"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 funny?"

"I'll tell you later," Hunt muttered, brushing away a tear.

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 Sonnebrandt had been recruited without too much persuasion. And he in turn had urged for the inclusion of a Chinese theoretician that he had been working with, a Madam Xyen Chien, who had set up a laboratory in Xinjiang that was already duplicating some aspects of earlier Ganymean physics involving artificial spacetime deformation. Direct as always, Caldwell had contacted her personally, and she had as good as agreed before the end of his call. The rest had been pretty straightforward. Although China still retained some vestige of the authoritarianism of times gone by, nobody there was going to argue with an invitation to send one of their leading scientists to Thurien. In fact, Madam Xyen was on the list that the party of Thuriens currently in eastern Asian had arranged to visit, and she would be returning with them directly to the orbiting Ishtar to meet the rest of the Terran group there. UNSA administration needed a name for the project. Since the aim was to investigate TRAns Muliverse communication, Hunt settled on "Tramline."

Sonnebrandt joined the rest of the group at Goddard a day before the Ishtar's scheduled departure for an overview and briefing. They flew out early the next morning to be shuttled up to orbit from the UNSA launch terminal in Virginia. As fate would have it, the flight up turned out to be the same one that the travel agency had booked for Mildred, who was also traveling from the DC area. "What a wonderful surprise, Christian!" she declared when she came aboard, festooned with bags and purses, and found them there. "You were holding back on me. You had this planned all along!"

"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 spinning artificially generated charged black holes up to speeds that drew them out into toroids. The singularity deformed to become aperture through the center, which could be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects and gave access to the hyperrealm known as h-space that connected the universe (or, more strictly now, "our" universe, out of the countless universes making up the Multiverse) by paths that bypassed the limitations of ordinary spacetime. The difference, however, was that while communications could be effected via microscopic-size ports located conveniently close to Earth in satellites or, at the cost of some heavy structural engineering, down on the surface, transportation required ports large enough to admit whatever was being transported. Projecting such ports where and when they were needed was one of the things that VISAR handled as part of its function as general manager of the infrastructure that the Thurien civilization rested on. The energy to create the toroids was also directed through h-space, produced by the consumption of matter from the cores of burnt-out stars at colossal generating systems constructed in older parts of the local galaxy. Projecting transportation-size ports into planetary systems would have produced gravitational disturbances sufficient to create havoc with clocks and calendars. Standard practice was therefore to project them far enough away outside for such effects to be negligible. Hence, vessels were needed to get to them. Thurien interstellar craft used regular gravitic drives-essentially the principle that the Shapieron had been built around-to travel to an entry port, and from the exit port to the final destination. This meant that a typical point-to point journey between star systems would take in the order of a few days.

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 planned surface bases with facilities to service them were still under construction. In the meantime, there was no need for such clumsy provisions as fitting Thurien and Terran vessels with compatible docking hardware. The Ishtar simply projected a force shell from its docking-port side to enclose a zone between itself and the shuttle, and filled it with air. The passengers were conveyed across the intervening space, open to the void and the stars, by similar means, on an invisible conveyor-somewhat unnerving for first-timers, but fast and easy. With the larger Thurien craft things were even simpler: they contained internal docking bays that opened to admit the entire surface shuttle, capable of accommodating a dozen or more at a time.

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.