It was Saturday, so we had to do our weekly cleaning. Dust was not a problem this time, because we hadn't had sand storms for a while, and because the ground was covered with snow, our shoes were not as dirty as usually. But there was still a lot of work. The hub had a ton of equipment and papers and especially samples we collected from our experimental fields. We typically collected them during the week, and those that had to be dried were simply left around in the hub until Saturday. And four people living in such a small place caused its own disarray.
Enembe doesn't care about tidyness, so he keeps leaving things around until Saturday comes, and then, with a grumble and annoyingly slow movements, he puts his stuff back where it belongs. With the common equipment, he is just hopeless. When he needs something he can find it, but when it is time to put it back, he seems to be completely incapable of remembering the correct placement of things. It is amazing how his brain works, because he seems to never forget anything he is interested in. After several months and a dozen identical quarrels, I inferred that he is actually not doing it on purpose. This is my theory about what happens in his head.
When he needs something, he has a vague idea about where things are in our hub. Like, the tools are in the barn, or the spare parts for the gas chromatograph are in some box in the back room, or clothes are in the dormitory. This is a science expedition, so things have been thought pretty carefully and organised systematically. But Enembe was not the one who systematised it. He is a computer scientist to the heart, so he is interested in keeping his code and his thoughts and whatever multidimensional models he is constantly running in his head in strict order. Real world is something that is, in his thinking, so faulty and not in place anyway that him leaving stuff wherever makes no difference whatsoever. Especially in Amirham where the world is so much faultier that it can be detected even with the strange Dameclitian foot-based measurement system rather than the standard scientific units, which are used by the rest of the world.
Anyway, when he needs something, he does not think about the location of the thing. He thinks about the purpose of that object and the detailed way he is going to use it when he finds it. Only a minimum brain capacity is used to wander around potential areas of the hub and analyse visual information. When there is a match, he just grabs it and goes away to use it. And when the work is done, he doesn't have an idea about where he got the object in the first place, so he just drops it somewhere nearby.
I don't know whether my hypothesis is correct, but I stick to it because it helped me get out from a brink of a nervous breakdown on one Saturday half a year ago after an especially nasty dust storm that broke several solar panels and brought us a lot of extra work and rubble and dirt and tools dropped by Enembe.
Enough about Enembe. Actually I am worried about Bwana. She has been even more reserved than usually, ever since we got snow, as demonstrated by a discussion we had yesterday.
- Are you done with the measurements, she asked when we were in the Valley of Floating Rocks.
- There is one minute of video to go, Bwana, and then we are ready, I said and checked the monitor of the camera that was attached to a tripod and pointed to the floating rocks from a carefully marked point. We always wanted to shoot from the exactly same point of view so that we could compare the positions of the rocks. And we used two simultaneous cameras to get a 3D view. Enembe was operating the other camera twenty meters away from me.
- Stop calling me bwana, she snapped and looked annoyed. Her breath was making a small cloud around her head in the bright afternoon sun.
- Sorry, Svetlana, it comes so naturally. In my culture, we always call bosses that way, I said cheerily. She was usually task-oriented and did not care about such linguistic nuances. But I knew that when she picked up things like that, there was something else bothering her, and she used these irrelevant details to channel the anxiety out of her. Her mouth was a thin line as she pressed her lips together.
- Now that some floating rocks have fallen onto the snow, do we take one for a sample? I could do some chemical analyses, said Enembe from beside his camera.
- No, Svetlana replied. - When we got the mission, we were specifically instructed not to touch the Floating Stones, just observe them to try and understand their behaviour.
- Yeah, but they are not floating any more, argued Enembe. - Now we finally could get an X-ray fluorescence from those.
- Are you disobeying my orders? Svetlana snapped. This was not like her, we rarely had any authority issues with her. Even Enembe looked a bit startled, although he is not very observant - to say the least - on people's moods or subtle tones in voice. - I said we don't touch the rocks. We'll study them here.
- Okay, okay, concurred Enembe. - I just didn't take my XRF gun with me so I thought it would be easier ... but no problems ... I will take it with me next time, so we can study the elements here without moving them.
I turned back to my camera ready to stop the recording, when I saw a glimpse of a shadow on the monitor screen. It was something that disappeared behind the small hill nearby. I raised my head to look at that direction, but there was nothing. Just the snowy hillside, and a few dozen rocks floating in front of it. I tried to look at footprints on the snow or anything that showed that there actually was something, but the snow was intact like it had been fallen an hour ago. If it was something, it was also floating rather than walking.
I was about to ask whether the others saw anything, but they were looking another direction and clearly saw nothing. So I let it go, but I decided that I had to check the recordings later on when back in the hub. So we just packed our equipment and headed back. We had already spent the whole day collecting data from this and other sites, and the sun would be setting before we would reach the hub.
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The topic for tomorrow: Badger
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