Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

Nakagawa had slept on it, which was the only test the survey had ever trusted, and in the morning it looked the same, which is how you know.

"Today," said Nakagawa, at the station, before anyone had eaten. "The handheld goes. Here is how."

Ferrant had no objections, and Egede had several, and Nakagawa let Egede have them all in order, because a rule kept without the objections to it teaches nobody anything.

A knock is one person and a stone. That did not change. Aravena went, alone, with the stone to the front, as a hundred times. The handheld went on the chest strap, under the stone, pointed where the light pointed, which was low, at the silt and the feet, and not up, because the party had been looked at from the edge of its own light for eleven minutes once and Nakagawa was not going to do that to anyone from a hand's distance. It kept what the eye saw. It did not add anything to the knock. If the one on the line could tell a handheld from a light, then the one on the line would know a thing about the party that the party had not meant to say, and that was a cost, and Nakagawa had weighed it against seven weeks of calling a thing a fault and had decided the cost was smaller.

"Sound channel off," said Nakagawa.

"Why?" said Egede.

"Because there is a thing said at the line every shift that is not in the log, and it is not going to get into the log by accident because we strapped a recorder to the person who says it."

Aravena, who had gone a colour, did not say anything, and Ferrant looked at Nakagawa with an expression Nakagawa took a moment to place and then placed. It was the look of someone revising a grade upward.

"To the line," said Nakagawa. "Not past it. Set it down, step back, wait the interval, come back. Whatever is there."

"And if something is there," said Egede, who had said it before, a year ago, and had been answered then too.

"Then something is there," said Nakagawa, "and this time we will have kept it."