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fifty light years. No one here has spoken anything but English for a hundred years. One or two in Intelligence have been taught a few Western languages, but that's it. We need someone to learn a whole new language, and you know how to do that."
    "But what lang—"
    "I don't know. Nobody knows. We found them four weeks ago, and so far no one knows anything about them."
    "But who is it I'm to talk to? Where are they from? And how is the language unknown?"
    "They're from right here. Outpost. And it isn't a human language you'll be learning. Your teachers will have six legs."

On Approach to Outpost's Surface

    The lander came down, a strictly routine sort of flight of a completely unremarkable craft. The lander was a fat, rounded cone shape, a standard design for a ballistic lander; she could have come off a production line anywhere in the League—and perhaps she had. Lucille didn't even know the lander's name. The Australian Navy's space fleet had always had a superstition about such things—if you didn't know the name of a ship, it was bad luck to fly in her. Lucille didn't have much truck with superstition, but it didn't make her any more comfortable.
    Gustav had been assigned to the mission. A sergeant named McKenna piloted the lander, and there were two troopers along, Carlton and Mansfield. McKenna brought them in carefully, setting down in the center of a large clearing in a temperate-zone forest. The moment the landing engines shut off, Lucille heard an oddly familiar thrumming noise on the hull. It was raining out there, making the same noise on the hull that it had on the tin roof back home on Earth, in Australia, during the all-too-rare rainstorms of the arid Outback.
    The lander had four viewports. Lucille cautiously unstrapped herself from her crash couch and stepped to the closest one. That was no desert out there, but a dark, dank wet field and forest. She could see two circular burned spots in the clearing, the signs of other landings here. Lucille carefully rocked back and forth on her feet, heel-to-toe and back. She felt rather light, say perhaps .8 Earth gravities.
    Gustav rattled off a chain of statistics without looking up. "Before you can ask, I did my homework and converted the figures to scales you know. Surface gravity .8 28 Roger MacBride Allen
    Earth gees. Atmospheric pressure 110 percent Earth sea level value. By percentage, much more carbon dioxide and water vapor, much less nitrogen, slightly less oxygen than Earth. The carbon dioxide makes it unbreathable. Possibly, we can get by without full pressure suits, but right now I'm not taking any chances. Local environment in landing zone: dank, murky, cold, but somebody calls it home."
    "Thanks for the travelogue. Now what?" Lucille asked.
    Gustav joined Lucille at the port, then turned to one of the troopers. "Go below to the galley and get us some coffee, Mansfield. What we do now is wait, Lieutenant. We wait. Our friends will have heard and seen the ship coming down, of course. And we hope the rain lets up. Our friends don't seem to like it, though that's just a guess."
    "How did you first find them?"
    "It was a scientific mission. Someone was doing a survey of temperate-zone plant life on this planet. Anyway, the Outposters appeared and our people ran like hell, back into the ship. Thought they were just a herd of some sort of animal that was large enough to be dangerous. But they watched through the ports and the Outposters had tools. All the cameras and viewports were half-blinded by mist and fog, but the crew saw that much. They radioed that little tidbit back to HQ, and were ordered to withdraw. Get back to orbit. Smart move. It let both sides think things over for a while, gave us a chance to put together a team."
    "And the second landing?"
    "Oh, they launched direct from Capital. All the heaviest scientific brass. They had all the cameras and recorders and whatever along, everything waterproofed and hooded against rain and so on. A lander