"You're surrounded by East Germany," Larry maintained.

"There's nowhere you can go but up."

They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog- where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Janaky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they'd never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn't until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

"You were not the first man to read a dolphin's mind, Mr. Greenberg." Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor's blackboard pointer. "Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?"

Larry nodded vigorously. "Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody's gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren't any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch." He sighed. "But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards."

Judy reached across and took his hand. "We'll get there yet," she promised.

"Sure we will," said Larry.

"You may not need to," said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet-" He paused expectantly.