He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.
"Young lady," rumbled Kingsley, "it seems to me that you don't need any help from these Cosmic Engineers.”
She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. "But I do," she said.
The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.
"The instructions," Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.
The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and the flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.
Gary's head swam at the thought of it… that slim wisp of a girl talking across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe, Talking and understanding but not perfectly understanding, perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about the equations she had written on the pad. The tip of her pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.
The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.
The pencil made corrections, added notes and jotted down new equations.
Never once hesitating. Then the light blinked off and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.