THE UPPER STRATA made an effort to join in the spirit of things. They prepared lines and committed them to memory, so the common room filled up with Goompah chatter.

Challa this and Challa that.

Frank Bergen wished everyone mokar kappa. Good luck. Literally, happy stars. They could find no Goompah word for luck or fortune, so they’d improvised. Dangerous, but unavoidable.

When Wally offered a chocolate brownie to Ava, she had the opportunity to deliver her line: “Ocho baranara Si-kee.” I am in your debt.

Ava smiled, and Wally, fumbling pronunciation, replied that her blouse looked delicious.

Jerry Madden told Judy that he hoped she found success in all her endeavors, delivering the line from memory. And getting it right.

She replied that things were going quite well, thank you very much, and that his diction was excellent, rendering the last word in both Goompah and English.

Jerry beamed.

Elsewhere, Peggy got a suggestion from Harry Chin: “When stuck,” Harry told her, “you can fall back on karamoka tola kappa.”

Peggy tried it, beat it up a bit, and finally got it right.

“Excellent, Peg,” he said. “We may draft you into the unit.”

“Of course. And what does it mean?”

“ ‘May the stars always shine for you.’ ”

DINNER WAS SERVED with a Goompah menu, although the food was strictly terrestrial. While they ate, Alexandra, trying to use the language, told Collingdale something. But she butchered it, tried again, and threw up her hands. “You have a message from the DO,” she said, finally.

It was simply a status report. Hutchins had rounded up the assistance of a few more experts in a half dozen fields, and shown them the recordings and the texts from Lookout, and she was forwarding their comments. Her own covering remarks were short and to the point. You might especially want to pay attention to Childs’s observations on the arrangement of the statuary in the temple. Billings has interesting things to say about the recurrence of the number eleven, although there’s probably nothing to it. Pierce thinks he’s isolated a new referent for the dative case. Hope all’s well.

What struck him was that she said it all in Goompah. And got most of it right. Not bad for a bureaucrat. “Alexandra,” he told the captain, “the woman has something going for her.”

Much the same thing happened when the daily transmission came in from the Jenkins.

“David, we got another show for you last evening.” Digger did it in Goompah. Collingdale hadn’t known anybody on the Jenkins was making the effort.

Digger went on to explain they’d recorded a drama for which the al-Jahani already had the script. He smiled out of the screen, signaling that he understood quite well the value of that. An unparalleled chance to tie together the written and spoken versions of the language.

Magnificent, Digger, thought Collingdale.

“We’ve also relocated some of the pickups to Saniusar. They’re all designated, so you won’t have any problem sorting them out. Raw data is included with this package.

“One more thing. I’m trying to translate Antigone into Goompah. But we don’t seem to have the vocabulary. I don’t know how to say glorious, forbidden, fate, brooding, and a bunch more. I’ve included the words. If any of your people have time, I’d appreciate the help.”

Antigone?

Alexandra looked over at him, her forehead creased. “Why?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve no idea, but it sounds like a decent exercise.”

COLLINGDALE WAS IN the shower, preparing to call it a day, when Alexandra’s voice broke in with a general announcement: “Attention, please. This is the captain. We are going to jump back into sublight for a few hours. There is no problem, and no reason to be concerned. But we’ll be performing the maneuver in two minutes. Please get to a restraint.”

Two minutes? What the hell was going on? She sounded calm and reassuring, but that was what most alarmed Collingdale. This was an unscheduled stop, so obviously something was wrong.

“Everyone please find a harness and settle in.”

It struck him that it was probably almost the first back-to-back English sentences he’d heard all day.

“It’s nothing serious,” she said when he called.

“It’s an unscheduled jump, Alex. That sounds serious to me.”

“We’re only doing it as a precaution. Bill picked up an anomaly in the engines.”

“Which engines?”

“The Hazeltines. That’s why we’re making the jump. It’s routine. Anytime they so much as burp, we go back to sublight.”

“In case—”

“—In case there’s a problem. We don’t want to get stuck where no one can find us.”

“What kind of anomaly?”

“Rise in temperature. Power balances.”

He had no idea what that implied. “I thought the engines were shut off while we were in hyperspace.”

“Not really. They go into an inactive mode. And we run periodic systems checks.” She paused. “Actually, we’ve been getting some numbers we don’t like for the last week.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It may not be a problem. On the other hand, we rushed the al-Jahani into service. Maybe before it was ready.”

“We going to be okay?”

“Oh, sure. There’s no danger to anybody.”

“You’re sure?”

“Dave, if there were any risk whatever to the passengers, any risk, I’d shut her down and call for help. Now, get into your bunk. I have work to do.”

HYPERFLIGHT IS A disquieting experience, an apparently slow passage, at about ten knots, through unending fogbanks. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he had begun to think of his relationship with Mary in much the same way.

His communications with her had dropped off somewhat. His fault, really. Nothing new ever happened on the al-Jahani, other than the progress they were making understanding the Goompahs. At first he’d told her about that, but her replies suggested the stories about zhokas and temples and Goompah revels were not exactly at the center of her interests.

So now, at least, he had some real news to report. We are back out under the stars, he told her, and they look good. You don’t appreciate them when you see them every night.

He’d been cooped up for more than three months. It was already the longest nonstop flight he’d made, and it would be another half year before they arrived at Lookout. “All sense of movement is gone, though,” he said. “We’re at almost 1 percent of lightspeed, but we seem to be frozen in space.”

Becalmed in an endless sea.

One-third of the way to Lookout. He tried to say it aloud in Goompah, but he didn’t know how to express fractions. Or percentages. Did Goompahs have decimal points?

They must if they’d designed and built the temple.

And his mind ran on: How would you say jump engines in Goompah? Molly was jump. No reason he couldn’t use it as an adjective. And a machine, a mechanism, like the hand-cranked pump they used to get water into their plumbing system, was a kalottul. Hence molly kalottuls, literally jump machines. Without their molly kalottuls, how long would it take to get to Brackel?

It occurred to him that he was putting all this into the transmission. But it would scare her, even though he’d assured her there was no danger. Still, he went back and deleted it. He finished up, telling her they would be on their way again shortly. And that he missed her.

He didn’t tell her that he thought he was losing her. That he felt every mile of the void between them. Not the void as it was counted in light-years. But as in distant, remote, hidden.

The laughter was gone.

When he’d completed the transmission and sent it off, he went back to the problem he’d set himself. How long to travel to Lookout at current velocity?

They were still about eighteen hundred light-years away. At one light-year per century.

Better have a good book ready.

Alexandra came back on-line: “Dave, you can tell your people we’re okay. Just running some tests now. We’ll be getting under way again within an hour.”

“We’re clear?”

“Well,” she said, “we’ve got some worn valves and a feeder line, and the clocks have gotten out of sync. We’ve checked the maintenance reports, and they never got to them in port.”

His first reaction was that heads would roll. And it must have shown when he told her that he hoped they’d be able to get to Lookout without any more problems.

“You can’t really blame the engineers, Dave. Everything was being rushed to get us out of there. Actually, it should have been okay for a couple more runs. But you can never really be sure. I’m talking about the valves and the feeder line now. The clocks we’ve already taken care of. And I’m replacing the line. The valves, though, are something else. Heavy work, in-port stuff. We can’t do much about them, except take it easy on them the rest of the way.”

“How do you take it easy on a jump engine?” he asked.

“You say nice things to it.”

“Alex, let me ask you again—”

“There’s no risk to the ship, David. These things are engineered so that at the first hint of a serious problem it jumps back into sublight and shuts itself down. Just as it did this morning.” Her voice changed, became subdued. “Whether we get to Lookout or not, that’s another story.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

“How far is the sky, Boomer?”

“It’s close enough to touch, Shalla.”

“Really? Marigold said it’s very far.”

“Only if you open your eyes.”

— The Goompah Show

Summer Special, All-Kids Network

June 21

On board the Heffernan.

Friday, June 27.

“ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY PICKING up inside the omega,” said Sky. It was getting close to the hedgehog.

“Estimated time fifty minutes,” said Bill. The rate of closure was just over 30 kph.

The Heffernan had backed away to 80 million klicks, the minimum range set by Hutchins. They were watching by way of a half dozen probes running with the omega, and they were maintaining jump status so they could leave in a hurry if the need arose. That used a substantial quantity of fuel and would require all kinds of refitting when they got back to Serenity. But that was the point: They were making sure they would get back.

“I don’t know how big this is going to be,” Sky told Em, “but they’ve got my attention.”

The overhead monitor carried a picture of the omega as seen from the monitors, a wall of churning mist streaked with bursts of incandescence. The cloud was usually dark and untroubled, but now it almost seemed as if the thing was reacting to the chase. Sky was glad to be well away from it.