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“Peaceful Harmony, this is Observation Station Peacable A.  Welcome to the Gilgamesh system,” Pelham said.

“We are advised we are to advance to your quarantine station for a full scan, discussion with your customs and trade officials, search of our vessel for military contraband,…the actual list is your Imperial regulation…” The alien held a sheet of paper up on the screen, the sub-sub paragraph of the regulation being displayed..  “…with which we are prepared to comply fully.  Apologies, but our translator software is backwards and imperfect, and I cannot pronounce some of the words represented by those characters.  However, in Grognir I was given an approach trajectory to which I will adhere until directed otherwise.”

“That’s the correct regulation,” on-duty Fortress Political Officer Bernard Tissyere said.  “Except the sub-sub-paragraph,” he looked at his own screen, “is for species that have not had prior contact with the Imperium.”

“Your understanding is correct, Ship Leader One,” Pelham answered.  “Do I understand your species has not contacted the Imperium previously?”

“Exactly correct,” Ship Leader One responded.  “Indeed, we are the first starship constructed by our world.”  When he said the last words, his face briefly changed its shape.  On a human face, some strong emotion would have been meant. “We were led to understand that this system, Vorith, is the closest point of Imperial terrain to Teruwhon.”

“Welcome to the company of all civilized species,” Pelham said.  “On behalf of the Imperium, I greet you and wish you well.” 

Ship Leader One twisted his head left and right.  “And I greet you also. Your Quarantine Station asks my attention.”

“Do as they say.  Peacable A, Out.”  Pelham cut the signal.

“We don’t hear that every day,” Tissyere said.  “I’d better notify my superiors.  Welcoming new species to Imperial territory requires great care and much protocol.”

“Continuing tracking,” Abernathy reported.  “Peaceful Harmony doesn’t have much in the way of drives.  He’s pulling just under three gravities – yes, he does have acceleration compensators, not very efficient ones – on a really small chaos gate.  Now he’s shifting for the approach to Quarantine One.”

~~~~~

Marcus 22, 853 AIS

“Peaceful Harmony, departing,”  Roger Abernathy said.  A display marked the track the Peaceful Harmony followed  as she headed for the warp zone.  He tapped several glyphs on his display screen.  “Always good to get a careful read on a new drive pattern,” he said to himself.  He let his instruments perform their job, watched as the freighter sank into hyperspace, and transferred the information to the tactical analysis systems.

“Running a test simulation?” Tactical Technician Jingfei Wu asked.  “Polite to mention first.”

“Apologies.  No, Jingfei, that’s a real ship, a freighter that just left,” Roger said.  “The folks from Grignoir and Teruwhon.  Weird warp drive pattern.”

“I was looking at the trace before they hit the warp point,” she said.  “The one that is not a freighter.”  She summoned a display and dropped cursor markings on it.

“Surely,” Roger said, “that’s the actual trace from the freighter that just left.” He looked at her in puzzlement.

“Roger,” Jingfei said, “look at the curvature on the power readings.” She put additional lines onto the display, lines that simply duplicated what she’d seen by looking at the instrumental readings.  “That’s not a freighter. They’re getting well more acceleration relative to how much power they’re putting into their fields.”

“You’re right,” Roger said. “I’m sure the computers would’ve told me that eventually,” he added. “Except we have you, who can read these things off the screen without letting the number-crunching advance.”

“Roger,” Jingfei continued, “the computers would eventually have told you that you’re looking at warship level curves. You aren’t seeing it in their speed because they are running their ship at almost zero throttle, but that’s a warship level curve. In fact,” she paused to bring a different display up, “that power curve is running,” she hesitated, “that power curve is running below the power curve of an Imperial warship. How can they be doing that?”

“Ours is not to reason why,” Roger said, “ours is only to file the required reporting paperwork and let someone else think about it.” He brought up reporting software and began summoning paragraphs of boilerplate. At least for the rest of the watch he was going to be busy. “And then Senior Master Chief Pelham gets to congratulate me for moving up on the promotion curve by proving I have an infinite tolerance for pointless paperwork.”

“So what did you do in the War, Winston?” Robert asked.

“A somewhat long story,” he answered, “but nothing secret.”  He poured himself another cup of coffee, added a generous dollop of milk, and launched into a description of his adventures with German spies in Denmark.

“With all those degrees, and Harvard being a fine school,” Robert said, “I’d’ve thought you could do better than being our Associate Sheriff.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing.”

Winston explained his debt to Gramps, and how he had promised to pay it off.

“If you’re trying to impress people with your honesty,” Ronald observed, “you certainly succeeded.  Most of my customers would’ve found some wiggle room in the agreement, some smart Yankee attorney, and by-and-by repaid your Grandfather with cash, not with staying here as a Deputy.”

“Amen to that,” Winston said, “But Gramps, Sheriff Cooper, is a relative, and decent men never cheat relatives.  Which reminds me.  Have either of you gentlemen heard anything that’s not been in the paper, anything about the heath?”

Robert shook his head.  “Not I,” he answered.

“You might ask Karl Eisenhower,” Ronald said.  “He’s Honest Ike’s Gemstones.  He’s paid several people to search the edge of the heath, not going in, looking for some sort of  crystal.  It’s a beautiful violet color, the one I saw, and almost as hard as a diamond. I’ve had people talking about mining the heath for all the funny color stones, and that orange sand.  They were talking about drag buckets, so you they could pull stuff out without going onto the heath yourself.  That all talk, so far; no one has asked me for a loan to pay for machinery.”

Warp Point Prime Defense Fortress

Barham System

Marcus 5, 853 AIS (Anno Imperium Solarianus)

“Emergence. Emergence. I have an emergence.” Senior Technician Ninth Class Roger Abernathy looked up from his displays, which were flashing warning signals across the board. The fractional artificial intelligence backing his display kept chanting that notice into his headphones, repeating the message until he tapped the ‘Warning Acknowledged’ button on his panel.

Abernathy surveyed the displays. Whoever it was had emerged at the out-system edge of the warp point, was lighting off in-system drives at low power, and surely had not had time to signal anyone that they had arrived. The warp drive analysis system tagged the arrival and reported “Identifying”, a process that might take a minute or two. The system display plotted this ship flashing red, and showed no other vessels, known vessels not being shown.

He sipped at his cocoa mug. The AI would take its own sweet time about being positive that it knew what it was looking at. The gravitronic detectors would synthesize the breakout arrangement in a few moments. On paper, at the appearance of an unknown ship the senior officer on watch should’ve brought Warp Point Defense Fortress Alpha to yellow alert, but that standing order had been overridden by a local order two centuries ago. There were no unknown ships, only freighters that were a bit off course.

The breakout monitors came up with the display of the breakout pattern. What on earth was it?  There were at least three bizarre features.   He tagged his communicator. “Senior Chief Pelham! Senior Chief Pelham! Breakout! Unknown ship. Not a conventional drive!” The Senior Chief on duty would undoubtedly be in his office doing paperwork, that being the only useful duty he could perform.  The AIs would now take forever and a day to decide what to do.

In only a few minutes Abernathy heard slippered footsteps behind him as the Senior Chief ambled into the control room.  “So what do we have, Mister Abernathy?” Sebastian Pelham asked.

“Unknown ship.  Not a conventional warp drive.  Here we go.  They’re signalling to enter quarantine lane,” Abernathy answered.  “AI hasn’t IDed them.  Quarantine lane has responded.”

“But who are they?” Pelham asked.

“Unknown.  We’re about to enter their light cone,” Abernathy said.

“Senior Chief, shall I raise screens?” Tactical Technician Jingfei Wu asked.

“No reason to,” Pelham answered. “Not yet.”

“Signal from unknown,” Senior Comms Technician Richard Vanderwelt reported. “On Screen Three.”

Screen Three showed the standard color test pattern followed by a vaguely humanoid face.  Pelham did not recognize the species. “This is freighter Peaceful Harmony out of Grognir, originally from the Kingdom of Pandor on Teruwhon.”  With the voice came a series of digital datapacks, showing where the freighter had begun its journal and what its intermediate steps were.  “I am Ship Leader One. We are here to explore possibilities for peaceful trade between Pandor and the Solarian Imperium.”

The next morning Winston had gone no farther than the Trinity House Cafe and ordering his breakfast special when two well-dressed men at the next table waved him over.

“Yes, sirs?” he said.

“You’re Winston Cooper, aren’t you?” the older of them asked. “Your badge is a giveaway.”

“Yes, sir,” Winston answered.  “Though I don’t believe we’ve met – something I could say about almost everyone in Prescott, for all that I’ve been here a few months.”

“I’m Robert Blake. My friend here is Ronald Carter.  We’re Prescott’s leading bankers.” 

Winston took careful note of their appearances. The three men shook hands and gestured at Winston to join them. 

“We were curious,” Robert said, “if it’s not a secret, on how your department is doing at investigating the heath murders.” 

“All those people, the railroad trains,they just vanished,” Ronald added.

“I wish I had something to say,” Winston said.  “Everything we’ve found has been in the newspapers.  Yes, we’ve been in touch with the Army Air Corps and the Navy about the mystery airship.  They say there’s no way – no known way — to fly that high.  No antiaircraft gun could reach the airship, ignoring that there’s no direct evidence that whoever is flying it created the devastation. Shooting at an innocent man will largely create business for our fair city’s attorneys.  We for sure have some questions we’d like answered, but that’s not the same thing.”

“I read,” Robert said, “people tried shining searchlights on it, a few nights ago, and blinking them in Morse code.  No answer.”

“I heard,” Winston said.  “I gather they’ll try again, this time putting the searchlights well out in the desert where city lights won’t hide what they are doing.”

“I hope that law and order is faring well,” Ronald said.  “We’ve been comparing notes, and recently our loan business has been a bit sparse. Deposits are doing well, especially the boarding houses and our two hotels, but people are selling their homes when they can, but not buying new ones.”

“Hotels are sightseers,” Winston said. “We try to tell them not to enter the Heath, because you die there, but it’s a free country.  I haven’t heard of anyone disappearing, but some people get awful close to those sandy spots.  Not a secret…we’ve had inquiries from back east, universities and mining companies, people looking to send expeditions to find out what happened.”

“I was in Phoenix last week,” Robert said.  “Parked under canvas at the Sky Harbor the Air Corps has a half-dozen pursuit planes, a platoon of soldiers setting up barracks and a permanent hangar, all pre-fabs left over from the Great War.”

“Those buildings show President Taft’s thrift,” Ronald said. “The pre-fabs had been finished, not shipped over there, so the crates were moved out into the California desert and stored until needed.  Whenever we have another war.”

Bartarello is an extraordinarily attractive young woman, very observant, so she was tasked with seducing the Union Grand Supreme Admiral – that appears to be a reasonable approximation of his title into the ranks of a civilized fleet – to gain an understanding of what the Anglic Union is actually doing, trying to fob us off with these scrap heaps of warships. She did ask him questions, under the guise of learning more about Union politics, but only during dinner. She made no effort to seduce him. In other words, she totally botched what should have been an extremely simple mission.

Under Intelligence Regulations I cannot put any black marks in her record. However, since she appears to be totally clueless, when her objective should have been obvious, your office can handle matters. We have a dead-end post, military attache to the Anglic Union, which she could be given. There is no promotion route out of that post. Historically, people with that assignment have usually resigned their commission and gone away; a modest number lapsed into alcoholism after only a few years.

&&&&&

Squadron Commander Smith stared at his viewscreen. The smiling face of Grand Supreme Admiral of the Fleet Thatcher looked back at him. Smith’s squadron was still in high orbit around planet D. The maneuvers had been completed, detailed reports had been written, a series of celebratory banquets, to which the Anglic Union officers had definitely not been invited, had been held, and Smith had waited patiently for the final set of reports on the maneuvers and his squadron’s performance in them before he returned to Earth. He had already received written reports. Someone had a bee in his bonnet that his squadron had found a significant number of asteroids that the Stellar Republic Mapping Service had never noticed. His squadron’s entirely bland report was apparently ill-received. Now he was receiving the verbal summary from Grand Admiral Thatcher.

“In conclusion,” Grand Admiral Thatcher said, “based on your performance during the maneuvers, we find that your ships are unfit for purpose and should not be considered for purchase by the Imperial Navy. I hope you will not take this personally. Several of my junior officers emphasized to me that you appeared to have done well with the technology you have, but your technology is so backward that it’s not of any interest. I shall repeat the recommendation that our diplomatic service has given to the Anglic Union many times before: You should abandon your peculiar ideas, and join the Stellar Republic in an appropriate status, probably a Junior Apprentice Grade in which you would receive a substantial number of advisors to assist you in reforming your governmental practices, to bring them into line with the superior practices of the Stellar Republic. Having said that, I wish you a safe trip home, and remind you that since you did participate in our maneuvers, you are entitled to stop at fleet bases if you are in dire need of emergency repairs. Thatcher out.” Thatcher cut the connection.

Smith wandered why, if his ship’s technology was so backward, they had managed to find so many asteroids that the Mapping Service had never noticed. The reverse of that question was whether or not Thatcher was aware of the asteroid count, or whether he’d simply been informed that the Terran squadron had only found a few of the asteroids, even though they’d been told exactly where to look to find them. No matter, he thought, it had been an interesting introduction to the Imperial Navy and its actual current standards. A reasonable man would wonder what would happen if the Stellar Republic tried to fight a war against a serious opponent, but that was not his problem.

“Squadron,” he said to his fellow officers, each of whom had heard Thatcher give his summary, “it is time to leave. We should all be ready to initiate departure in fifteen minutes. Proceed. Smith out.” He cut his viewscreen.

&&&&&

Winston Cooper stared at the wall clock.  He’d typed up the reports, not that there’d been much to type, marked in the central log each time one of the patrolmen checked in, and soon after ten he could advance to his room and go to sleep.

“Mister Cooper, Sir,” Sergeant de la Vega said, “Goodheart called in.  He says there’s something strange in the sky south of town.  Bright blue flames.”

“That’s different,” Winston answered.  “South is the heath. I’d better check. Sergeant, Mister Morton, Gramps always wants two men here, so no matter what don’t leave until I get back.  I’ll take the car, should be back in ten minutes or less.  Sergeant, you have the desk until I get back.”  He shook his head.  “Blue flames in the sky?  What next?”

A short drive through quiet streets later, Winston reached the end of Coatney Lane.  There were streets closer to the Sheriff’s Office, but here he had a good view to the south.  There were the flames, as promised, bright blue, shifting like an aurora but the wrong color.  And they appeared to be striking the ground, off toward the heath’s center.  He listened carefully, There was  a distant growl, like a mountain lion but higher in pitch.  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could spot people standing at the edge of town and pointing.

Where was it coming from?  He glanced skyward.  The flames formed a cone, a cone whose skyward vertex very much appeared to be the mysterious airship.  Okay, he thought, this appeared to be another piece in the puzzle, but what does it mean? Going out there to look at the flames close up, where they hit the ground, sounded unsafe.  Besides, that area was surely outside his jurisdiction, so it was someone else’s problem.  He returned to the Sheriff’s Office  and began composing a report. 

He’d have to ask Miss Hayes if she had made some sketches.  Even if she hadn’t, that would be a good excuse to say hello and tip his hat to her.  Of course, thanks to his deal with Gramps, he was approximately flat broke, but he could still stay in practice for the future.

&&&&&&

“He made a big point of what a beautiful violet shade they had,” Chalmers remarked. “How hard they were. And how rare they were. And how they would match a pretty girl’s eyes on her ring finger after you proposed. Gail — you’ve met her — has eyes the wrong color, so that wouldn’t work for me, assuming that someday I have a solid job so I can propose to her.”

“Yes, they appear to be proper gemstones,” Watership agreed, “so perhaps we will see more of them. Perhaps there are more in one of those boxes.”

“Haven’t found more yet,” Chalmers answered. “But Eisenhower told me: He paid someone to go to the edge of the Heath and look, finding a dozen, all in the same place.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Watership said, “the Governor’s Office contacted the Chemistry Dean. They saw the newspaper report on your elements, were concerned it was a hoax, were happy that we’d all confirmed what you did, and said there’d be financial support for your research. Soon. Lots of money. They did hope that if you find another element, it will be named Californium.”

“Happy to do that. Ummh, a reporter did come around,” Chalmers said, “while you were in Los Angeles. I told him ‘professional ethics’. I can’t talk about results until they are published. But he had all my results right. Someone took very good notes.”

“That is several of your fellow students,” Watership said. “If it happens again, you can say ‘completely off the record, I’d warn you if you were so wrong you’d hurt your career’. Or suggest to him that he skip something. Wait? Did he have any idea where we got our samples?”

Chalmers shook his head. “No. And he only had two element names, Arizonium and Berkelium. Now I have all these. With the first stone, I was very lucky on fractional crystallization. I could have needed a year to separate them.”

“Which you would have had, thanks to spectroscopy.” Watership observed. “If I were not covering for colleagues, teaching three courses, I’d be in here analyzing. Well, keep up the good work. You’re going to go far.”

&&&&&

&&&&&

From: Fleet Intelligence, Junior Commodore Wilhelmina Zhuravlyov commanding

To: Grand Supreme Admiral of the Fleet Arthur Thatcher

Subject: Visit of the Anglic Union Squadron

Admiral:

My tasks in the Exercise being pre-determined, I have had the needed time to assemble observations on the Anglic Union ships.

Anglic Union officers clearly had no idea how matters are done in a first, second, or even third-rate navy. It was explained to them, several times, that they needed to make an appropriate donative in exchange for having a position of respect in the fleet action. They had no interest in offering even a nominal sum.

To judge from this squadron, Anglic Union ships have remarkably eccentric designs. Oblate ellipsoidal hulls have been obsolete since early in the First Empire, but they seemed quite attached to them. Their observed maximum accelerations were quite low. In those accelerations their beta drives were kept very low on their power curves, indicating that their crews have no confidence in drive stability at higher power levels. Their four ships emerged from the warp point in very close proximity, much closer together than our safety regulations permit, indicating a lack of basic hyperspace navigation skills. On emergence from the warp point, they brought up their screens extremely quickly, far more rapidly than is specified in the orthodox powering-up sequence.

The Union ships were assigned to the asteroid search module, and quietly given the set of correct answers. All they had to do was to fly a pinnace or drone to the indicated locations, take an image of each, and be done. On one hand, in this well-known foolproof training demonstration, they failed to find several asteroids, despite knowing exactly where they are. On the other hand, they claimed to have located a considerable number of smaller rocks that were not on the answer sheet, and supplied images and mineral analyses of each rock. Fortunately we have a supply of Junior Ensigns who earned positions on punishment details, so I assigned the lot of them to validate the claims. The claims were valid.

Each of their officers at the banquet was assigned one or two ‘friends’ to sit next to them and report what they said. Their officers were without exception remarkably naive about how things should be done in a quality navy. They were quite fond of defending the primitive designs of their ships. A curious observation was reported by Junior Ensign Fifth Class Ekaterina Barterello. As is well known, the Union ships arrived several days before they were told to appear. They were supposed to arrive after the first exercise was under way, so that we could report that the Union barbarians could not adhere to simple schedules. They instead arrived early. Barterello asked how they did this. The bizarre claimed answer is that at several points in their travels they moved from system to nearby system using real-space faster-than-light movement, based on using their beta drives.

The breeze off San Francisco Bay was cold and dank.  James Chalmers still had his laboratory windows well open, with his laboratory hood drawing maximum draft.  Working behind lab coat, gloves, dust mask, and smock cap he was still adequately warm.  Having to weight down the pages of his lab notebook was a trifle inconvenient, but seemed the safer choice.

There came a knock at the door.

“Ah, Mr. Chalmers,” Professor Watership said, “I see you are hard at work, and being very cautious about something.  Your entry on the outside chalkboard — minerals being analyzed: unknown count — is a bit odd. How can you not know how many minerals you’ve been given?”

“Professor Watership! Welcome back from Los Angeles. I hope the train ride was pleasant.”

James Chalmers set down what he was working on and turned to face the Professor.   Watership was a short man, stout, with silver threads in his still-black hair, dressed in a proper three-piece suit with gold watch chain. Watership, Chalmers thought, had always been very supportive of his hard work, not to mention the time consumed by the two new minerals from Prescott, Arizona. Now Watership seemed slightly disturbed, perhaps because it had been a long trip, and perhaps because the chalkboard entry was a bit exotic.

“It was indeed,” Watership answered.

“While you are away,” Chalmers said, “Mr. Karl Eisenhower himself appeared from Prescott with two respectably large steel boxes. They are both full of strange minerals, at least, they are both full of minerals that he said he didn’t recognize. But they were recovered from the Blasted Heath. The two men who went to the center of the heath died on the way out. He warned me that one of them had been subject to a very careful autopsy, and the medical examiners were totally baffled about why he’d died. The best thought was that something in the air or the water or some emanation from the ground had poisoned him. But they’d taken very careful precautions, not as careful as mine now, stayed very little time in the Heath, and still died on the way out.”

“Men paid with their blood to fetch your samples,” Watership said. “I take it Eisenhower didn’t give you a count of how many minerals he had?”

“He said he’d studied a half-dozen on the surface of each tin”, Chalmers answered. “He was very polite about it, said he was very sorry that you weren’t here, but he had to get back to his shop.  He found strange specific gravity and bead tests, and decided he should leave it to our hands. He even took me out to dinner. The next morning he had another meeting, about violet stones like the ones he gave us last time. He didn’t say who the meeting was with.”

“Interesting,” Watership said. “Only a few people in this department know what your analysis of the violet stone has revealed so far. Why would someone else be interested in them?”

&&&&&

The air circulators on the pinnace Hiram Percy Maxim provided the softest background noise to the conversation between Gabriel Smith and his senior officers. They had all been taken aback by the sumptuous splendor of what was supposedly a routine Fleet Officer dinner before a major set of maneuvers.

“They knew I was the senior captain of the squadron,” Gloriana Woodruff said, “and I’d quoted to them my equivalent Space Guard rank when they asked where Ship Commander fit into our rank structure. Because we are the visiting barbarians, they dropped me at one end of the head table. I considered protesting, Gabriel, that you should be up there, but I had absolutely no idea where you were, and assumed that you would speak up for yourself if it appeared appropriate. From your description of what the Junior Ensigns had to say, you learned more than I did. After the dinner, Grand Admiral Thatcher’s adjutant took me aside and announced that since I’d been opaque over dinner he would have to explain things clearly and simply. If we wanted a role in the maneuvers, we had to pay him off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral’s mistress off, we had to pay off an impressively long list of officers, but fortunately, since we had no idea how much to give to each of them, he would take care of that.  All I had to do was give him a hundred thousand Stellars to compensate him for his difficulties in having to deal with primitive barbarians like us. He was severely taken back when I explained to him that the Service does not pay bribes.  Apparently the lubricating power of cold cash is central to the operation of the Stellar Republic’s fleet.”

“Did anyone,” Gabriel Smith asked, “hear anything that did not suggest that the maneuvers are totally scripted? From the description, absolutely everything has been planned in advance, so the ships make the moves that had been planned for them, and the officers and men on each of them get to sit there and watch things happen. Whoever is at the helm actually has to point their ship in the right direction and fly it at the right acceleration, not that the automatic flight controls won’t do that, but they have exact flight plans.”

His officers shook their heads.

“I heard considerable pieces of the maneuver discussed,” Levi Roshwald, captain of the Orville Wright said, “and couldn’t understand how they could be so sure what was going to happen, but it didn’t occur to me they had absolutely no initiative during the exercise and were simply watching ships move around as if they were on a huge motion picture set. If I’d known what was the case, I might’ve asked why they bothered, as opposed to using computer graphics to generate videos of the battle, which everyone could watch while safely at home.”

“I somewhat asked,” Gail Robbins, captain of the Wilbur Wright asked, “how they could be so sure what was going to happen. I was told it was like experiments of long ago they had each performed in freshman physics labs. Everything you were supposed to to do was in the directions, your work was required to get the correct answer from the experiment, and if your answer was off by more than a few percent from the right answer, you were required to repeat the lab until you got the right answer. I don’t see how that approach to lab work leads to competent scientists.  The claim here was that by watching the course of the battle, you learned things you couldn’t learn by watching simulations or reading texts on strategy. I managed to respond ‘Oh, that’s very clever. We never thought of doing things that way’.”

“How did they answer your response?” Smith asked.

“That’s why you’re here, they said, to learn how to conduct fleet operations in the best possible manner, so that when the Union is admitted to the Stellar Republic, you will have the least difficulty in integrating your units into ours, though of course you will be receiving Imperial officers to replace yours until the training of your officers can be upgraded.”

“I was told the same,” Gail said, “and decided it would be hopeless to try to disabuse them of their ideas.”

“I was given,” Smith said, “a data stick with a list of all known asteroids in the volume we’re supposed to search. Electronic security will have to handle it carefully, lest we discover it has some issue. We should find most but not all of them, assuming the list is accurate, and perhaps find a few that aren’t on this list, assuming there are any to be found.  You should each assume that one of the purposes of the exercise is to make us look incompetent, and should not go too far in separating them from the notion that we are primitive and backward.  Of course, in many respects, especially given their patent rules, we are primitive and backward, but we have to live with that.”

&&&&&