ked skeptical instead.

Eden was still under the first five-year test. Five-year experimental
colonists were arrogant, they were zany, they were a lot of things, some
unprintable, which qualified them for being test colonizers and nothing
else apparently. They were almost as much of a problem as the
Extrapolators.

But they weren't lazy. They didn't forget.

"Some fool ship captain has probably messed up communications by
inserting a jump band of his own." The supervisor hopefully tried out
another idea. Even to him it sounded weak. A jump band didn't last more
than an instant, and no ship captain would risk his license by using the
E frequency, anyway.

He looked hopefully down the long room at the bent heads of the other
operators at their panels. None was signaling an emergency to draw him
away from this; give him an excuse to leave in the hope the problem
would have solved itself by the time he could get back to it. He chewed
on a knuckle and stared angrily at the operator who was sitting back,
relaxed, looking at him, waiting.

"You sure you're tuned to the right frequency for Eden?" the supervisor
asked irritably. "You sure your equipment is working?"

The operator pulled a wry mouth, shrugged, and didn't bother to answer
with more than a nod. He allowed a slight expression of contempt for
supervisors who asked silly questions to show. He caught the
surreptitious wink of the operator at the next panel, behind the
supervisor's back. The disturbance was beginning to attract attention.
In response to the wink he pulled the dogged expression of the unjustly
nagged employee over his features.

"Well, why don't you give Eden an alert, then!" the supervisor muttered
savagely. "Blast them out of their seats. Make 'em get off their--their
pants out there!"

The operator showed an expression which plainly said it was about time,
and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down.
Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slow
three-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for ten
miles in Eden's atmosphere should be blaring.

The supervisor stood and watched while he transferred the gnawing at his
knuckles to his fingernails.

He waited, with apprehensive satisfaction, for some angry colonist to
come through and scream at them to turn off that unprintable-phrases
siren. He braced himself and worked up some choice phrases of his own to
scream back at the colonist fo