"No, I need a good contact here. You've got my job now, and more. There isn't room on a ship to carry a complete psych analyzer, much less a synthesizer, so, for anything I dig up, you'll have to do most of the math."

"Good enough. I have—" Kerrman stopped suddenly and looked at his watch. "Wow! Almost talked too long. There's an Ancestor due in five minutes."

He sat down again at the board, cutting in the instruments. A shadow pointer moved slowly up a dial, then stopped.

"Not early, at any rate," he commented.

Better than four hundred light years away, a hypersee communicator fired out its carrier; at vast multiples of the velocity of light, that disturbance radiated in all directions through space. Less than a thousandth of a second after leaving its origin, the carrier was nudging the receptors on Earth.

On Kerrman's panel the shadow pointer began a smoothly oscillating dance. Kerrman touched three switch plates in swift succession. A voice came from the speaker.

"Expedition Seven Nine Six calling Earth. Seven Nine Six calling Earth. Come in, Earth."

The accent was odd, and most people would have had trouble understanding it, but Kerrman was used to handling the changes that had taken place in the language in four centuries.

"Communications Central, Earth," he replied. "We're in, Seven Nine Six."

"Seven Nine Six in," said the speaker definitely. "We've been here twenty-four hours. How long have we been gone?"

"You're four minutes late; not bad correlation at all. You left Earth four hundred thirteen years, seventy-one days, two hours, thirty seconds as of now." He touched a button to produce a ting! "What's your subjective time?"

"Eleven years, sixty-two days, twelve hours, five minutes even as of now." A similar sound came from the speaker.

Kerrman jabbed the figures into the MAC for subjective-objective time correlation.

"Any sign of the enemy?" he asked next.

"None. They haven't landed here. We've scouted the planet carefully."

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