Eshel spread the sensor trace across two yard tables.
Tavin and Gell had carried the tables into the back room of the office, one after the other, and pushed them together beside the cot so Mara could see without sitting up. Then Eshel unrolled the trace: a long strip of graph paper from the rig’s recorder, as wide as his forearm and nearly as long as the room, printed with fine lines in four colors, one for each sensor on the test channel. Temperature of the mirror skin. Pressure in the return. Strain in the lining. Tone, as the rig’s microphone had heard it.
He pinned the corners with feeler blocks from the yard’s gauge drawer. Small heavy steel slabs, each stamped with its thickness.
“Move that one,” Mara said.
Eshel looked at her.
“The block at the far end,” she said. “On the right. It’s on the peel line.” She could see the place on the trace where the four lines broke, where the skin had begun to go at eleven seconds. A feeler block sat squarely on it. “I want to see it.”
Eshel moved the block a hand’s width along. The peel line showed: a sharp break in the strain trace, a sudden climb in the tone.
