"Surely this is the third?" "It's one task to frame a hypothesis, then another to test it," Roi insisted. "So that's six separate acts." Neth was too polite to object, and perhaps too serious to understand that Roi was only joking. If the proverb was worth anything, it certainly wasn't worth taking literally. It did encourage persistence, though, and Roi had a feeling that their persistence was finally going to be rewarded. Since Neth's discovery that orbits around the Hub might become unstable, a dozen or so members of Zak's original team had left to educate hatchlings into the secrets of weight and motion, and a dozen more had headed for the sardside, with the even more ambitious aim of recruiting a new team to build Bard's tunnel. The task of those who remained was to find a geometry for space and time that satisfied Zak's principle, in the hope of learning more about the dangers the Splinter would face in the future. Tan had refined his ideas for characterizing geometry to the point where he could calculate the natural paths — the closest things to straight lines — on any curved surface.
