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
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
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