Putting off the inevitable is a mug's game. Finally I bit the bullet, and placed the call: seventeen hundred hours my time, oh-nine-hundred in Kyoto. I watched the icons flicker and flash along the bottom of the screen as my telecom dialed the LTG number Barnard had given me, and made the connection. My system synched up and shook hands with the Seattle node, then the call was suspended—put on hold, basically—by the remote station. I watched as my screen echoed a call to Denver ... and was put on hold again. The process happened three more times—when Barnard said a relay was cold, I decided, he meant you could use it for cryogenic research—before I finally saw the standard Ringing symbol blink.