Human Test

by E. M. Foner

“Like when you’re my age,” eBeth responded with an unconscious toss of her head.

  “I want to work with my Aunt Rachel,” the girl replied.

  “What does she do?” eBeth asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, but she travels a lot and brings everybody really neat presents,” Naomi answered.

  “How about you, Monos?”

  “I want to work for the Ferrymen,” the boy declared.

  “Do you mean making goods for export?”

  “No, I want a job on a spaceship,” Monos replied as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “How do you get a job like that?” eBeth asked with a furtive glance in my direction to make sure I was listening. “I never see any Ferrymen around here.”

  The children all burst out laughing again, and I heard a couple of them repeating eBeth’s comment about never seeing Ferrymen in the village as if it were the punch line to a joke.

  “I’ve got connections,” Monos boasted, and then rubbed the side of his nose in the age-old human gesture of a criminal conspiracy.

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Delphi asked her teacher playfully, and the children laughed so hard I was afraid they might start leaking lemonade.

  “I’m apprenticed to my father to be a clockmaker,” eBeth told them when they finally settled down.

  “When are you going to marry Peter?” the girl followed up.

  “I’m not old enough yet,” eBeth objected. “Besides, I don’t know if I want to get married.”

  The boisterous children immediately fell silent, and you could have heard a feather drop, or at least, I could have.

  “But you walk out together,” Delphi said. “He must have asked your father for permission.”

  I saw that eBeth was taken completely off-guard by the sudden change of subject and might accidentally break her cover story with the wrong answer. I stepped into the breach and informed the students, “The marriage was arranged between our families when they were children. You know how that is.”

  Apparently they did, because the students dropped the subject without another word. Dessert was followed by a number of games whose educational value was questionable at best, unless the goal was to inculcate boys with a healthy fear of blindfolds and kissing. Then somebody suggested dancing and the children pushed all the furniture to the walls, linked arms, and exhausted themselves with going in a circle and singing in a scene that called to mind some wedding rituals from Earth.

  By the time her students headed home, eBeth looked worn out, but her eyes were bright, and she came straight to me for debriefing.

  “Did you catch all that, Mark? I thought that the Ferrymen were Sky Gods to these people, but Monos talked about them like they’re just another employer.”

  “Which they aren’t, at least not in the village or the towns I’ve visited, and Stacey hasn’t seen any in the capital yet, either.”

  “It makes sense that Monos would know about spaceships because they’re landing all the time to pick up the export goods, but he wants to work on one. I think the other children would have made fun of him if it wasn’t a real possibility.”

  “Next time he makes trouble, keep him after class and get some answers,” I suggested. “This lack of information is driving me crazy.”

  Eight

  “What are you so happy about?” Helen asked as we parked our bicycles in front of the miller’s cottage. “You’ve been grinning like the Cheshire cat the whole ride out.”

  “It’s this new saddle that Sue gave me for Ferrymen’s Day,” I confessed, a bit embarrassed that my satisfaction with the gift was so obvious. “The old one was too narrow.”

  “Why didn’t you buy a replacement yourself?”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure, really. The saddle that came with the bike wasn’t optimal for the pelvic structure of my encounter suit, but it wasn’t doing any permanent damage that I’m aware of.”

  Helen nodded in understanding. “I’m that way with money, too. Cheap.”

  “I’m not cheap. I was just trying to avoid waste.”

  “What did you do with the old saddle?”

  “Chopped it up with an axe,” I said, unable to suppress my sense of satisfaction. “Listen, Helen. The folks who live around the village think that you’re a bit wild because of the way you ride your bicycle. Let’s try not to give them anything new to gossip about today.”

  “I’ll be good, but I’d guess it has more to do with my dancing than my biking.”

  “What dancing?”

  “I’m always out at night to watch for the Originals, and when I hear the music from a barn dance, I just can’t resist dropping in. Don’t look at me like that. I was going to put it in my report.”

  I swallowed my response, and instead asked, “You’re sure you’ve done this before?”

  “I was collimating my own home-built reflector telescopes when you and Sue were still learning how to do floating point math,” Helen said. “Did you bring props?”

  “All the measurement instruments I own,” I replied, removing the optics-related tool box from the exchangeable rack on my bike. “The miller’s daughter is probably here, and she’s studying astronomy in the academy, so she may be familiar with the process.”

  “Then she’ll be impressed with the results,” Helen said, and knocked on the cottage door.

  “It’s not the results I’m concerned about, it’s the effort. If you do it ten times faster than she’s used to it will look suspicious.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll pretend to use your instruments and I can fake doing math on a slide-rule with the best of them.”

  The door opened and we were greeted by the miller’s wife.

  “Mark. Helen. Thank you for coming out during the holiday week. Sophus is so excited about his new telescope that I couldn’t stop him from sending the dog to see if you were available.”

  “It worked out fine, Palti. My niece wouldn’t have been available next week.”

  “Is that so,” the miller’s wife said, and I couldn’t help suspecting that she would have preferred waiting. “Well, Sophus and Athena will be thrilled that you’re here. He’s in the new shed out back.”

  “We’ll just head around then,” I answered for both of us. As I guided Helen to the path that ran between the cottage and the mill, I told her, “I suppose he didn’t pay for a folding tripod so he can’t bring the telescope inside without disassembling the mount. Millers make good coin but he’s a bit—whoa!”

  “Is that thing a telescope or a hollow log?” Helen asked, but I could tell that she was impressed by the tube sticking out of the shed’s roof, the half that wasn’t covered with canvas stretched over curved ribs. The overall effect reminded me of the time I saw a convertible creeping down the road back on Earth with the roof stuck half-open. Alerted to our presence by his dog, Sophus emerged from the new building almost immediately, his daughter in tow.

  “Thank you for coming, Mark. And this must be your niece who I’ve heard so much about.”

  “Helen,” my team member introduced herself. “And whatever you’ve heard about me is an exaggeration. How was I supposed to know that the pole wasn’t for dancing?”

  “It was for dancing,” Athena said. “We tie long ribbons to the top and dance in circles around it. Nobody had ever seen what you did before and the boys are still talking about it. Don’t you get dizzy spinning around upside-down like that?”

  “I’m out of practice, actually, but it’s kind of like riding a bicycle. You were there?”

  “The marriage celebration was for one of my oldest friends. Did you know the groom?”

  “I was just out and about.”

  I decided to jump in before the exchange went any further. “That telescope looks like it belongs in an observatory, Sophus. I’m surprised you…”

  “Could afford it?” the miller completed my unfinished thought. “The lenses and mirrors are from an orbital factory. According to Athena, microgravity is the
ideal environment for making optical parts.”

  “I’m just repeating what my instructors say,” the girl admitted with a slight blush at hearing her father repeating terms she’d just finished explaining to him. “They’re also much less expensive than the parts made on our world, and the import authority finally reached an agreement with the lens-grinders guild last month. I sent mom a letter as soon as I heard about it, and she put in one of the first orders to the telescope maker that sponsors our class.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t see an announcement in the Engineer’s Journal,” I said. “They do regular reports about additions to the import list.”

  “The Engineer’s Journal is great for technology and classified ads but their news items lag a couple months,” Athena told me. “It’s just not a priority with them.”

  “That makes sense. So, I invited Helen along to help with the collimation because she has more experience with reflector telescopes than I do.”

  “Athena took care of tuning everything already,” Sophus told me proudly. “We would have been up all night stargazing if not for Bright Moon getting in the way.”

  “Oh. I thought the note said you needed help with the setup. Were you just inviting me out for a look?”

  “It’s the tracking mount,” the miller’s daughter told us. “It was supposed to come ready for operation but I can’t even wind the spring.”

  “You really are building an observatory,” I marveled. “I’ve never seen a tracking mount on a backyard telescope.”

  “The business that makes them contracted with our academy to test a homeowner version and I was one of the students assigned to the project. They offered to loan students the used pre-production units in return for regular performance reports. I couldn’t resist.”

  “Let’s take a look at it,” I suggested, and we all followed the girl into the observatory shed. Once inside, I could see that the roof had more ribs than the typical convertible and the overall shape when the roof was closed would closely mimic a dome. The walls were numbered, prefab panels, which explained how Sophus, who wasn’t known for his building skills, had erected it himself. But the tracking mechanism was a thing of beauty that must have cost as much as a couple of new bicycles.

  “The crate had a note about seeing the included instructions but there weren’t any,” the miller griped. “Athena has hundreds of hours of experience using the device but she’s never set one up.”

  Back on Earth, I would have stealthily downloaded the instructions from the manufacturer’s website or raided their internal database if a public document wasn’t available, but neither option was available on Reservation.

  “They probably forgot the instructions because it’s not a retail package, but I’ll be back at the academy long before we could get a new set sent out by mail,” Athena added. “Everything looks the way I remember, but I never paid much attention to all those gears. And I don’t know where the counterweights go because this isn’t the same telescope as the one I used at the academy.”

  “I’m sure we can work it out,” Helen told her. “Why don’t you look at the mechanism, Mark, and I’ll figure out the counterweights.”

  “It’s too bad eBeth wasn’t awake when we left,” I said. “She’s getting good at visually analyzing gear trains.”

  “Does it look alright?” Sophus asked anxiously just a few seconds later. “I was so excited when it came that I might have gotten a bit careless prying the planks off the crate. I thought it would be packed in something to prevent shipping damage, but it was only secured at the base with a few bolts through the bottom.”

  “That’s alright,” I assured him. “I’m pretty sure I see the issue and it’s a good problem to have. They’ve installed wedge-clips and locking collars throughout the gear train to prevent shipping damage. Normally there would be a diagram highlighting the locations of all of the safety devices. Did you check the inside of the lid?”

  “I’ll look now,” Sophus said, squeezing past me and out of the shed.

  “I want one of these,” Helen declared as she installed the counterweight on the spindle. “We could build a little observatory on the roof of The Eatery.”

  “Numbered,” I announced, holding up a wedge-clip. “Six of thirteen. You keep track of these, Athena, and we’ll know when we have them all.”

  “I can’t thank you both enough,” the girl told us. “The telescope is great, but so many of the objects my dad wants to view are moving too fast to track manually because the field of view is so small. I tried to get him to change to the lower power eyepiece, but he wants to see everything at maximum magnification.”

  “I’m curious to see this tracking mount in action myself,” I told her as I continued to strip out all of the shipping safeties. “I imagine it requires a bit of practice to get the angles and the speed correct.”

  “Yeah, it’s not super-easy to use, but getting the speed right is the main thing. As long as the object you’re viewing isn’t zipping right through the field of view, you can adjust the vector on the fly with that little knob.”

  “It’s a brilliant piece of engineering,” I told her. “The only thing that’s missing is a camera mount.”

  “Shhh!” she cautioned me. “Dad doesn’t know they make them and Mom doesn’t want him finding out. It’s not so much the cost of the camera or the photographic plates but she worries about developing. One of her cousins got hooked on taking nature photographs and their whole house stinks like chemicals.”

  “See how the tube moves,” Helen suggested to the miller’s daughter, who put the telescope through its full range of motion.

  “It feels perfectly balanced now,” Athena reported. “How did you know the exact position for the counterweight?”

  “I’m a good guesser,” my team member replied.

  “You were right, Mark,” Sophus said, returning to the hut with a large diagram. “This was tacked to the inside of the lid, but it’s just a picture, no written instructions.”

  “A picture is worth a thousand words,” I stated, and wasted a microsecond wondering if it was too late to get credit for the phrase on this planet. “Let me see if I missed any locking collars.”

  To my chagrin, it turned out I hadn’t spotted the largest one, which I had mistaken for a flywheel. Once it was removed, Athena counted up all the pieces of packing hardware and checked the total against the drawing.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I think the only thing left is to connect the drive rods to the universal joints on the mount’s base.”

  “This part is just like the power train that moves the clock hands you see on towers,” I explained as I made the connections. “Even though the telescope has much more mass than clock hands, these drive rods turn so slowly that there’s not much force involved.”

  “I’ve already learned to keep my hands off the tube while I’m viewing,” Sophus said. “The slightest touch and I lose whatever Athena has focused on for me.”

  I used my all-in-one pocket screwdriver to secure the drive rods to the universal joints on the tracking mount and wound up the mainspring that provided the motive power for the gear train before stepping back.

  “I’ll leave the rest to the expert,” I said, nodding to the girl.

  “I probably won’t be able to focus on anything with the sun so high, unless Phobos is visible,” Athena cautioned us, disengaging the clutch that allowed her to swivel the telescope on the mount without fighting against the gear train of the now-attached tracking mechanism. Then she sighted through the low-magnification spotter, searching for the hurtling ball of rock that would no doubt burn up in the atmosphere in the next ten million years or so if somebody didn’t wake up and nudge it into a higher orbit.

  “Got it!” Athena exclaimed and reengaged the clutch. Then she pulled out the actuation knob that allowed the mainspring to set the whole gear train into motion and moved around to where she could look through the eyepiece while reaching the controls for the tracking mechan
ism with her left hand. Her experience showed as she adjusted the speed and balance between the different drive shafts by changing the gear selectors, and then fine-tuned the speed by adjusting the tension on a slipping disc drive. “Look now, Dad.”

  As Sophus carefully worked his way around the periphery of the crowded shed to the eyepiece, I remained intent on the gear train, which was performing the work of an analog computer. It was a fascinating combination of mechanical technologies that I’d never seen used in this particular combination. I immediately saw several ways in which it could be improved, but the design had clearly been driven by price considerations, and that it worked at all was a testament to the engineers.

  “Is that really Phobus?” the miller asked in awe. “Are you sure you didn’t focus the telescope on Widow’s Peak by mistake?”

  “It’s just a chuck of rock in space, Dad,” Athena reminded him with a laugh. “Tonight I’ll show you the star system the Ferrymen rescued us from.”

  “We can see that far?”

  “Not with the naked eye, but I think this reflector has enough magnification. We look at old Sol through the academy reflector sometimes, and the light we see probably left there before the Ferrymen started making their visits. Isn’t that strange to think about?”

  “Weird,” Helen agreed. “The speed of light is a pain.”

  “That’s why we should get portals,” Athena said casually, the first time I had ever heard portal technology referred to on this planet by anybody who wasn’t on my team. “But the Ferrymen don’t want to lose their monopoly.”

  “The Ferrymen have a monopoly on portals?” I asked, knowing that those lazy aliens couldn’t build a portal if their lives depended on it, but curious to learn how an academy student viewed the galaxy.

  “Not on the portals, on us,” the girl replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “We’re a valuable resource and they don’t want to share us.”

  “Come and look, Mark,” Sophus said, tearing himself away from the eyepiece. “Athena, go get your mother. She should see this too.”

  I would have preferred to continue the conversation, but I could hardly countermand the miller in his own observatory, so I stepped around Helen and looked through the eyepiece. My greater sensitivity across the spectrum combined with integration to lift the signal from the noise allowed me to pick out a few of the brighter galaxies that bracketed the moon. The smoothness of the relative motion between these objects only increased my admiration of the tracking mechanism and Athena’s skill as an operator. “You try it, Helen.”