4.4

[It's Watson's birthday today]

He was already sweating, and the sweat bit at the corners of his eyes. His hands, sunk up to the elbow in the membranes above him, were too grease-grimed to be of any help. The delicate operations he was trying to enact (beyond the power of sight) in the complex guts of the machine (well-designed to be inaccessible and incomprehensible by people long-lost to time itself) put more than just physical strain on the bones and sinews of his aching fingers. His mind began to pirouette, turn backflips, fade from control. That shape octagonal, this one cylindrical, a thread here, a sprocket there, and over all a repulsive gelatinous lining of icy lubricant.
He turned to the young idiot standing next to him, insensible to the fear of failure, confident in his skill and the inevitability of success, and said "Wrench, please."
He got the wrench and drove it up into the layers of sheeting under the hulk. Averting his eyes (it's almost impossible to lie with one's eyes), he tapped the wrench four times against the cleanest section of dull-tympanic crust he could manage.
"Wow, it's really up in there, isn't it?"
"Yeah. I've almost got it, though." He thought about throwing the part very far away, preferably over a cliff into a dark bay somewhere. He drew the wrench back out and closed his eyes as the lie washed over him once more. "Wrong size."
"Smaller or–?"
"Sure."