With Momoe being our third bartender I can arrange more time to myself now. I wrote out a schedule that would give me a few days off and made myself a pack to go exploring in the tunnels. It took a while to find a way around the cave in, but I have found the way back to Dunsany. I’ve managed to build a stockpile of supplies in Joseph’s apartments so that I can have a base for exploration without having to go back up. Still no sign of Thomas and the others.
There’s someone else here.
I was cataloguing the equipment in the lab and had reorganized the shelves but when I came back the next day the stuff had been put back to how I had found them originally.
I was going to put them back right but then I had a better idea. I took one of the bottles from the shelf and sat in the corner and waited. Less than two hours later I saw him. He slipped into the lab from a secret door. I watched him examine the shelf then make a sort of clicking sound.
“Looking for something?” I said. He seemed frozen, as if my words had stunned him. “Who are you? Come into the light so I can see you,” I said.
“Father,” he said as he stepped from the shadows and shielded his eyes from the flame from my flint. “It’s me, Tobias.”
Father. I have his voice. How much longer will I deny I am a Foehammer?
Tobias follows me to the surface sometimes. I think he is lonely.
Sometimes Tobias is a real prick. Like, there was a flood in the basement, and he just sits on the table with his arms crossed and tells me how to use a mop more efficiently saying my hands are at the wrong position on the mop handle to get optimal leverage, but does he ever lift a finger to help me? No, never! He just keeps on and on about how I should do things more efficiently. Then when I do tell him that if he was so smart he should just show me, he starts lecturing me about those who think and those who work and how the engineer was less than the philosopher as he must work through with hands and tools to realise perfection, rather than having the ability to see perfection through purity of thought. What? I thought he was never going to shut up, this wasn’t a discourse session, this was a flooded basement! Builder’s sake! I got so damned sick of him that I had to go for a walk. When I got back, he was still sitting there, staring at the water like he could will it away. So that is what Ivory Tower means! All talk, no application!
Maybe I have learned more following Emerson on his adventures that I thought! Was I like that before I left the Church?
Application! Knowledge comes through direct experiment, not philosophy!
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