The collar bent another fraction under the heavy pulse, and the jack gauges showed it before anyone felt it.
Eshel saw it first. He had the six jacks’ strain gauges on the rack’s lower row, under the seams, and as the first pulse settled into the branches, the line on jack four’s gauge moved. A short line, on the slate, angled upward. Then a pause. Then a longer one.
“Jack four,” he said. “Bending.”
Tavin was already at the row. He went down it with his rule and his lamp, one support at a time, the way he had after the trial. He knelt at each jack and laid the rule along its body and read the gap under it, and called the reading down the row.
“Jack one,” he said. “Flat.” The feeler gauge, the thinnest leaf, under the rule. It would not go. “No bend.”
“Jack two. Flat.”
“Jack three. A hair.” The thinnest leaf went in at the rule’s middle and stopped. “A hair.”
He knelt at jack four longest.
