Keeping in mind EMC’s culture of hip self-presentation – not to  say its preference  for conservatively leveraged joint  venture structures  with local partners  – Gaines kept silent his collaboration  with Imps  von Sant. Last of the genuinely human  beings, Imps passed his day in shower sandals and  cargo shorts, often matched  with  a slogan  T-shirt,  which  might  read  SHE’S  UP YOU,  MAN  or  YbAlB4  (pronounce  that  ‘yibble before’). In addition  he cultivated  a range  of mid-20th  century  conditions from gingivitis to dry skin and had, over the years, grown fat. This old school viewpoint was what Gaines enjoyed about Imps most: his work being more difficult to fathom. Half the experiment  – designed off the shelf a hundred  years before to identify strange materials in the big dust clouds and expansion fronts at the edges of the Tract – was broken, while the rest produced data not from outside but from in, giving van Sant a running commentary on its own processes he had begun to describe in his reports as ‘a cry for help’. Needles swung across their dials, redlining jerkily until the Tub’s shadow operators woke up murmuring:

‘It’s not right, dear,’ and, ‘It’s too much to ask.’

When Gaines arrived that morning for the weekly performance objectives review, he found van Sant hammering  with the heel of his fist on a zinc box about a foot on a side and enamelled green, from which a pair of independent  eyepieces dangled on cloth-covered flex.

‘I used to be able to see something in here.’

‘Forget that stuff,’ Gaines advised him, ‘and give me a beer.’

‘It was a view of mountains,’ van Sant said.

He scratched up a quart of Giraffe, then banged the box again. ‘Mountains in one eye, and something else in the other, I forget what. No, wait. A lake! That’s what it looked like to me.’

‘Really?’

Gaines  had  his  doubts  about  the  quality  of these  images – neither did he believe them to be informative in themselves. The instrument,  acquired knock-down  at the usual Motel Splendido fire sale, was operator-tuned: there would be some way of seeing, something  you did with your head, which performed  that  trick of cross-correlation. Squint though he might, Imps van Sant had never got the knack. He wasn’t tailored the right way, though  a certain natural shrewdness enabled him to observe:

‘It was what they added up to that made the difference.’

‘You don’t want to worry about that,’ Gaines told him vaguely. ‘Have we discovered anything this week?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’