Every time he starts to really relax, starts to slip closer to falling asleep on his feet, he jerks back to attention, his mind for a moment reacting like he’s back in the stone shell, struggling against the force threatening to drag him into unconsciousness. (He’s still counting, still counting, the numbers constantly ticking up in the back of his head. Senkuu takes mental note of everything he’s going to need to do in the morning, once other people start waking up. Everyone’s depending on him to get this right, he needs to account for every contingency ahead of time. There’s always some critical element whose true value isn’t apparent until you go without. He’s learned all too well with his early experiments, that even when you know all the theory for something, there’s countless practical details you can only pick up with experience. It should be fairly simple if Chrome’s collection has the right stuff though, and even if they don’t have it on hand he has faith Chrome can find it.įirst priority is to go over the work on the Perseus again, check in on how the addition of the engines is going.

That reminds him, they’ll need to make a basic Braun tube at some point so they can get basic radar. A habit burned into his thought patterns like a persistent image permanently burned into an old CRT screen.) A reflex trained into himself over the aeons spent in the dark, trapped and alone. (The counting is always going in the back of his mind now. It’s dark out, has been for 29,887 seconds if he counts from when the sun was no longer visible from the lab window. He jots down what he does remember about clockmaking regardless. He could, but even beyond the possibility of something happening to him, he doesn’t want everyone’s fates to depend on his counting yet again.) He could count the seconds from each sunrise to sunset. While he’s read about some of the early clocks used to keep time at sea, he doesn’t know the exact details, doesn’t know if he could figure it out quickly given trial and error, or if he should go for a different method of tracking position instead.

They’ll need some accurate clocks that can keep time on the ocean as an additional way to track their position pendulum clocks are out of the question given the inevitable swaying of the waves. Work is still rolling along on the Perseus, but there’s so much Senkuu needs to do to get everything ready for their voyage.

The bear and the dragon summary