This situation changed dramatically some weeks after the opening up of the underground remains of the devastated Lunarian base on Lunar Farside. Among the pieces of equipment included in that find had been a metal drum, containing a series of glass plates, rather like the magazines of some slide projectors. Closer examination of the plates revealed them to be simple projection slides, each holding a closely packed matrix of microdot images which, under a microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text. Constructing a system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics became the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed in months.

Don Maddson, head of the linguistics section, rummaged through the litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.

"There's a set of these on its way up to you," he said to Hunt, who was sitting in the chair opposite. "I'll leave you to read the details for yourself later. For now, I'll just sum up the general picture."

"Fine," Hunt said. "Fire away."

"Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to—that kind of thing."

"Army? Was he in the army, then?"

Maddson shook his head. "Not exactly. From what we can gather, they didn't differentiate much between civilian and military personnel in terms of how their society was structured. It's more like everybody belonged to different branches of the same big organization."

"A sort of last word in totalitarianism?"

"Yeah, that's about it. The State ran just about everything; it dominated every walk of life and imposed a rigid discipline everywhere. You went where you were sent and did what you were told to do; in most cases, that meant into industry, agriculture, or the military forces. Whatever you did, the State was your boss anyway—that's what I meant when I said they were all different branches of the same big organization."

"Okay. Now, about the pay records?"

"Charlie was born on Minerva, we know that. So were his parents. His father was some kind of machine operator; his mother worked in industry, too, but we can't make out the exact occupation. The records also tell us where he went to school, for how long, where he took his military training—everybody seemed to go through some kind of military training—and where he learned about electronics. It tells us all the dates, too."

"So he was something like an electronics engineer, was he?" Hunt asked.