Grantville Gazette.Volume VII Read online

  ***

  "Dictionary form. They organize information alphabetically. It is insane! Related material may be completely separated. Related people are not listed together. Related places are not listed together. It is completely arbitrary and utterly brilliant." Nicholas looked at his long list of words taken from the article he had. Dictionary form. "I can do this. It was what I was trained to do. They don't need a jeweler. They need a scholar."

  ***

  Nicholas tapped his screwdriver on the table as he looked out across the desk, contemplating. "Brother Johann, Melville Dewey was a very great man."

  "Yes, he was."

  "The index, the 'card catalog,' was a work of genius. The subject coding, clearly the work of inspiration. But these…" Nicholas waved his hand over the pattern of three-by-five cards carefully arranged on the desk. "These are brilliant. Without them, glossing this library would have been the work of years. But this… this is wonderful. I make a note of the source, I list a topic, a comment and so on, and I can re-arrange, I can move the gloss from place to place. Cross references. Dictionary Form. Brilliance."

  Brother Johann nodded. "I know." He looked at the cards, with a bit of irritation showing. "I only wish the stationer we ordered them from had not been so literal when we said we wanted him to duplicate the sample we provided. The "Recipe" printed across the top, and the drawing of breads doesn't actually assist in the work. But, we have only fifteen thousand left. They'll soon be gone, and we can get more. Plain ones this time."

  Nick nodded. "That will help. But it is really no matter now. I just use the plain side."

  "So," Johann asked, "have you found it yet?"

  "No, but we are getting closer. I can feel it. With each additional source, with each additional reference, the quarry is that much closer to us. It won't be long."

  With that, the two men bent their heads back over the books they were reading, and continued in pursuit of the alternator so desperately needed by their friends.

  ***

  Nick's eyes widened. He sat back in his chair with a sudden jerk, and his chair screeched on the floor.

  "Those idiots." Softly whispered. Brother Johann looked up in surprise.

  "Those idiots!" No whisper now, but full voice and almost yelled.

  "What is it, Father Nick?"

  Nick turned to his fellow researcher.

  "Brother Johann, have you heard the word 'sophomore' here in Grantville?"

  Johann nodded. "Of course. They use it to identify a rank of their children in school."

  "The word is Greek in origin, you know." Johann nodded again. "It means 'wise fool.' And I've just decided that it should be applied to all of Grantville. To have all this wisdom and knowledge available to you," Nick waved a hand to take in the stacks of books, "and not know how to use it makes one a fool, indeed."

  "You found the answer?" Johann began to show excitement.

  "Yes, I found the solution to problem of the alternator. It doesn't move."

  "What?"

  Together they bent over a volume from the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 edition.

  ***

  "So, I understand congratulations are in order." Nick looked up to see Father Larry and Father Athanasius approaching him.

  "Not really, Father. I just found something they had lost, is all."

  "Nonetheless, Father Athanasius tells me that John's ecstasy almost approaches hysteria. Good job. It will make a lot of people very happy. So, how long did it take you to find the answer?"

  "The alternator? With Brother Johann's help, I had that in a little over two weeks. It merely took careful work, word after word from the encyclopedia, then more lists of words, and more encyclopedia articles. I cannot build them, you understand, neither the alternator nor the frequency doubler. That will take mechanics and such. But the solution was simple enough. John's team has the information and they have started building a model."

  Nicholas laughed. "Saint Phillip be praised." He reached up to his breast pocket and touched his screwdriver. "The solution is both funny and perverse. It will require careful attention, and it will be difficult, but it can certainly be done. The Americans would never have thought of it."

  "Why?"

  "Because the secret of the alternator is in not doing. The alternator does not spin! It just sits there. The coils, the magnet, all of it, just sits there. It is very unAmerican. What spins is a plate of iron with holes that occasionally let the magnetic field through to the coils. The plate, unlike the coils or the magnets, can be made quite strong, and large, and can spin fast enough to make the waves many, many thousands of times per second. Alexanderson was very clever. And the irony is, the Americans will not see the irony in it."

  They all laughed at the joke, and the irony of the joke.

  Father Mazzare surveyed the stack of papers and the mass of note cards scattered over the surface of the table. "So, what are you doing here-designing it for them?"

  "No, I turned over everything we found to John a few days ago."

  "So what's this, then?"

  Nick waved a hand over the table. "I'm writing a guide to the study of up-time documents. A guide to the exegesis of up-time texts, and the application of their techniques to our writing and publishing. The Dewey Decimal System of course, the APA standard form for citations, the concept of 'Encyclopedia' and the differences between those and 'Dictionaries' and 'Gazetteers.' The power of organizing information. Why did we not think of it? Alphabetical organization is an insane way to arrange topics-except of course, that it works. Rules for sorting. Rules for indexing. All the tools that the up-timers have that they seemingly have not learned how to use."

  Nick shook his head. "The alternator is a good example of why it is needed. The up-timers, most of them, simply do not think like scholars. Most of them, like John, tend to be doers, not thinkers. Do you know? Everything they needed for the radio alternator was in the encyclopedia. They simply didn't know how to look. They spent a half a year winding coils and breaking wires trying to spin the coils or the magnets because their first inclination when faced with a problem is to do something. They even have an aphorism about it. 'Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.' They all know this, but few of them grasp it."

  "Yep." Father Larry nodded. "You missed the other saying, though. That one goes 'Don't just stand there, Do something.' I wouldn't want to say that no one in Grantville understands what you're talking about. Most of the folks just have never had to learn it. They're thinkers, but not scholars. If things don't work out the way they would expect them to from their experience, they can generally figure and tinker a way out of it. Heck. I do that. We all do."

  "And thank God for that! But it means that we who have been adopted by them will have to be their link to what they know." Nick waved his hands at the stacks again. "Even their teachers are not scholars by trade. The Americans managed to make teaching into a job separate from scholarship. I, for one, would never have believed it, but it is true."

  Nick tapped the papers in front of him. "So, I have been writing a guide."

  "Do you have a title, yet?"

  "I am still looking for a title. I am considering," Nick coughed. " How Not to Think Like a Redneck."

  Father Larry looked amused, but his voice was very dry. "As one who would wear half-a-beard, I'm afraid you're not authorized to use that term. You're not a member of the group."

  Nick grinned, and reached into his satchel. He pulled out a yellow Cat hat, which he firmly placed on his head. "John made me an honorary redneck, and told me to go for it."

  Mule 'Round The World

  By Virginia DeMarce

  November, 1633, Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving

  "It was well done of you, Henry. It really was." Enoch Wiley looked rather doubtfully at a pile of yellowish mush on the cracker in his hand. "What is this stuff?"

  "Cora makes it out of mashed chickpeas. Some kind of a substitute for chip dip. Not bad-there's onion in it, I
think. Anyhow, it has some zip." Henry Dreeson took a bite. He always felt a bit embarrassed when Enoch commended him for something so solemnly. He was eight years older. Not a lot, between old men. A generation, for children. He'd been an eighth grader the year that Enoch started school. It had felt a bit odd, at first, when Enoch became the minister at his church. That was what-forty years ago, now?

  "I didn't really need it, anyway. I'd just gotten used to having it in my pocket. When Jeff Adams told me that the girl Benny adopted really was going to lose that eye-well, it just seemed the thing to do. The color's not too bad a match. Jim McNally said that he could re-grind it to fit her socket; it's easy enough, most of the time, to make something that's too big smaller. The trick is to make something that's too small stretch."

  Henry's mind briefly contemplated Grantville's latest budget projections; then turned back to the reception. Several teachers and quite a few students from the remedial English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and special education programs located at the middle school were milling around. He had just presented Minnie Hugelmair with a framed certificate of valor for her defense of Benny at the riot in Jena last spring, along with his good luck piece. "Maybe it will make Minnie feel more like she really belongs in Grantville, having Uncle Jim's glass eye to wear."

  Both men looked up toward the temporary platform at one end of the city council meeting room. Minnie certainly sounded like she belonged to Grantville. She was up there, singing "Bury Me Beneath the Willow," to Benny Pierce's accompaniment in a voice that could have come out of any one of the hollows that ran off of Buffalo Creek.

  Henry had heard that she hadn't sounded so nice the day that Benny, coming back to winter in Grantville toward the end of October, told her she'd have to go to school.

  Minnie was about fourteen or fifteen, they figured. More or less. Most likely more than less, since Doc Adams guessed that she had been badly undernourished when she was little. She was a foundling. Somehow, every master to whom her home village had ever bound her out had managed to avoid the obligation to send her to school. How many men wanted to pay school fees for a foundling not yet old enough to earn her keep? Henry realized that you couldn't work up a general answer from one example, but it was clear that in this case, the answer was none. Minnie had a seventeenth century small town's equivalent of street smarts, but she did not have any education.

  She didn't want any, either.

  Benny hadn't had much luck taking her to school.

  Eventually Benny and his sister Betty, Betty's daughter Louise, Betty's daughter-in-law Doreen, Simon and Mary Ellen Jones who were the ministers from the Methodist church, Enoch and his wife Inez, Henry's wife Ronnie, and Henry himself had taken Minnie to school. Fussin' and fightin' it all the way.

  Benny switched the tune to "John Brown's Body." Minnie really got into the spirit of it.

  That girl is going to make some man a real obstreperous wife, one day, Henry thought.

  ***

  Joe Pallavicino, director of Grantville's ESOL program, still wasn't sure what to do with Minnie Hugelmair. Yeah, she had to go to school. But the intake program and classes had been set up to teach English, first to refugees and then to other immigrants, who already had at least some experience with going to school in German, then to funnel the kids into regular classes. The Germans had spoken fifteen or twenty nearly incompatible dialects, but least three-fourths of the refugee kids who came into Grantville the first year already had basic literacy and numeracy under their belts when they showed up at the schools. Most of those who didn't, had not been German. So he hadn't felt the least embarrassment about resolutely tabling all suggestions about bilingual education programs. The illiterate ones had been from six dozen different places on the map of Europe, attached some way to the mercenaries, and there wasn't anyone in Grantville who could educate them bilingually, even if the Emergency Committee had been so inclined. Which it wasn't. Almost all of the immigrants who had come since then, since Thuringia and central Germany settled down, were looking for jobs. Both the adults and their kids just needed to learn English, just as the Grantvillers who showed up needed to learn some kind of standardized, homogenized basic German that the speakers of fifteen or twenty different dialects would have a shot at understanding.

  Whatever else Minnie might need, she didn't need to learn English. During her months of wandering around Thuringia with Benny Pierce, she had learned English thoroughly. With a fine West Virginia twang. A little archaic, perhaps, since a lot of it came from folk songs, but perfectly functional English. It actually helped her talk to some of the down-time English people who came through town now and then, translating into modern American for them.

  Temporarily, he had set her to spending her mornings with Ceci Jones and afternoons with Tina Sebastian. Not because their sections were better suited to her needs than any of the others, but because their families were both important in the Methodist church that Benny Pierce attended, so they felt obliged to put up with her.

  Minnie needed to learn to read and write. She needed to learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It didn't matter much to Joe whether she learned them in English or German; at the moment, she didn't know how in either language.

  Minnie was not about to go to first grade. Joe sighed. Unfortunately, he could see her point. On the other hand, Minnie certainly didn't belong in special education.

  Benny's fiddle switched again, to "The Mule 'Round the World."

  "I was born about four thousand years ago; there is nothing in this world I do not know." Minnie grinned impudently, looking down at the teachers in the audience, and made her way to the verse about Adam, Eve, and the apple, "I can prove that I'm the man who ate the core."

  She isn't a man, Joe thought, but that's a good song for her. Whatever else, Minnie has attitude.

  ***

  What bothered Benny most about the whole deal was that he was eighty-two years old. Not that he didn't intend to live to see Minnie grown up, now that he'd taken her on, but it was always possible that he'd get to the point where he was beyond making the markets and fairs, even in the summer months. Then where would the money to keep them come from? Renting out part of the house brought in some, but not really enough. For that matter, what would become of her when he couldn't busk any more? She was the best fiddler he had ever taught, but a girl really couldn't go out doing that on her own. It was too dangerous. He couldn't see her settling down, though.

  For all that they'd finally gotten her here, Minnie really didn't want to keep on coming to the school. She had only agreed to attend the reception in her own honor on condition that she could sing instead of socialize after the speeches. They had compromised. First, she would sing. Then she would go around the room, with Doreen next to her, and say one single polite thing to every person there. Something like, "Thank you for coming."

  The compromise was possible because he'd figured out one thing that worked. Weeks that she didn't make too much trouble in school, Wynne Nisbet would give her a hammer dulcimer lesson on Saturday morning. Defining "too much trouble" could be a bit touchy, sometimes. There was always at least some trouble. Trouble followed Minnie around. But you had to grant that she picked her targets.

  Benny grinned and shifted over to Mother Maybelle. No matter what else he played in a set, he tried to finish up with a Mother Maybelle Carter piece. This reception was really for Minnie and the other kids, though, for all that Henry and Enoch and Reverend Jones, Benny's family, and several of the teachers were here. Kids weren't crazy about ballads. They liked something livelier.

  He rolled into "Worried Man Blues."

  ***

  The steps up to the temporary platform didn't have a rail. Minnie didn't jump and run-she stayed right there, carefully handing Benny down. Joe Pallavicino, watching, thought that one thing was sure in life. Anybody who offered, or even seemed to offer, a threat to Benny Pierce would have to deal with Minnie.

  Anybody who offered, or even seemed to
offer, a threat to anyone whom Benny cared about would have to deal with Minnie.

  Joe would put his money on Minnie, any day.

  Benny went over and sat down next to Louise on one of the metal folding chairs. She had a plate of crackers and a root beer for him. Minnie and Doreen started to circulate. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe spotted someone who shouldn't be here, given that she wasn't in the ESOL program and the noon bell dismissing the kids for Thanksgiving hadn't rung yet. He started across the room, drawing in his breath, prepared to start a sentence with, "Denise." Behind him, a voice said, "Cool it, Joe. Princess Baby was determined to come, so I wrote her an excuse and took her out of class. Her and Minnie have gotten to be best friends."

  ***

  Here came Minnie and Doreen; time to be polite. Henry Dreeson fished his cane out from under his chair; he and Enoch heaved themselves to their feet. Minnie and Doreen and-the two girls with their arms thrown casually around one another's shoulders-Denise Beasley.

  You learned a lot of things, being mayor. Henry knew that, contrary to the general assumption, Denise's parents were married to each other. Had been for fifteen years. He looked around. Yep, there was Buster Beasley, all right, keeping an eye on his Princess Baby.

  Now Buster-he was the one who ought to sing, "there's nothing in this world I do not know." He'd ridden with one of the big motorcycle gangs for years before he came back to Grantville and settled down. Part of the self-storage lot's business had been perfectly legitimate, with local people, but both Henry and Dan Frost had always suspected that part of it was an entrepot for-other things. None of it had ever come out into the community, though, and the last dozen years of Buster's tax returns before the Ring of Fire were impeccable. Dan knew. After it, well, Buster had called the Emergency Committee and opened a few of those down at the far end, where the lot fronted on the old dirt road. They knew that all those counterfeit-brand car and truck parts would come in real handy, so they hadn't asked what was in the others, right then. The 250 Club had cigarettes for sale long after everyone else in town had run out. What else? Who knew? Buster owned the lot free and clear.