Time Enough for Love (11 page)

“No. I would like to hear if you want to tell me.”

“Mmm—Ask me when Ishtar isn’t around—I think she knows more English than she lets on. But I did promise to talk if you showed up to listen. What would you like to hear?”

“Anything, Lazarus. Scheherazade picked her own subjects.”

“So she did. But I don’t have one on tap.”

“Well…you said as I came in that ‘early rising is a vice.’ Did you mean that seriously?”

“Maybe. Gramp Johnson claimed it was. He used to tell a story about a man who was condemned to be shot at sunrise—but overslept and missed it. His sentence was commuted that day, and he lived another forty, fifty years. Said it proved his point.”

“Do you think that’s a true story?”

“As true as any of Scheherazade’s. I took it to mean ‘Sleep whenever you can; you may have to stay awake a long time.’ Early rising may not be a vice, Ira, but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. I can’t stand people who are smug about how early they get up.”

“I didn’t mean to sound smug, Grandfather. I get up early from long habit—the habit of work. But I don’t say it’s a virtue.”

“Which? Work? Or early rising? Neither is a virtue. But getting up early does
not
get more work done…any more than you can make a piece of string longer by cutting off one end and tying it onto the other. You get
less
work done if you persist in getting up yawning and still tired. You aren’t sharp and make mistakes and have to do it over. That sort of busy-busy is wasteful. As well as unpleasant. And annoying to those who would sleep late if their neighbors weren’t so noisily active at some ungodly cow-milking hour. Ira, progress doesn’t come from early risers—progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

“You make me feel that I’ve wasted four centuries.”

“Perhaps you have, Son, if you’ve spent it getting up early and working hard. But it’s not too late to change your ways. Don’t fret about it; I’ve wasted most of my long life—though perhaps more pleasantly. Would you like to hear a story about a man who made laziness a fine art? His life exemplified the Principle of Least Effort. A true story.”

“Certainly. But I don’t insist on its being true.”

“Oh, I won’t let truth hamper me, Ira; I’m a solipsist at heart. Hear then, O Mighty King,

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail

He was a schoolmate of mine in a school for training naval officers. Not space navy; this was before the human race had even reached Earth’s one satellite. This was wet navy, ships that floated in water and attempted to sink each other, often with regrettable success. I got mixed up in this through being too young to realize emotionally that, if my ship sank, I probably would sink, too—but this is not my story, but David Lamb’s.
⁸

To explain David I must go back to his childhood. He was a hillbilly, which means he came from an area uncivilized even by the loose standards of those days—and Dave came from so far back in the hills that the hoot owls trod the chickens.

His education was in a one-room country school and ended at thirteen. He enjoyed it, for every hour in school was a hour sitting down doing nothing harder than reading. Before and after school he had to do chores on his family’s farm, which he hated, as they were what was known as “honest work”—meaning hard, dirty, inefficient, and ill-paid—and also involved getting up early, which he hated even worse.

Graduation was a grim day for him; it meant that he now did “honest work” all day long instead of spending a restful six or seven hours in school. One hot day he spent fifteen hours plowing behind a mule…and the longer he stared at the south end of that mule, breathing dust it kicked up and wiping the sweat of honest toil out of his eyes, the more he hated it.

That night he left home informally, walked fifteen miles to town, slept across the door of the post office until the postmistress opened up next morning, and enlisted in the Navy. He aged two years during the night, from fifteen to seventeen, which made him old enough to enlist.

A boy often ages rapidly when he leaves home. The fact was not noticeable; birth registrations were unheard of at that time and place, and David was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, well-muscled, handsome, and mature in appearance, save for a wild look around the eyes.

The Navy suited David. They gave him shoes and new clothes, and let him ride around on the water, seeing strange and interesting places—untroubled by mules and the dust of cornfields. They did expect him to work, though not as much, or as hard, as working a hill farm—and once he figured out the political setup aboard ship he became adept at not doing much work while still being satisfactory to the local gods, namely, chief petty officers.

But it was not totally satisfactory as he still had to get up early and often had to stand night watches and sometimes scrub decks and perform other tasks unsuited to his sensitive temperament.

Then he heard about this school for officer candidates—“midshipmen” as they were known. Not that David cared what they were called; the point was that the Navy would
pay
him to sit down and read books—his notion of heaven—untroubled by decks to scrub and by petty officers. O King, am I boring you? No?

Very well—David was ill prepared for this school, never having had four to five years’ additional schooling considered necessary to enter it—mathematics, what passed for science, history, languages, literature, and so forth.

Pretending to four years or so of schooling he did not have was more difficult than tacking two years on the age of an overgrown boy. But the Navy wished to encourage enlisted men to become officers, so it had established a tutoring school to aid candidates slightly deficient in academic preparation.

David construed “slightly deficient” to mean his own state; he told his chief petty officer that he had “just missed” graduating from high school—which was true in a way; he had “just missed” by half a county, that being the distance from his home to the nearest high school.

I don’t know how David induced his See-Pee-Oh to recommend him; David never discussed this. Suffice to say that, when David’s ship steamed for the Mediterranean, David was dropped at Hampton Roads six weeks before the tutoring school convened. He was a supernumerary during that time. The Personnel Officer (in fact, his clerk) assigned David to a bunk and a mess, and told him to stay out of sight during working hours in the empty classrooms where his fellow hopefuls would meet six weeks later. David did so; the classrooms had in them the books used in tutoring in academic subjects a candidate might lack—and David lacked them all. He stayed out of sight and sat down and read.

That’s all it took.

When the class convened, David helped tutor in Euclidean geometry, a required subject and perhaps the most difficult. Three months later he was sworn in as a naval cadet on the beautiful banks of the Hudson River at West Point.

David did not realize that he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire; the sadism of petty officers is a mild hit-or-miss thing compared with the calculated horrors visited on new cadets—“plebes”—by cadets of the senior classes, especially by the seniormost, the first classmen, who were walking delegates of Lucifer in that organized hell.

But David had three months to find this out and to figure out what to do, that being the time upper classes were on the briny, practicing warfare. As he saw it, if he could last nine months of these hazards, all the kingdoms of the Earth would be his. So he said to himself, if a cow or a countess can sweat out nine months, so can I.

He arranged the hazards in his mind in terms of what must be endured, what could be avoided, and what he should actively seek. By the time the lords of creation returned to stomp on the plebes he had a policy for each typical situation and was prepared to cope with it under doctrine, varying doctrines only enough to meet variations in situation rather than coping hastily on an improvised basis.

Ira—“O King,” I mean—this is more important to surviving in tough situations than it sounds. For example, Gramp—David’s Grampaw, that is—warned him never to sit with his back to door. “Son,” he said to him, “might be nine hundred and ninety-nine times you’d get away with it—no enemy of your’n would come through that door. But the thousandth time—that’s the one. If my own Grampaw had always obeyed that rule, he might be alive today and still jumping out bedroom windows. He knew better, but he missed just once, through being too anxious to sit in on a poker game, and thereby took the one chair open, one with its back to a door. And it got him.

“He was up out of his chair and emptied three shots from each of his guns into his assailant before he dropped; we don’t die easy. But ‘twas only a moral victory; he was essentially dead, with a bullet in his heart, before he got out of that chair. All from sitting with his back to an open door.”

Ira, I’ve never forgotten Gramp’s words—and don’t you forget ’em.

So David categorized the hazards and prepared his doctrines. One thing that had to be endured was endless questioning, and he learned that a plebe was
never
permitted to answer, “I don’t know, sir,” to any upperclassman, especially a first classman. But the questions ordinarily fell into categories—history of the school, history of the Navy, famous naval sayings, names of team captains and star players of various athletic sports, how many seconds till graduation, what’s the menu for dinner. These did not bother him; they could be memorized—save the number of seconds remaining till graduation, and he worked out shortcuts for that, ones that stood him in good stead in later years.

“What sort of shortcuts, Lazarus?”

Eh? Nothing fancy. A precalculated figure for reveille each morning, a supplementary figure for each hour thereafter, such as: five hours after six o’clock reveille subtracts eighteen thousand seconds from the base figure, and twelve minutes later than that takes off another seven hundred and twenty seconds. For example at noon formation one hundred days before graduation, say at exactly twelve-oh-one and thirteen seconds, figuring graduation at ten
A.M.
which was standard, David could answer, “Eight million, six hundred and thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-seven seconds, sir!” almost as fast as his squad leader could ask him, simply from having precalculated most of it.

At any other time o’ day he would look at his watch and pretend to wait for the second hand to reach a mark while in fact performing subtractions in his head.

But he improved on this; he invented a decimal clock—not the one you use here on Secundus, but a variation on Earth’s clumsy twenty-four-hour day, sixty-minute hour, sixty-second minute system then in vogue. He split the time for reveille to taps into intervals and subintervals of ten thousand seconds, a thousand seconds, a hundred seconds, and memorized a conversion table.

You see the advantage. For anyone but Andy Libby, God rest his innocent soul, subtracting ten thousand, or one thousand, from a long string of digits up in the millions is easier to do in your head, quickly and without error, than it is to subtract seven thousand, two hundred, and seventy-three—the figure to be subtracted in the example I just gave. David’s new method did not involve carrying auxiliary figures in the mind while searching for the ultimate answer.

For example, ten thousand seconds after reveille is eight forty-six forty
A.M.
Once David worked out his conversion table and memorized it—took him less than a day; just memorizing was easy for him—once he had that down pat, he could convert to the hundred-second interval coming up next almost instantly, then
add
(not subtract) two digits representing the time still to go to the last two places in his rough answer to get his exact answer. Since the last two places were
always
zeroes—check it yourself—he could give an answer in millions of seconds as fast as he could speak the figures, and have it right every time.

Since he didn’t explain his method, he got a reputation for being a lightning calculator, an
idiot-savant
talent, like Libby. He was not; he was simply a country boy who used his head on a simple problem. But his squad leader got so groused at him for being a “smart ass”—meaning that the squad leader couldn’t do it—that he ordered Dave to memorize the logarithm tables. This didn’t faze Dave; he didn’t mind anything but “honest work.” He set out to do so, twenty new ones each day, that being the number this first classman thought would suffice to show up this “smart ass.”

The first classman grew tired of the matter when David had completed only the first six hundred figures—but Dave kept at it another three weeks through the first thousand—which gave him the first ten thousand figures by interpolation and made him independent of log tables, a skill that was of enormous use to him from then on, computers being effectively unknown in those days.

But the unceasing barrage of questions did not bother David save for the possibility of starving to death at meal times—and he learned to shovel it in fast while sitting rigidly at attention and still answer all questions flung at him. Some were trick questions, such as, “Mister, are you a virgin?” Either way a plebe answered he was in trouble—if he gave a straight answer. In those days some importance was placed on virginity or the lack of it; I can’t say why.

But trick questions called for trick answers; Dave found that an acceptable answer to that one was: “Yes,
sir!—
in my left ear.” Or possibly his belly button.

But most trick questions were intended to trap a plebe into giving a meek answer—and meekness was a mortal sin. Say a first classman said, “Mister, would you say I was handsome?”—an acceptable answer would be, “Perhaps your mother would say so, sir—but not
me
.” Or “Sir, you are the handsomest man I ever saw who was intended to be an ape.”

Such answers were chancy—they might flick a first classman on the raw—but they were safer than meek answers. But no matter how carefully a plebe tried to meet impossible standards, about once a week some first classman would decide that he needed punishment—arbitrary punishment without trial. This could run from mild, such as exercises repeated to physical collapse—which David disliked as they reminded him of “honest work”—up to paddling on the buttocks. This may strike you as nothing much, Ira, but I’m not speaking of paddling children sometimes receive. These beatings were delivered with the flat of a sword or with a worn-out broom that amounted to a long, heavy club. Three blows delivered by a grown man in perfect health would leave the victim’s bottom a mass of purple bruises and blood blisters, accompanied by excruciating pain.