It’s a bit cloddish for me to crank about that to you. It holds me up all spoiled and petulant, with my miserable few months stuck in the same place, compared with what you’ve had to put up with for practically your whole life. All right, so I’m a clod. I don’t know how you manage it, Lorie, except maybe being a telepath helps to get your mind off things. I’d have gone crazy in your place long before I was house-broken.

Still, you are you and I am I, and please make allowances for my faults, which are maximum. I don’t have your saintly patience, and I’m quietly going crazy in this ship, and feel free to scorn me for having such a low tolerance for boredom.

I’ll leave all of this on the cube. I want to give you the whole picture, everything I’m feeling, and devil take trying to look like a noble soul. I couldn’t fool you anyway.

Now for the cast of characters. And I do mean characters.

There are eleven archaeologists on this trip. Three of us are apprentices, newly outslipped from college, and archaeologists more by courtesy than by merit. On the other hand, our three bosses are utter tops in the line, each one of them deemed a major authority on the High Ones, and naturally they hate each other to a high-frequency zing. The remaining five are medium sorts, all pros but nothing special, the kind of hacks you find in any operation. They’ve been around, they know their stuff, they do what they’re told. But they don’t have much spark.

As you might expect we’re a racially mixed outfit. The liberals must have their way. And so the quota system has been imposed on us: we include six Earth-men, counting one android, and five selected representatives of five of the other intelligent galactic races. Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.