Romm Parmay, standing beside Kerrman, shook his head resignedly. No sign of them. There never was.

Kerrman's next job was pure psychology. That was the reason for assigning a psych engineer to the first receiver. Each call from a ship coming out of near-light drive was picked up by this board.

Kerrman glanced at the dossier on the desk before him; the four-century-old dossier that contained complete information on Expedition 796 as she had been when she left Earth.

"Am I speaking to Commander Loris Cay?"

"No. He passed away seven years ago, subjective time. I am Lieutenant William Bowman, commanding."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Lieutenant." Kerrman looked at the blank screen and wished that hypersee vision transmission had been in existence when Expedition 796 was launched. It was easier to judge a man's psych reaction by his face than by his voice alone.

"Lieutenant, can you understand me all right? I've had a chance to study your pronunciation, but how does mine sound to you?"

The lieutenant admitted it was odd but perfectly clear.

"Good. Then I'll give you a brief synopsis of the history of the past four hundred years.

"When you left the only hint we had that another race was colonizing the galaxy was the sounds, which we assumed to be speech, that came over certain frequencies of the hypersee band. Since then, we have perfected vision transmission; we can see them now. And they're not pretty to look at.

"We still have no way of knowing where a hypersee wave is coming from; they are non-directional, at least insofar as we have been able to discover, so we still don't know from which direction the enemy is approaching.

"We haven't been able to correlate their vision with their voice transmission, so we still don't have any key to their language. Luckily, we're fairly sure that they don't have any key to ours, either.

"A little over a century ago, we detected something else on the hypersee band. It sounded like a weird sort of static; a whining sort of thing. The only source that could put out that kind of disturbance was found to be material objects traveling faster than the velocity of light.

"That gave us our first clue—the first hint that hypersee ships could be built. We figured that if the aliens had them, 

 Prev. P 3/18 next