Amirhan, Part 15 - Proof

Amirhan desert mission, day 333

Ismen's memory-merging continues. We can not do anything about it, though, since the version of him in the non-snowy reality doesn't get his memories from here.
Although whether this can be called the snowy reality any more is reasonable question. The white is still there, that is not the point. Temperature dropped back below zero during the night and has stayed there for today. The snow, sticky yesterday, obviously did not simply convert back into snow with the dropping temperature. Not that we thought it would. It has stopped being sticky, and now has become hard and slippery instead. Not like ice, or anything else we have ever seen. We knocked the ground to see what kind of sound it makes, and it was unlike anything I have ever heard before. It made an unbelievably clear sound, like something between plastic and metal and ceramic, sounding high and low at the same time. That description does not actually help anyone who has not heard it understand what it sounded like, but that is the best I can do. Our hertz-meter went crazy when we tried to measure the sound, so we could not get any proper readings.
An equally interesting property was the slipperiness. We realised quite soon it was very slippery, as Ismen almost fell with his first step onto it. We also measured the friction of our new outside surface, and it turns out it is very close to zero. We slid a wooden block that was for some reason laying in the corner away from the door. It only stopped and changed its direction after it reached the first hill. I thought it slowed down a bit already before that, though, and Ismen said it didn't. We tried it a few times, filming from above with a drone, and let the computer analyse it. It turns out I was right, and the block did slow down before reaching the uphill, but not much. From the point of view of going outside, though, this isn't much better than the stickiness from yesterday. We still can not simply go walk out or we would fall, but it is possible to invent some means of transportation that will allow us to move outside on a surface like that.
The third thing about the not-ice out there is that it is very hard. None of our tools could make more than a scratch on it (which will not be useful at all for anything, unless we had time to go scratching the entire yard so maybe it would not be so slippery. And I am not sure that would help.) despite the fact we have tools with us to work on stone. It's true stone is not nearly the hardest thing on the planet, but it is harder than ice. Although this thing on the ground does not behave like ice, like it did not behave like snow when it first snowed, melting very slowly and all. So we decided to go on to prove what was in the ground was in fact not ice, and it never was snow, because it never was water. I can not believe we did not think of doing this earlier, but somehow we were too busy with everything else.
Since we could not get a sample of it to run through the chromatogram, we scanned the not-ice with the xrf gun. And we did get our proof, only not the proof we were expecting. It turns out the thing on the ground is water. It is oxygen, and it is hydrogen, and it is those in the correct ratio. So now we are confused. It is impossible for water to behave in the way the thing on the ground id behaving, but who am I to argue with scientific proof, and we did scan it many times in different spots, just to make sure the first time wasn't a measurement error. Then again, a good scientist also questions the proof she has, because without questioning what we think we know is the only way to truth. Although that also includes questioning our understanding of how water works. It's only that all the evidence from the rest of the world and all previous everything says water can not behave this way. And one would think people would know exactly how water works by now.
We spent the rest of the day trying to figure out if there was some other explanation, if it would be mathematically possible to either water to behave the way we are now seeing it behaving (it is not) or for hydrogen and oxygen to combine into a molecule that is not water that could behave the way the substance outside behaves (It is not. Nothing in the world that we know of behaves in the way the substance outside behaves. Least of all a stable molecule of oxygen combined with twice the number of hydrogen.)
So again, in the end of the day, we are more confused than we were in the morning. I also do not know what will happen if we do not soon find a way to move around outside. We still do have food for another two weeks for two, so we are in no hurry yet, but we do need water (the kind you can drink), which means we need to get to the mata'ir tomorrow.
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The topic for tomorrow is Bread.

~matu