Ten Seconds

The hard part, she said, was finding a sound they'd answer. Not a word. They have no ears; they hear, it seems, with hairs on their legs, so it had to be something the air would carry to a leg in a dish twelve centimetres across, in a room kept dark enough to pass for night.

So, three in the morning in Bonn, the infrared turning everything to a ghost of itself, she waits for the eyes. You can see them go, behind the lens, the retina swinging like a lamp somebody's carrying through a house, the legs curling a little, and then she presses it, the tone, and counts. Awake, they turn in under two seconds. Resting, nearer three. In the eye-moving part, four and a bit, and four of ten don't turn at all inside the ten seconds she allows. They just keep looking at whatever you look at with the lights off and nothing in front of you, and she writes no response, and later, when they're up and hunting, plays it again, and they turn at once, which is the point: they could hear it. They were somewhere it didn't reach.

I like that the measurement is waiting. Most of what we know about whether anyone's in there, we know by calling and counting. The flies were another night, twenty-odd let loose in the dark, and the night after, they slept longer and did the eye thing nearly twice as much, as if there was something they'd been kept from finishing.

She drives home with the window down. Her partner's asleep on his back, his eyes going under the lids, the slow sweep, the quick one. She says his name, not loudly, the way you'd play a tone, and counts, she can't help it, one, two, three, four, and at four and a bit he says what? from wherever he's been, and she says nothing, go back, and he does, and she lies there knowing the one thing the method can tell her, that whoever answered had come a long way in the dark to do it.