16.0 Falsified Information
"Nyet."
"Ne."
"Nu."
"No."
And so on and so forth, an incessant repetition of the word with every over the shoulder fling of an item pulled from the (eternal) wreckage of Mihailo's dwellings. Additions to the hoard had blessedly stagnated during his period of distraction (a great many conference calls via webcam to a great many more colleagues, acquaintances, distant relatives, etcetera) however conversely, though the Professor exerted no small effort to keep it that way, his mental faculties (those that enabled a certain amount of spatial memory in relation to what went where) seemed significantly compromised.
He couldn't find the damn cat anywhere.
Which really wouldn't have bothered him to begin with- cats were solitary animals (usually) content to periodically regain independence from cross species interaction (with creatures they were unable to gut, at least)- but when the lackadaisical shifting about of items revealed not only the lack of feline but of other specifics as well, he'd grown increasingly distressed.
Something about the place was wrong. There were no carefully folded clothes tucked neatly away in a corner, nor books on English decorating the coffee table or immaculately sharpened pencils strewn throughout the stubs of graphite that he himself used.
He tossed an old Serbian boot leg DVD of American and Japanese cartoons in the relative direction of the television. Nothing.
It took another half hour of this now habitual (since Friday) 'reorganization' for Miha to relent his stubbornness (if only slightly) to fish for his cellphone and rapidly punch the sequence he had (again, for a reason yet to be determined) been avoiding for nigh on several weeks.
"Ah- Zdravo, Sollomovici."
"Ne."
"Nu."
"No."
And so on and so forth, an incessant repetition of the word with every over the shoulder fling of an item pulled from the (eternal) wreckage of Mihailo's dwellings. Additions to the hoard had blessedly stagnated during his period of distraction (a great many conference calls via webcam to a great many more colleagues, acquaintances, distant relatives, etcetera) however conversely, though the Professor exerted no small effort to keep it that way, his mental faculties (those that enabled a certain amount of spatial memory in relation to what went where) seemed significantly compromised.
He couldn't find the damn cat anywhere.
Which really wouldn't have bothered him to begin with- cats were solitary animals (usually) content to periodically regain independence from cross species interaction (with creatures they were unable to gut, at least)- but when the lackadaisical shifting about of items revealed not only the lack of feline but of other specifics as well, he'd grown increasingly distressed.
Something about the place was wrong. There were no carefully folded clothes tucked neatly away in a corner, nor books on English decorating the coffee table or immaculately sharpened pencils strewn throughout the stubs of graphite that he himself used.
He tossed an old Serbian boot leg DVD of American and Japanese cartoons in the relative direction of the television. Nothing.
It took another half hour of this now habitual (since Friday) 'reorganization' for Miha to relent his stubbornness (if only slightly) to fish for his cellphone and rapidly punch the sequence he had (again, for a reason yet to be determined) been avoiding for nigh on several weeks.
"Ah- Zdravo, Sollomovici."