Thirty-One
Gunfire was a mutterer.
Legs sprawled on the natural cave’s sandy floor and life support pack propped on a convenient rock, I watched the man fiddle with parts. His rock was a lousy workbench. He balanced little round mysterious electronic bits like dials and transistors and tubes or whatever in every crevice he could get. When he ran out of space, he tugged a square meter of black drop cloth from the toolkit and claimed part of the sand as well. The whole time he grumbled annoying partial sentences about ohms and watts and frequencies and integrals and differentials and mathematical stuff. He put me in mind of a bad mockery of a witch doctor from the old days when video was black and white, practicing an art the filmmakers considered equal parts mysterious and bizarre.
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