Human Test

by E. M. Foner

  I didn’t look back to see how Saul took my sudden departure, and I put on a burst of speed just to make sure he wouldn’t follow to continue his new line of questioning. Something about the county safety inspector always made me feel like he knew more than he was letting on.

  Three

  The morning session was nearing an end when I reached the village school. As adjunct faculty without a homeroom, eBeth taught in the auditorium where the village meetings were also held. All of the large-capacity rooms on Reservation that I’d visited featured a lush indoor garden in the back which may have been intended as a natural air purifier. At first glance, I wondered if the entire student body was in attendance, and I felt guilty about having pushed eBeth to accept the job shortly after we arrived. Then I realized that the audience was divided into three distinct groups, and only the twenty or so youngsters at the front were official students.

  Behind the children sat a similar number of teenagers, most of them a year or two younger than eBeth, an age where the teens remaining in the village were typically working as apprentices or in a family business. Further back sat a thinly spread group of adults, including the headmaster, two members of the village council, and a few people I didn’t recognize.

  “Who wants to try reading today’s tongue twister?” eBeth asked her students in English while tapping the blackboard with a long pointer. “Yes, Naomi?”

  “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” the girl reeled off proudly.

  “Excellent,” eBeth congratulated her. “Are there any questions about today’s class before we break for lunch? My students only,” she added when several adults raised their hands.

  “What’s a peck?” a boy asked.

  “A Northern measure,” eBeth told him. “It’s like, a, uh, Log, only different.”

  “How do you pick pickled peppers?” a farm girl demanded. “You have to pick the peppers first and then pickle them.”

  “Who pickles peppers?” another child asked.

  “It’s not meant to be literal,” eBeth explained, drawing blank stares from her class for using an unfamiliar word. “I mean, the point of a tongue twister is to improve your ability to speak clearly, not to convey, uh, deliver information.”

  At the base of the school’s bell tower the designated student began energetically ringing the lunch hour. eBeth’s class dissolved into a frenzied packing away of notebooks and a preliminary round of trading desserts before the main bartering event took place in the small cafeteria. The village school was the only stone structure in town, and the lack of recent additions testified to the relative stability of the local population. I watched as one of the departing students made a detour to the front of the class and shyly presented eBeth with an apple before fleeing after his fellows.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mark,” the headmaster addressed me from his seat as I navigated my way through the outbound flow of students.

  “Joshua,” I greeted him. “I’m surprised to find you in my daughter’s class. If I had known there would be adults in attendance I would have negotiated a higher pay rate for her.”

  “You mean you would have tried,” he replied, surprising me by responding in English. Then he ruined his show of fluency by adding, “I is a very good student, being.”

  “Yes you is,” I told him, as I wasn’t being paid to correct anybody’s English. “I’m taking eBeth to Old Furnace on a clock repair job this afternoon. I hope you’re not keeping her after school.”

  “No, no.” He smiled crookedly at my weak joke and switched back to his native tongue. “It’s actually a bit of council business. We all feel that it’s time the village got its own turret clock and we’d like to hire you to purchase one for us.”

  “The school’s bell tower doesn’t have room,” I cautioned him, though I was intrigued by the possibility of raising the roof, so to speak.

  “It’s for the steeple on the Ferrymen Temple,” he told me.

  “But nobody goes there,” I said, calling up an image of the steeple from memory. Sure enough, the steeple had been designed with blank spots for a clock face on each of the four walls. Due to the temple’s location on the highest land in the village, a clock would be visible for a good ways in every direction. “Does the council really have that kind of money to invest? A new turret clock costs as much as a dozen good bicycles.”

  “That’s why we need you to buy us an old one and recondition it,” the headmaster told me. “We’ll compensate you for all of your time, of course.”

  “Of course,” I grumbled, knowing that I would end up eating most of the hours for the sake of goodwill. But the truth is that I enjoy working on turret clocks, and taking one apart to the last screw and pin would make an interesting apprenticeship graduation project for eBeth. “What’s your budget for the purchase?”

  “We’re still wrangling, but I thought, eight gold?” he ventured, a price that would be just about right for a single bicycle.

  “It will take a while,” I warned him. “There’s a section of ads for used machines and such in the back pages of the Engineer’s Journal but I don’t remember seeing anything that would fit in your price range. Eight gold will limit us to clocks being sold for parts, but as long as the frame and the basic movement are intact, I can work with Paul to fabricate anything else that’s needed.”

  “Are you sure you can’t just build one from scratch?” the headmaster asked slyly.

  “Sure he can,” eBeth interjected, having taken advantage of my ban on active sensing to sneak up behind me. “That would be a great project for us.”

  “Paul doesn’t have a foundry to cast the frame parts,” I reminded her, “and the escapement requires precision machining.”

  “Whatever,” eBeth said, knowing better than to get into an argument in front of the headmaster about the exact level of technological cheating I would permit myself and my team members.

  “I’ll let you know before I order anything so you can arrange for the payment,” I told the headmaster.

  “There’s no need to be so formal,” he said, standing up and gathering his notes. “Just buy what you think is best and put in for reimbursement. And thank you for an excellent class today, eBeth. It’s wonderful how quickly the children are progressing.”

  The headmaster hurried off before I could protest the purchasing arrangement, leaving me with the distinct impression that I’d been hustled. The economy of Reservation was split between cash and barter, with the latter being more popular in the rural areas where coin wasn’t as easy to come by. As a result, the inhabitants were well versed in deal-making.

  “Let’s go,” eBeth said. “I packed a lunch.”

  “It’s bad for your digestion to eat while pedaling, not to mention riding with no hands on these roads.”

  “I know. I’ll eat when we get there. It’s around ten miles, right?”

  “Ninety stadia,” I told her. “You should use the local units even when we’re talking English so that they become second nature.”

  “Like I’m going to need to know a bunch of ancient Greek and Aramaic measures to get ahead in life,” eBeth retorted. She pulled her bike out from the faculty rack and wheeled it alongside as we headed for the visitor rack, which in a reversal from the norm on Earth was the farthest parking area from the school entrance. “Why didn’t they just choose one system or the other?”

  “I suspect it was more of a natural process than a matter of choice. The number of individuals the Ferrymen transported was relatively low so it’s quite likely that the different ethnic groups were forced to depend on each other for specialist knowledge. For example, if the Greeks supplied the road engineers, it would make sense that their units were adopted for longer lengths.”

  “It’s worse than the metric system they tried to teach us in school,” she complained as I retrieved my own bike. “None of the units make sense.”

  “People are always most comfortable using the system they grew up with. Take
the calendar.”

  “Don’t even get me started on the calendar,” eBeth grunted, hopping on her bike and standing to put all of her weight on the left pedal. “I have to ask Sue to translate it just to figure out how old I really am.”

  I caught up with her at the gate and pointed in the direction of Old Furnace, which not surprisingly lay beyond Old Bridge. “Years are based on planetary orbits, it’s the same around the galaxy,” I told her. “The humans brought to this world stuck with a seven-day week even though Reservation’s day is a good fifteen percent longer than Earth’s. The year is just over three hundred days, which if you adjust for the planet’s rotational speed, makes it about five percent shorter than an Earth year. It wouldn’t have been that difficult for the ancestors of these people to become acclimated. The Ferrymen catalog large numbers of worlds in order to find the ones most suitable for their population transplant operations.”

  “If the day is fifteen percent longer, how come it still has twenty-four hours?”

  “You can blame the ancient Egyptians for that one. I believe they started with a ten-hour day for sundials, added an hour to each end for dawn and dusk, and then doubled it for night.”

  “The math doesn’t work,” eBeth argued.

  “The second here is longer than an Earth-second, making the minute longer as well. The relationship between the units is based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system, base sixty mathematics. It’s how they ended up with sixty copper coins in a silver, and sixty silver coins in a gold.”

  “I thought that seconds were based on atomic clocks or something,” eBeth argued. “You’re saying that it’s all relative.”

  “I’m saying it’s all arbitrary. Advanced science allows civilizations to define their basic units with ever-increasing accuracy, but it’s strictly a matter of mutual agreement.”

  We rode on in silence for a while, which gave eBeth a chance to digest the information dump. It must have come as a surprise to her that the seconds and minutes weren’t the same here as on Earth, a fact I’d put off explaining from day to day on the advice of Sue, who claimed the girl already had enough adjustments to make. When we reached the main road and turned towards Old Furnace, eBeth must have finished processing the latest data, because she asked, “Why are bicycles so expensive here?”

  “They’re cheaper than automobiles on your world, and they last a lot longer with proper care.”

  “I’d have to save my whole salary from the school for the rest of the year to buy this bike.”

  “One of the perks of your job,” I told her. “I’d be a poor master not to provide transportation for my apprentice.”

  We pedaled along in silence for a few short minutes, and then eBeth asked, “Where do ball bearings come from?”

  “Do you mean that in the general sense, or are we still talking about the locally manufactured bicycles?”

  “These ball bearings,” she replied, pointing down at the crank as she pedaled.

  “They’re imported from other worlds. I’ve seen advertisements in the Engineer’s Journal. Humans here could in principle manufacture ball bearings themselves, but hydraulic power and gear-driven control systems would produce an inferior product to what’s cheaply available on the galactic market.”

  “That’s what I thought,” eBeth said, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that we were headed for yet another argument about Sky Gods exploiting gullible humans. “If the Ferrymen allowed us to generate electricity we could build better machines and factories and we wouldn’t have to buy imported ball bearings that make bikes so expensive.”

  “Us?” I chided her.

  “You know what I mean,” she shot back. “How much of this bicycle originated off-world?”

  “Just the ball bearings, eBeth, and at most they cost a handful of coppers. The bicycles are expensive because they aren’t mass produced using robots. Paul could make a living turning out one bicycle a month if that was how he wanted to spend his time.”

  “You’re telling me that somebody made this steel tubing in a little mill on a river?” she asked skeptically.

  “The frame is heavier than bicycles sold on Earth because of the cruder manufacturing techniques available here,” I pointed out. “There are some large factories in the provincial capitals that turn out steel tubing, rubber tires, and other basic components that are too inefficient to produce in a small shop.”

  “So the Ferrymen break their own rules when it suits them to keep the wheels of industry turning.”

  “The large factories run on water power, which is one of the reasons their use is limited to vital components. There are only so many prime locations to build dams or aqueducts.”

  “Why are you always defending them?” eBeth demanded. “Sometimes I suspect that you think humans are better off with alien overlords.”

  “I never said that,” I protested. “I have less than four years of experience observing your people with over three years of that coming on Earth. But if I had to pick a place to raise a human child—”

  “That’s what I just said. You DO think we’re better off here.”

  “According to Kim, these people are a lot healthier than Earthlings, mentally as well as physically. She hypothesizes that exercise has a great deal to do with it, but the lower levels of pollution and stress are also major factors.”

  “So maybe we should invite the Ferrymen to take over Earth and we can all start making handicrafts at home.”

  “Sarcasm is unattractive in a young lady, and it seems to me that quite a few humans were taking advantage of your Internet craft-store sites to do just that,” I reminded her.

  “I do miss the Internet,” eBeth said, and if I were human I would have breathed a sigh of relief over successfully changing the subject. “Especially the gaming. One of the older kids in my class invited me to their game night and I’m thinking of going, just to see what it’s like. She said they have role-playing games with huge multi-sided dice to determine the outcomes. Supposedly they’ve been around forever.”

  “The first commercially produced role-playing game on Earth was Dungeons & Dragons, back in 1974,” I informed her.

  “New rule,” the girl proclaimed. “You have to tell me whenever you’re pulling something from the copy of Wikipedia you downloaded into your memory before we left Earth. Otherwise, it’s like cheating.”

  I had no answer to that.

  “How much longer to Old Furnace?”

  “About seventy-two stadia,” I said, rounding down to make it sound a little closer.

  “Tow?” she requested, moving closer alongside.

  “Go ahead,” I told her, recalling that the girl hadn’t eaten lunch yet and was burning a lot of calories. eBeth reached for the metal hoop on the side of the toolbox mounted on the back of my bike and pulled it out. The internal reel and spring fed her a few yards, or, should I say, ten podes of cable, and she fit the ring over the custom post Paul had added to the steering stem on her bike. From there, a mainspring salvaged from an experimental version of a wind-up turret clock did the work of keeping the cable taut, even if she chose to do a little pedaling.

  I picked up my speed to the maximum I thought I could allow myself without arousing suspicion if somebody saw us. A half an hour later we arrived at town hall. Old Furnace was the county seat, boasting approximately five thousand households within its expansive boundaries, and there were several stone buildings on the main street, including the local seat of government with its impressive clock tower. I led eBeth in a quick circuit around the building to ensure that all four faces of the clock showed the same time.

  “The linkages are still attached,” she observed in a professional manner, “but the south face looks a minute or two behind the others, so the collar must have slipped.”

  “Or the last person to fool around up there didn’t have an assistant below and got tired of running up and down the stairs. What else?”

  “Well, it’s stopped, but that’s obvious.” />
  We parked our bikes in visitor slots and I hit the quick release on my toolbox mount and grabbed the handles. “You get the doors,” I told her.

  “The apprentice is supposed to carry the tools,” eBeth pointed out, even though she knew as well as I that with all the spare brass parts I carried, my clock-repair kit weighed half as much as she did.

  Nobody paid us any attention as she searched for the door to the tower stairs, which turned out to be exactly where I would have guessed based on the building’s exterior. The temperature in the tower seemed to go up a few degrees at each landing, and when we reached the small room with the turret clock, I knew it must be unpleasantly hot for the girl.

  “Why don’t you go back down and eat your lunch by the river?” I suggested.

  “Are you going to follow me around for the rest of my life and do my job for me?”

  “At least drink some water.”

  eBeth scowled, but she fished a water bottle out of her pack and took several swallows. While she drank, I removed the wooden cover that protected the clock mechanism from bird droppings and dust. It would take a minute for her eyes to adjust to the light that filtered into the room and I considered setting up the spirit lamp packed in my tool box. Despite the fact that the hands outside weren’t moving, the clock ticked away with the movement of the escapement, the pendulum describing short, sure arcs. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the girl puzzled her way through the gear train.

  “There,” she declared, pointing triumphantly. “The pin fell out of that gear and it’s just spinning on the arbor.”

  “Excellent,” I congratulated her. “Why did the pin fail?”

  eBeth crouched down and fanned her fingers through the dust below the clock stand, then grinned. “Gotcha,” she said, holding up the remains of a cotter pin. “It was a replacement and the metal fatigued where the ends were bent over. Didn’t you say to ignore the whole dissimilar metals thing and use steel pins on brass and vise versa?”

  “Steel on steel is terrible because there’s no give and the pins fall out, unless they rust in place, and brass on brass leads to both the pin and the hole deforming,” I told her, sliding open the pin selection drawer.