‘Tis Charity
to Show
Chapter IV
Part 5
It wasn’t
the furnishings in the small cramped room that gave it its clutter; there was
only a desk, a chair, and a slender cabinet in the whole area. Boxes of artifacts and specimens sorted
and unsorted, knapsacks of tools, and a plethora of digital devices, were what
crowded what was fairly small space.
No expense was spared in that every corner of Dr. Ellis’ office was
being utilized for all they were worth.
But in spite
of the orderly compartmentalizing of items in the room, Rand had a difficult
time navigating through the narrow pathways created by all the stuff. Clearing what she could so she could
create a clear space for herself at the desk, Rand sat down, took the wafers
out of the leather envelope and spread them out onto the desk in fan-like
formation. She pulled out all the
wafers that have been dated and placed them aside, taking the undated wafers
and replacing them back into the envelope.
“No need
listening to wafers with nothing on them,” she quipped.
Rand sighed
and looked out of the window that was right over her desk. The sun was not as high up as before,
and the sky was a slightly darker shade of turquoise as was characteristic of
the afternoon. She gazed onto the
warm- hued, darkly sanded landscape and thanked God there was a window in this
miserable little closet of a room, or she’d have to burst a hole in the walls
just to stop from feeling like they were closing in on her.
Rand put the
leather envelope aside and pulled Dr. Ellis’ recorder towards her.
“At least
she left the thing on the desk so I wouldn’t have to fish for it,” she thought.
The recorder
wasn’t portable like Rand’s, but a bulky, cumbersome, rectangular block of as
device that resembled the old recorder of 20th Century Earth, except
that the insides contained flat silver plates that operated wafers. Rand picked up the wafer with the
earliest date, pressed the open button which flipped up the hatch to the
recorder, and placed the wafer inside.
Closing the
hatch to the recorder, Rand pressed the ‘on’ button, slumped in her chair and
waited while tapping her feet to the floor. As a result of her yeoman training at the Academy, Rand was
familiar with the various jargons used in many professions, but because her
father was a professor of Anthropology and because she herself had a degree in
the same field, she was especially familiar with the jargon that Dr. Ellis
would be using in her logs, like grid, in situ, debitage, test pit.
Having a
working knowledge on anthropological and archeological terms wouldn’t mean a
damn thing if the Good Archeologist mentioned nothing that might give her leads
on their disappearance.
“This is the
log of Dr. Adrienne Ruth Ellis on the date of…”
“Oh, boy,”
thought Rand.
The voice of
Dr. Ellis wasn’t going to make this task any easier, since it had a flat,
drone-like quality to it that made Rand recall many a heavy-lidded period where
she fought mightily to keep her head from thudding on her classroom desk. Recounts of a new found artifact, what
it might have been used for and the minute detail of its physical
characteristics, coupled with that voice, was enough to send Rand into a
tailspin of a stupor.
“Always fun
to revisit my college days,” she groaned, throwing her head back in mock
self-pity.
This was
going to be a long one!
Yuck.
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