Stephen Greaves stands stock still, frozen in a posture he has held without a break for most of the afternoon.  He is simply and perfectly happy: a happiness made of observations and inferences.  His brain is a computer.  Nothing perturbs its dispassionate calculations.

He is in the water-testing station at the eastern end of the loch, in the main pump room.  He is not alone there.  Hungries surround him, and will attack and devour him if they notice he is there - that is, if he moves too suddenly or makes any loud noise.  They will not detect him by scent: the chemical gel smeared over his body protects him, makes him smell like nothing much at all instead of like a meal.

The discomfort of standing so still for so long doesn't trouble Greaves over-much.  He has refined the skill over a long time.  He started practising the day after his thirteenth birthday, two years ago, when Dr. Khan first told him that his name was on the longlist for the Rosalind Franklin's crew.  Close observation of the hungries was clearly something that would be highly desirable, so he trained himself in the necessary skills.  He feels the strain, of course, but he lets it lie at the outer limits of his perceptions, all but ignored.  This is not so bad.  He has chosen a position that puts minimal strain on his arms and legs, braced in an angle of a wall so that he can even lean back and relax a little if he gets tired.

Also on those perceptual outskirts, consulted from time to time without undue urgency, is an estimate of passing time.  He is counting off the seconds in a kind of mental sub-routine, a discipline he taught himself when he was ten.

He knows he will have to leave soon, that he is close to his limit.  He has set an alarm.  When his internal counter reaches 108,000, corresponding to an elapsed duration of approximately three hours, it will signal to him that it is time to leave.  There are two reasons why he has to do this.  The first is temperature.  As the air around Greaves cools, the hungries will become aware of him as an anomalous hot spot in the early evening chill.  They will be able to track him by his body heat.

The other reason is that the longer he stays here, the more likely it is that his absence will be noticed.  That would be unpleasant.  Greaves does not enjoy talking to other people, except for Dr. Khan and (sometimes) Colonel Carlisle.  He likes it even less when the other people are angry or upset.

He wishes he could just be allowed to assume the risk without argument, without having to justify himself.  He has come here to observe the hungries in their quiet, dormant state, and there is so much to observe.  Their stillness, their silence is full of meaning.  Greaves visited the water-testing station for the first time the day before and was pleased with what he found there.  The station offered a large concentration of hungries in a single enclosed space: very dangerous, but (from the point of view of information-gathering) fabulously rich pickings.  He was able to stand and watch for an hour, stealing the time from a soil-acidity sweep that he had officially logged in the day-book.  As far as the other crew members knew, Greaves was safely within Rosie's defensive perimeter.