Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

He tried once more at the door, because he was going to be gone by evening and because a hypothesis you never test is not caution, it is just a thing you carry.

"The gate at the bottom of a garden," he said, as if it were nothing, as if it were the weather. "Where the light sits wrong beside the post and it isn't the light."

Elvira had a jar of chalk in her hand. She did not put it down.

For a moment — and he would write it in no report, because a moment is not a measurement and he had spent twelve years teaching junior surveyors exactly that — something went across her face that was not politeness and was not blankness either.

Then she said, "That's a thin place. Badly sited gate. Whoever built it wasn't paying attention." A pause of the ordinary length. "Where was this?"

"Somewhere I haven't been in a long time," Galahad said.

"You should measure it," she said. "If it's still standing."

"It's still standing."

She nodded, and turned back to the rack of thread, and the morning went on being a morning.

He walked out along the causeway with the file under his arm, past the root plate where the chalk had gone grey at the edges, and did the arithmetic he had been declining to do since the third week — twenty years, and a face that had not moved a day inside them, and no instrument anywhere in the Survey Corps that measured what he was actually claiming.

Find out why it wasn't harder, her note had said.

He had one reason. It was unfalsifiable, unfileable, and his alone, and the correct professional response to a pattern with a sample size of one was to hold it and say nothing until the data caught up.

He was aware, walking, that he had been telling himself this for three weeks, and that a man who has to keep re-deciding a decision has not really made it.