"Very much sand in the air," he said.
"You know what I mean," she said.
"The wind has us all on edge," he said. "It feels like rain. A change in the weather." He made another note, put down the brush, and began setting out papers for the conference. All at once, his head came up. He smiled at Francine. The smile made him look immature, and she suddenly saw back through the years to a serious little boy named Hiko Ohashi.
"It's been seven months," she said. "It stands to reason that they're not going to wait forever."
"The usual gestation period is two months longer," he said.
She frowned, ignoring the quip. "But we're no closer today than we were at the beginning!"
Ohashi leaned forward. His eyes appeared to swell behind the thick lenses. "Do you often wonder at their insistence that we communicate with them? I mean, rather than the other way around?"
"Of course I do. So does everybody else."
He sat back. "What do you think of the Islamic team's approach?"
"You know what I think, Hiko. It's a waste of time to compare all the Galactics' speech sounds to passages from the Koran." She shrugged. "But for all we know actually they could be closer to a solution than anyone else in...."