The Faculty had a file of Enigmas for student investigation, she knew, within reasonably short distances from the Leinster site. Molly thought she could guess why this one had been given to a team containing a Human student. The guess assumed that the Faculty had already learned a good deal about her species, but this was likely enough. Any red-sun native would have been curious about the combination of a high-energy star and a fairly habitable—from their point of view—world like Titan, and even more so about a place like Earth. In asking the Human students about these, they could hardly have failed to learn a lot about the beings they were questioning.

But that was really letting her mind wander. The assigned exercise was to produce an explanation for the basically surprising fact that Enigma, with far less mass than Earth’s moon, had a very substantial atmosphere. The team was to present observational support for its solution with an absolute minimum of items taken for granted; and here was the trouble. Ten months at Eta Carinae, and a really close friendship with Joe, had certainly not supplied her with a complete list of what even one red-star type took for granted. This was bad enough. Worse, twenty-seven Earth years of life and a good education still left her unsure of which of her own everyday assumptions would need supporting evidence to nonhuman minds. Science was science, physical evidence was evidence, but there are spaces between the points on any graph. To her, the explanation demanded by the exercise seemed obvious to the point of being trivial: the planet was too young to have lost its initial atmosphere. She was sure, however, that supporting evidence was going to have to be very carefully handled indeed. She was not normally inclined to worry, but dealing with minds of such different background still made her uneasy. They certainly weren’t all like Joe.