first formality was to issue each of the Terrans with a flesh-colored disk about the size of a dime that attached behind the ear and coupled into the neural system to provide an audio-visual link to VISAR, which could then act as interpreter. The devices were known as "avcos"-for audio-visual coupler-and could be used down on Earth where equipment existed that could communicate with the orbiting Thurien h-space relays. This was true at Goddard, and Hunt still had one of the devices in his desk drawer from his last trip. But for little better reason than habit, he preferred to stick to a regular old-fashioned seefone when he was at home. A few people there wore their Thurien avco disks ostentatiously as a status symbol, making great shows of removing, reattaching, and pretending to clean them.