(Dude with a rake who bears not a slight resemblance to Scavina’s husband with longer hair? It’s all in the eyebrows…)

In any case, we need guy-with-rake on a t-shirt, I think. You’d get lots of crossover buyers from Neal Stephenson fans who are besotted with his mammoth Anathem. There’s a principle in that named Diax’s Rake which is named after a (in the story) historical event where a philosopher/theoretician got angry and beat people with a rake.

I guess this is the downside of being a purely scientific organization. Hopefully Patty will not end up having her brains splattered all over the countryside as a result of this, as she was one of my favorite supporting characters.

I’m still a bit shell-shocked that Galaxion is back. (Yes, obviously I was four years late getting the news.) Also gives me hope that there might be time for a bigger creative life again once my little boy is a bit older…

So, a rake implies a 20th century tech-level industrial civilisation. And time and energy for gardening. It’s not a tree trunk. It’s not a super spacey collapsible bit of survey kit like you’d find on a spaceship. It has an ordinary handle, not a super spacey one like Aria’s magic survey pole that just got smooshed.

If you’re a subsistence-level survivor, you’re probably not going to care too much about how exactly level your garden is. You might fashion a spade or digging stick. Knives, definitely. You might have a hydroponics kit dragged out of the bay and set up. You might have a robot doing stuff. But a rake? It’s the sort of fussy thing built for suburban lawns or small house gardens. They’re really hard to build and they don’t add a whole lot to productivity. They’re for prettiness and imply lots of spare energy budget but not yet high-tech enough to automate home gardening.

So my guess is it belongs to this Earth, which means we’re near suburban 20th C tech level civilisation, and one which hasn’t diverged much from British/American norms.

Which means NASA or UNIT or the local mall cops or janitors should have been crawling all over the starship crash site for years, yet they’re not.

So… yeah, I’m confused.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

@Samantha: Yeah, the rake is indeed the weapon of choice. And thank you!

@John: Hm, now I look at it I guess I ought to have made it more clear. The sound is supposed to be the rustling of the leaves and branches as the Mystery Guy crashes through them. EDIT: Right, like David said!