Spin 2- Spin Control by Chris Moriarty

Author:Chris Moriarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-11-04T19:09:21+00:00

He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward, and crouched down to pull his field notebook from his rucksack. He set it on the table, still not meeting his pairmate’s eyes. “I’m just…not a hundred percent comfortable with the results I’m getting in the field.” The understatement of the millennium. “Normally I’d talk to the DVI team about it but…well…the DVI situation being what it is…” Arkasha grasped the essence of the problem with such astounding speed that Arkady caught himself thinking yet again that he was far too fine a tool for the scientific hackwork of a routine survey mission.

“Have you worked up your climatic succession equations yet?” he asked.

“I tried. I came up with nonsense.”

“Can I see your work?”

“I checked it. And double-checked it. It’s not a calculating error.”

“I’m not saying it is,” Arkasha replied with unaccustomed mildness. “I just want to understand what you’ve done so I don’t waste time repeating it.”

He waited while Arkady leafed through the pages, written and scratched out and overwritten, on which he’d tried and failed to make sense of the facts on the ground.

“What’s dh? Disturbance history?”

“Yes. And C is percentage of the sample in climax stage. And P is…”

“Patch areas. Yes. Great. Perfect.”

Arkasha flipped back to the first page of calculations, walked around to the other side of the lab bench, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a chewed pencil stub, dragged his stool back around to Arkady’s side of the table, and sat down—all without taking his eyes off the equations. “Go boil some coffee, would you? It’s going to take me a while to get through this. And Arkady?” Arkady turned, his hand on the doorjamb.

“We’re not telling anyone about this until we’re sure, right?”

“Right.”

“Good boy.”

Arkady was so distracted that he boiled the water twice, and by the time he got back Arkasha’s scratch paper was thickly covered with his illegible pencil scratchings.

“Well,” Arkasha announced. “Your math’s fine.”

“I know my math’s fine. What I don’t know is where the problem is.”

“In the data, obviously.”

“What are you—?”

“Oh, get your hackles down. There’s nothing wrong with your data collection methods, or your samples or your recording or anything else you’ve done. There’s something wrong out there.” He gestured toward the skin of the hab ring and the vast black forest beyond. “There’s something wrong—or right—with the planet itself.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.