Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume VII

"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."

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.