r neglecting his duty--getting
Extrapolation Headquarters here on Earth all worked up over nothing. He
wondered if he dared threaten to send an Extrapolator out there to check
them over.

He decided the threat would have no punch. An E would pay no attention
to his recommendation. He knew it, and the colonist would know it too.

He began to wonder what excuse the colonist would have.

"Just wanted to see if you home-office boys were on your toes," the
insolent colonist would drawl. Probably something like that.

He hoped the right words wouldn't fail him.

But there was no response to the siren.

"Lock the key down," he told the operator. "Keep it blasting until they
wake up."

He looked down the room and saw that a couple of the near operators were
now frankly listening.

"Get on with your work," he said loudly. "Pay attention to what you're
recording."

It was enough to cause several more heads to raise.

"Now, now, now!" he chattered to the room at large. "This is nothing to
concern the rest of you. Just a delayed report, that's all. Haven't you
ever heard of a delayed report before?"

He shouldn't have asked that, because of course they had. It was like
asking a mountain climber if he had ever felt a taut rope over the razor
edge of a precipice suddenly go slack.

"But there's nothing any of you can do," he said. He tried to cover the
plaintive note by adding, "And if you louse up your own messages ..."
But he had threatened them so often that there was no longer any menace.

He spent the next ten minutes hauling out the logs of Eden to see if
they'd ever been tardy before. The logs covered two and a fraction
years, two years and four months. The midgit-idgit scanner didn't pick
up a single symbol to show that Eden had been even two seconds off
schedule. The first year daily, the second year weekly, and now monthly.
There wasn't a single hiccough from the machine to kick out an
Extrapolator's signal to watch for anything unusual.

Eden heretofore had presented about as much of an _outre_ problem as an
Iowa cornfield.

"You're really sure your equipment is working?" he asked again as he
came back to stand behind the operator's chair. "They haven't answered
yet."

The operator shrugged again. It was pretty obvious the colonists hadn't
answered. And what should he do about it? Go out there personally and
shake his finger at them--naughty, naughty?

"Well why don't you bounce a beam on the planet's