carries all the appropriate benefits of free use of UNSA vehicles
and aircraft, access to restricted files up to category three, and
standard issues of clothing and accessories for duties overseas or
off-planet. All that is in the Executive Staff Manual; details of
reporting structures, admin procedures, and that kind of thing are
in the UNSA Corporate Policy Guide. Lyn will get you copies.
“You’ll have to get in touch with the federal authorities in
Houston regarding permanent residence in the USA; Lyn knows the
right people. Arrange transfer of your personal belongings from
England at your own convenience and charge it to Naycomms. We’ll
help out finding you somewhere to live, but in the meantime stay on
at the Ocean.”
Hunt had the fleeting thought that had Caldwell been born three
thousand years previously, Rome might well have been built in a
day.
“What’s your current salary?” Caldwell asked.
“Twenty-five thousand European dollars.”
“We’ll make it thirty.”
Hunt nodded mutely.
Caldwell paused and checked mentally for anything he might have
overlooked. Finding nothing, he sat back and raised his glass.
“Cheers, then, Vic.”
It was the first time he had addressed Hunt informally.
“Cheers.”
“To the stars.”
“To the stars.”
A low roar from a point outside the city reached the room. They
glanced toward the window to see a column of light climbing into
the blue as a Vega lifted off from a distant launch pad. A quiet
surge of excitement welled up in Hunt’s veins as he took in the
sight. It was a symbol of the ultimate expression of man’s outward
urge, and he was about to become part of it.
chapter ten
Demands for the services of Special Assignment Group L commenced as
soon as the new unit officially went into operation, and they
continued to increase rapidly in the weeks that followed. By the
end of a month Hunt was swamped and forced to take on extra people
at a faster rate than he had intended. Originally his idea had been
to keep going with a skeleton staff for a while, at least until he
formed a better idea of what was required. When Caldwell first
announced the establishment of the new group, there had been one or
two instances of petty jealousy and resentment, but the attitude
that prevailed in the end was that Hunt had contributed several
worthwhile ideas, and it seemed oniy sensible to get him in on the
team permanently. After a while, even the dissenters grudgingly
began to concede that things seemed to run more smoothly with Group
L around. Some of them eventually did a complete about-face and
became enthusiastic supporters of the scheme, as they came to
appreciate that the communication channels to Hunt’s people worked
in bidirectional mode, and for every bit of data they fed in, ten
bits came back in the other direction. As the oil thus added to
Caldwell’s jigsaw-puzzle-solving machine began to prove effective,
the machine shifted fully into top gear, and suddenly pieces
started fitting together.
The Mathematics section was still working on the equations and
formulas found in the books. Since mathematical relationships would
remain true irrespective of the conventions used to express them,
their interpretation was a far less arbitrary affair than that of
deciphering the Lunarian language. The mathematicians had been
stimulated by the discovery of the mass conversion table. They
turned their attention to the other tables contained in the same
book and soon found one that listed many commonly used physical and
mathematical constants. From it they quickly picked out pi as well
as e, the base of natural logarithms, and one or two more, but they
still didn’t understand the system of units well enough to evaluate
the majority.
Another set of tables turned Out to be simple trigonometric
functions; these were easily recognized once the cartographers had
provided the units of circular measure. The h~adings of the
coluinns of these tables gave the Lunarian symbols for sine,
cosine, tangent, and the like. Once these were known, many of the
mathematical expressions elsewhere started making more sense; some
of them fell out immediately as familiar trigonometric
relationships. These in turn helped establish the conventions used
to denote normal arithmetic operations and that of exponentiation,