Ortega chuckled. “How do you and I converse? I’m speaking Ulik, a tongue your rather odd vegetable sound generator couldn’t approach. By the same token, your speech is the wrong set of frequencies for me to even hear. Yet we talk normally like this and are understood.”

“Ah!” the Czillian’s strange pumpkin head came up, its perpetual look of amazement only adding to its body language of understanding. “The translators! Of course! Basically they are telepathic projectors.”

The snake-man nodded. “Sure. And for purely diplomatic reasons, we all wear them in Zone. All of us. The master communications system here is only a larger, more sophisticated external version so we can understand the Entries without an operation. He knew it’d take whatever he spoke and translate it into our own languages as if he were speaking ours.”

“But isn’t that dangerous? Didn’t he risk running into a former 341 Entry?”

“Pretty slim, you’d admit,” he responded. “And, besides, most races have a number of languages— and things change even more with time and distance. No, he slipped because of the language he used and the fact that I was one of the very few people on the Well World who might recognize it. I have to tell you I needed computer help to defeat my own translator mechanisms.”

“And the language?”

Ortega smiled. “It is ancient Hebrew. We had a couple of rabbis come through, and the language is in the data-center computers. It’s Hebrew all right—a Type 41 language and one he knows well. Oh, the man is so damnably clever!”

The Czillian shook its head slightly in wonderment. “He is quite an actor,” it noted. “Who was the duty officer who processed him?”

Ortega spat. “Me, damn his hide. Me!”

“This means that Brazil arrived before his agents,” the Czillian pointed out needlessly. “He was through Ambreza before we even knew anything was amiss. He could be anywhere by now. Anywhere!”