“Joe, did you recognize that last bump? We went real two or three minutes ago and still are; it couldn’t have been interface.”

“Not sure. I wasn’t sure about the earlier one—it didn’t feel like faces I’ve been through, but if that’s what it seemed like to you, you’re probably right. This was some sort of real acceleration, then. Have you checked our surroundings? I’ve been concentrating on ion counts, and nothing has changed much there.”

“I made a quick sweep out to about a kilo for gross matter and obvious EM and particle radiation without spotting any immediate answer. Would any of our fellow teams be doing something that could account for it?”

Joe failed to answer at once, and for a moment Molly wondered whether she had violated one of the courtesy rules again. Some of the red-star races carried the mind-your-own-business attitude to what she considered an extreme, but her question could hardly have been an intrusion even by Nethneen standards. Scientific research was a matter of general interest, especially when several projects were working out of the same unit and likely to use the same resources. Besides, Joe would make allowances; he knew Molly and her husband very well, and several other human beings slightly.

“It’s possible,” he said at last. “There was some work to he done that involved leaving monitors adrift to gather data, and they would have to be dropped at velocities very precisely measured with respect to Arc and its companion. I suppose ...” His voice trailed off. The translator Molly carried had been well programmed in the last few months, and she got the distinct impression from the tone structure that he had been about to say more but couldn’t bring himself to do it. She remembered that the crew of the vessel consisted largely of students, too. Joe would not have wanted to say anything that reflected on the personal competence of one of these. It occurred to her that the student pilot might be a bit heavy-handed, and stopped worrying.