Her face was uncertain, but she smiled tentatively when the silver blob bobbed up and down. She then reached out and thumped Dr. Rame on the chest and repeated his name.

“Hey! Why do I always get thumped?”

Both Dr. Palin and the young woman ignored the doctor’s plaintive outburst as she began to chatter unintelligibly to Dr. Palin’s ominous form.

From the outside looking in, Weston had to suppress the occasional chuckle as he watched Dr. Rame become invisible to the other two in the room. Even through the suits, Weston could see the exasperation evident in Rame’s stance and the rapt attention that flowed from Dr. Palin.

For several minutes, Palin just sat there listening to her speak, allowing the words to wash against him as his mind began processing the information and looking for correlations to the languages he knew. After about twenty minutes of listening, he spoke.

“Jan mest Dukto Edward Palin.”

The young lady stopped speaking and stared in astonishment at the silver mask covering Palin’s face. “Jan mest Ithan Milla Chans.”

Palin leaned back in his chair and an audible sigh was heard. “Lovely to meet you, Milla.”

“Captain, our lovely guest here is Milla Chans. She also has some title, but I am not certain what it means yet. It’s actually quite fascinating; her language seems to be evolved from the same core that makes up the Romance languages on Earth: French, Italian, and Spanish. Although, it does appear to be more complex.”

“How long do you think until we can communicate with her?”

Palin paused a moment. “Between my skills and the ship’s computer, I think a few days and we’ll be conversing quite well—that is, as long as you don’t intend to start interrogating her about technical matters.”

“For now, I just want to hear her story.” Weston paused a moment. “And find out where she’s from, so we can bring her home.”

“Not long, then, Captain, not long at all.”

Weston acknowledged the report and turned away from the scene in the isolation chamber, his head spinning from what he had just observed. Palin had decoded the first levels of a new language in minutes and planned to be finished within a few days. His file hadn’t been exaggerating his skills in the slightest.

Good. The sooner this is concluded, the sooner we can find out what happened and whether or not it may be a threat to us. Weston strode from the med-lab and headed back to his bridge.

Dr. Rame had backed off when it became apparent his patient wasn’t going to enter a blind panic, and he’d decided his presence wasn’t needed. As the airlock cycled around him, he reflected on what he had just seen. Dr. Palin wasn’t the oaf he had taken him for. He treated the young woman with compassion and had relaxed her enough to begin working with her to translate her language. Palin’s phenomenal linguistic skills bothered him because Palin was never mentioned as being impressive in any way. In his lab, Rame slipped behind his desk and activated his terminal, calling up the personnel files.