Small alien head on a finger

Today I was logging the boundary stones along the north shelf, which is tedious work, since the stones all look the same under the dust. Then I found one with a mark scratched into its face: a round head, two long almond eyes, and a mouth no wider than a grain of rice. Someone had taken real trouble over it. The line was so thin I had to tilt the stone to the lamp to be sure it was not a crack.

I showed the survey board that evening. Okonedo took one look and laughed, then went quiet. Her father, she said, used to draw that same face in the margins of every chart he signed, always in the same corner, always small enough to hide under a thumb. Nobody on the board knew why. The official position is that it is a surveyor's habit, like initials.

I did not log the stone. I sat with my pencil over the form and wrote the coordinates on the inside of my cuff instead, the way I did as a child before anyone trusted me with a ledger. Tonight the relay hummed its three notes, and I hummed them back, low, to see whether it would stop.

It didn't. But it changed the last note, which I suppose counts as an answer.