"Fine. What I'd like you to start giving some thought to is a preliminary overview of Ganymean science," Caldwell said. "What with this ZORAC machine of theirs and all the conferences and discussions they're having all over the place, there's more information coming across than we can handle. When all the excitement dies down there's going to be one hell of a lotta work to get through with all that. When you were coordinating the Charlie business you operated a pretty good network of channels to most of the leading scientific institutions and establishments around the world. I'd like you to use those channels again to make a start at cataloging and evaluating everything that's new, especially things that could be of particular use to UNSA--like their gravitics. We may find we want to revise a lot of our own research programs in light of what these big guys have got to tell us. Now seems as good a time as any to begin."

"The group stays intact for a while then?" Hunt guessed, referring to the team that he had headed during the Lunarian investigations and which had continued working under the supervision of his deputy, mainly to tidy up the unresolved details, during his time on Ganymede.

"Yep." Caldwell nodded. "The way they work seems set up for the job. Have you said hello to them yet?"

Hunt shook his head. "Only got back this morning. I came straight on here."

"Do that then," Caldwell said. "There are probably a lot of old friends around here that you want to see. Take the rest of this week to settle in again. Then make a start on what we just talked about on Monday. Okay?"

"Okay. The first thing I'll do is go see the group and give them an idea of what our next job's going to be. I think they'll like it. Who knows . . . they might even have half of it organized for me by Monday if they start thinking about it." He cocked an inquiring eye at Caldwell. "Or is that what you figure you pay me to do?"

"I pay you to think smart," Caldwell grunted. "That's called delegation. If you wanna delegate too, that's what I call thinking smart. Do it."

Hunt spent the rest of that day with his own staff, familiarizing himself with some of the fine points of how they had been getting on--he had kept in touch with them almost daily for the general things--and outlining for them his recent directive from Caldwell. After that there was no getting away; they quizzed him for hours about every scrap of information that he had managed to absorb on Ganymean scientific theory and technology, kept him talking all through lunch, and succeeded in extracting a commitment from him to arrange for a Ganymean scientist or two to come and give them an intensive teach-in. At least, he reflected as he finally, left for home at nine o'clock that night, he was not going to have any problems with motivation there.

Next morning he made a point of avoiding that part of Navcomms HQ building that contained his own offices and started his day by paying a call on another old friend of his--Don Maddson, head of the linguistics section. It was Don's team, working in cooperation with several universities and research institutes all over the world, that had played one of the most important roles in the Lunarian saga by untangling the riddle of the Lunarian language, using documents found on Charlie's person and, later, a library of microdot texts from the remains of a Lunarian base that had come to light near Tycho, Without the translations, it would never have been possible even to prove conclusively that the Lunanans and the Ganymeans had come from the same planet.

Hunt stopped outside the door of Maddson's office, knocked lightly and entered without waiting for a reply. Maddson was sitting behind his desk studying a sheet from a stack of the innumerable pieces of paper without which his office would never have seemed complete. He glanced up, stared incredulously for a second, and then his face split into a broad ear-to-ear smile.

"Vic! What the. . ." He half rose from his chair and began pumping Hunt's proffered hand vigorously. "It's great to see ya. I knew you were back on Earth but nobody told me you were Stateside yet. . ." He beckoned Hunt toward an easy chair on the other side of the desk. "Sit down, sit down. When did you get in?"

"Yesterday morning," Hunt replied, settling himself comfortably. "I had to see Gregg and then I got tied up completely with the Group L bunch. Gregg wants us to start thinking about writing a compendium of Ganymean science. They're all dead keen to go on it. . . kept me talking till heavens knows what time last night in the Ocean Bar."

"Ganymeans, eh?" Maddson grinned. "I thought maybe you'd have brought us one back."

"There's a load of'em over at Westwood with Chris Danchekker right now."

"Yeah. I know about that. They're due to pay us a call here later. Everybody around here's getting keyed up with the suspense. They can't wait." Maddson sat back in his chair and regarded Hunt over interlaced fingers for a few seconds. At last he shook his head. "Well, I dunno where to start, Vic. It's been all this time . . . there are so many questions . . . I guess there's enough to keep us talking all day, huh? Or maybe you're getting tired of people asking all the same things all the time, over and over?"

"Not at all," Hunt said. "But why don't we save all that for lunch? Maybe some of the others might like to join us and then I'll only need to say it all to everybody once; otherwise I might end up getting tired of it, and that wouldn't do."

"Great idea," Maddson agreed. "We'll reserve the topic for lunch. In the meantime, have a guess what we're into now?"

"Who?"

"Us. . . the section. . . Linguistics."

"What?"

Maddson took a deep breath, stared Hunt straight in the eye and proceeded to deliver a string of utterly meaningless syllables in a deep, guttural voice. Then he sat back and beamed proudly, his expression inviting Hunt to accept the implied challenge.

"What the hell was that all about?" Hunt asked, as if doubting his own ears.

"Even you don't know?"

"Why should I?"

Maddson was evidently enjoying himself. "That, my friend, was Ganymean," he said.

"Ganymean?"

"Ganymean!"

Hunt stared at him in astonishment. "How in God's name did you learn that?"

Maddson waited a moment longer to make the most of Hunt's surprise, then gestured toward the display unit standing on one side of his desk.

"We've got ourselves a channel through to ZORAC," he said. "There's been a pretty fantastic demand for access into it ever since it was hooked into the Earthnet, just as you'd imagine. But being UNSA we qualify for high priority. That sure is one hell of a machine."

Hunt was duly impressed. "So, ZORAC's been teaching you Ganymean, eh," he said. "It fits. I should have guessed you wouldn't let a chance like that slip by."

"It's an interesting language," Maddson commented. "It's obviously matured over a long period of time and been rationalized extensively--hardly any irregular forms or ambiguities at all. Actually, it's pretty straightforward to learn structurewise, but the pitch and vocal inflections don't come naturally to a human. That's the most difficult part." He made a throwing-away motion in the air. "It's only of academic interest I guess. . . but as you say, a chance we couldn't resist."

"How about the Lunarian texts from Tycho," Hunt asked. "Been making progress on the rest of those too?"

"You bet." Maddson waved toward the piles of papers covering the desk and the table standing against the wall on one side of his office. "We've been pretty busy here all around."

Maddson proceeded to describe some of the details his team of linguists had been able to fill in during Hunt's absence, concerning the Lunarian culture and the way in which it had been organized on the Minerva of fifty thousand years before. There was a thumbnail sketch of the war-torn history of the Lunarian civilization; some detailed maps of parts of the planet's surface with accounts of geographic, climatic, agricultural and industrial characteristics; a treatise on the citizen's obligations and duties toward the State in the totalitarian fortress-factory that was Minerva; a description of native Minervan life forms as reconstructed from fossil remains and some speculations on the possible causes of their abrupt extinction twenty-five million years before. There were numerous references to the earlier race that had inhabited the planet before the Lunarians themselves had emerged; obviously, a civilization such as that of the Ganymeans could never have passed away without leaving ample traces of itself behind for posterity. The Lunarians had marveled at the ruins of Ganymean cities, examined their awesome machines without growing much the wiser, and reconstructed a fairly comprehensive picture of how their world had once looked. In most of their writings, the Lunarians had referred to the Ganymeans simply as the Giants.