"We will anticipate the visual boom," chuckled a deep voice behind which interweaving lines of squeaks were running. "Our calculation for your best trajectory in normal space is for you to come back to it at 18.3846 thousand miles. You will then be square on our landing beam. Good luck."
"Maybe they've forgotten their galactic good manners," Stern smiled, "but not their navigation."
The Commander disregarded him. Shifting from normal space and back was always physiologically disruptive, if only slightly so each time, and every long voyager, according to his specific makeup, was allotted a limited number of such shifts before being retired from the service. A shame to use any of it up on such a short hop but from now on this diplomatic transaction had to be handled rapidly, so rapidly that Nodar could not anticipate every move.
He pressed the field-shift button.
A few minutes later they were back in normal space, coasting on Nodar's landing beam. "Doesn't make sense," Stern insisted. "The beam's perfectly clear yet every other signal we've picked up is a complete garble."
"I told you—they were just throwing sand in our eyes."
"But Barnes says the garbles were all ground-to-ground signals, thousands of different ones and none for us. They still know standard Galactese when they speak directly to us."
The Probe was down to 14 thousand, moving smoothly, and the Commander sympathetically patted the semanticist's shoulder. "There's no call on your specialty, that's what's worrying you. Mustn't go introspective on us now, eh?"
"I'm not sure I mustn't, sir," he stood firm. "But I won't."