Duty Log, Partial

Custody conditions

Held flat in an inert sleeve in Recovery Cabinet 4. Handling under glass only. Paper is sound but the sheet is torn along one edge and four rows are lost.

Transcription is permitted. Interpretation is not: no member of either section may enter a reading of columns four to six into any record. See Standing Orders § 8.

Recovery

Taken from the shore drift line nine hours after the ██ overturn, dry, and lying face up.

Physical record

A single ruled sheet, foolscap, torn across the foot. Machine-ruled in six columns with a printed header row. Sixteen rows are filled in by hand in iron gall ink, in one hand throughout.

The handwriting is unremarkable and fully legible. The script is Latin, the numerals are Arabic, and the language is English.

Columns one to three are headed Hour, Wind, and Temp. Their contents behave as those words require: the hours advance, the wind is given in a scale of eight, the temperatures run between 3 and 11 and fall through the night.

Columns four to six are headed Carry, Owing, and Fell. Each holds three-figure decimals. All three headers are ordinary English words. None of them is being used in a sense this station can supply.

The figures are not arbitrary. Across all twelve legible rows the sum of Carry and Owing holds constant to within 0.4%, which is the ruling accuracy of the hand. Fell increases monotonically and does not reset at the day boundary.

We can therefore state that the sheet records a conserved quantity, and that we cannot say what is conserved.

Laboratory record

Fibre, sizing, and ink are consistent with local manufacture. The paper's refractive index measured 0.041 above local stock at intake and 0.036 at day 90. Normalization here is roughly ten times slower than for LAKE-001, in line with the observed relation between depth and settling rate.

The Optical Section has entered a standing objection: nothing establishes that normalization acts only on the physical properties of a recovered object. The objection is noted and no test for it has been proposed.

A statistical description of the conservation in columns four to six is filed with this record as Physical, not as Inference. It describes the marks on the sheet. It says nothing about what the marks are about.

Inference

No translation available.