"Welcome back, Vic," the familiar voice of VISAR said, seemingly in his ear but actually activated inside his head. "I see you're getting restless again." The disk also projected images into the visual field when required. This wasn't the full Thurien total-neural experience, but it afforded universal voice communication to anywhere, with supplementary visuals that could be generated from the optical neuronics of senders using their eyes effectively as TV cameras. Once it caught on, it would be the end of the line for the Terran phone business, Hunt supposed.

"Hello, VISAR. Yes, we're back in your territory again." Hunt faced the waiting Thuriens. "So who have we here?"

The deputation was headed by the Ishtar's first officer, Bressin Nylek, who had come to pay compliments on behalf of the ship's commander. It seemed that Calazar had sent a note personally to make sure that Hunt's party was well taken care of. Madam Xyen Chien was aboard and would join them after they had settled in. As was normal Thurien practice by now with vessels sent to Earth, a section of the ship had been adapted for Terran tastes and proportions-the average Ganymean was around eight feet tall. After taking them there, the Thuriens would stop by the lounge area later.

"Who is this that I'm hearing from?" Mildred inquired, looking around after experimenting with her disk. "Are you the driver?"

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say," VISAR answered, coming in on everyone's circuit since she had made the question general.

"Can you tell me about Lynx? Is she all right? She came up in her case with the baggage."

"Who's Lynx?" Hunt asked subvocally.

"Her cat," VISAR returned. Then, in a more public-sounding voice, "Never better. A steward will bring her to your cabin."

"Ah, splendid. I couldn't leave her in Washington. I know nobody there would have fed her correctly. She's very highly strung and diet-sensitive, you know."

"God help us all," Hunt heard Danchekker mutter, turning his head away.

As in their cities back home, the Thuriens also employed their gravitic technology to shape the environments inside their spacecraft. Since "up" and "down" could be defined locally and vary progressively from place to place, interiors didn't conform to the layers-of-boxes theme reflected in practically all Terran designs regardless of the attempts to disguise it. Everything merged in a confusion of corridors, shafts, and intersecting spaces, surfaces that served as floors in one place curving to become walls somewhere else with no sense of rotation as one passed from one to the other. Through it all, Thuriens were being conveyed unconcernedly this way and that on by currents of force similar to that which had brought the new arrivals across from the shuttle, traversing the ship in all directions like invisible elevators. But when they came to the Terran section of the ship, everything suddenly became rectilinear, verticality reasserted itself, and recognizable walls and floors emerged around corridors leading past lines of doors. Because that was what Terrans were used to, and how they liked things to be.

Hunt's bags had already arrived in his cabin when the party's Thurien escorts delivered him to the door. VISAR could have guided them, of course, but the personal touch was nice-presumably a part of the crew's response to Calazar's prompting. The interior was comfortable and showed the usual Thurien knack for thinking of everything, Hunt saw as he deposited the office case that he had carried with him and hung his overjacket in the closet. A coffeepot and ingredients stood on a side table, and a robe and slippers were laid out in the bathroom. He came back out to the main room of the cabin and checked the selection of drinks and snacks in the cold storage by the coffeemaker and cabinet above. "Aha, gotcha, VISAR," he murmured. "You're slipping. No Guinness."

"On tap at the bar in the lounge area," the computer replied. Hunt sighed and went back out from the cabin to find the lounge area, where he had arranged to meet Josef Sonnebrandt.

Sonnebrandt was already there, sitting in an armchair at a corner table with an Oriental woman that Hunt recognized from pictures accompanying various writings of hers that he had read as Xyen Chien. Danchekker and Mildred were a short distance away with two Thuriens who seemed to be the focus of Mildred's attentions. A number of other Terrans that Hunt hadn't met were also dispersed around the room, many of them again Asian. Apparently, a group was going back with the Ishtar to reciprocate the Thurien visit. The bar was appropriately stocked with Eastern beers, wines, other beverages, and foods too, Hunt noticed.

The German stood as Hunt joined them-a gesture one didn't see very often these days. He was medium in height and build, with a somewhat overgrown mane of dark, curly hair, dressed casually in a khaki bush shirt with chest pockets and epaulettes, and over it a Western style brown leather vest. "Dr. Hunt. We meet face to face at last," he greeted. "So this is a Thurien starship. You have been in them before, of course. At least, we will remain sane in this part of it, yes? Out there is like being carried through an Escher drawing."

Madam Xyen was perhaps around fifty, as far as Hunt could judge, allowing for the tendency he'd noticed for Orientals to look younger than Westerners thought they should. Her hair was tied high, secured by a jeweled silver clip, and she wore a plain lilac dress with a dark blue shoulder cape. She had a composed air about her, taking in Hunt with a long, penetrating look from dark, depthless eyes that seemed to read everything that external appearances could convey; but her face softened into an easy enough smile when he introduced himself. Hunt's first impression was of a person totally in control, who saw the world for precisely what it was, without pretensions or delusions, and revealed back to it in turn just as much of herself and her thoughts as she chose to.

A four-foot-high serving robot floating a few inches above the floor on some kind of Thurien g-cushion arrived at the table to ask Hunt what it could get for him. He settled for a pot of green Chinese tea and an Indonesian dish that sounded like a spicy meat-and-vegetable pita bread sandwich. "Do you have a name we should use?" he asked the table attendant.

"No, sir. Such has never been the custom." Uncannily, whatever was guiding it reproduced a perfect Jeeves intonation.

"Then from now on, you are…" Hunt eyed its silvery metallic curves, carrying tray, and manipulator appendages thoughtfully for a moment, "Vercingetorix… No, wait, Sir Vercingetorix. Aptly to be known as Sir Ver. What do you think?"

"As you wish, sir."

Chien chuckled delightedly. "Brilliant," Sonnebrandt, acknowledged, raising his glass toward Hunt. It looked as if it contained a lager beer.

"Is this one of your sidelines, VISAR?" Hunt inquired as the robot glided Jeevishly away.

"I suppose you could say, a distant cousin," VISAR replied in his head. "Mainly locally autonomous, but when it gets hit with something like that, it checks back with me."

After some initial socializing, the conversation got down to the business at hand. The first thing that Sonnebrandt and Chien wanted to hear was Hunt's account of the encounter with his alter ego in his own words. It was one of the few occasions when Hunt regretted not availing himself of the option to keep a recorded log of his phone exchanges in the way many people did. Maybe it had something to do with his English upbringing, but it always seemed to him to smack of lawsuit phobia, security paranoia, and other practices of the neurotic society now fading into history. It was persistently rumored that the communications companies still kept copies of everything that flowed through their channels anyway, but requests from the top levels of UNSA, stressing the importance of the matter, had produced only apologetic denials and assurance that the claim was an urban legend from way back that just wouldn't die. He went through what had been said during the exchange and all the analyses that had been repeated since, and gave his reasons for believing that the device had been an unmanned relay injected into orbit. His tea and snack arrived while he was talking.