"When you left the only hint we had that another race was colonizing the galaxy was the sounds, which we assumed to be speech, that came over certain frequencies of the hypersee band. Since then, we have perfected vision transmission; we can see them now. And they're not pretty to look at.

"We still have no way of knowing where a hypersee wave is coming from; they are non-directional, at least insofar as we have been able to discover, so we still don't know from which direction the enemy is approaching.

"We haven't been able to correlate their vision with their voice transmission, so we still don't have any key to their language. Luckily, we're fairly sure that they don't have any key to ours, either.

"A little over a century ago, we detected something else on the hypersee band. It sounded like a weird sort of static; a whining sort of thing. The only source that could put out that kind of disturbance was found to be material objects traveling faster than the velocity of light.

"That gave us our first clue—the first hint that hypersee ships could be built. We figured that if the aliens had them, we could get them, too.