The recordings did not show three separate tests.
Iven understood that before he understood the whole of Sera’s explanation. Parn’s apparatus sheets had three headings, three limited outputs and three runs that had passed individually. Laid beside the clinical pressure trace, the combined schedule became one event entering a living body through three places.
The body had carried the return between them.
Sera stood at the long table in the upper clinic, one hand holding a translucent comparison sheet above the others. Vessa had aligned the common starting marks. Harl’s local recorder had caught the same opening signal as the test apparatus, giving them a physical event to match instead of relying on two clerks’ memories of a clock.
Parn stood opposite.
She had come without changing the settings on the original board. Two witnesses had recorded the apparatus before its lines were disconnected. Her clerk sat near the door with the working copy and wrote corrections where everyone could see them.
“Here,” Sera said.
The first test movement entered. The local return settled incompletely. The second entered before that movement had finished travelling through the adjacent tissue. The third met both.
