Lest Darkness Fall (5 page)

            "Did You hear that,
God? He wants me to make him a present of my business! Go away, Martinus.
You're wasting your time here. I couldn't possibly come down any more. Twelve
and a half. That's absolutely the bottom."

            "Ten."

            "Don't you understand
Latin? I said that was the bottom. Good day; I'm glad to have met you."
When Padway got up, the banker sucked his breath through his teeth as though he
had been wounded unto death, and rasped: "Eleven."

            "Ten and a half."

            "Would you mind showing
your teeth? My word, they are human after all. I thought maybe they were
shark's teeth. Oh, very well. This sentimental generosity of mine will be my
ruin yet. And now let's see that accounting system of yours."

-

            An hour later three
chagrined clerks sat in a row and regarded Padway with expressions of,
respectively, wonderment, apprehension, and active hatred. Padway had just
finished doing a simple piece of long division with Arabic numerals at the time
when the three clerks, using Roman numerals, had barely gotten started on the
interminable trial-and-error process that their system required. Padway
translated his answers back into Roman, wrote it out on his tablet, and handed
the tablet to Thomasus.

            "There you are,"
he said. "Have one of the boys check it by multiplying the divisor by the
quotient. You might as well call them off their job; they'll be at it all
night."

            The middle-aged clerk, the
one with the hostile expression, copied down the figures and began checking
grimly. When after a long time he finished, he threw down his stylus.
"That man's a sorcerer of some sort," he growled. "He does the
operations in his head, and puts down all those silly marks just to fool
us."

            "Not at all," said
Padway urbanely. "I can teach you to do the same."

            "What?
Me
take
lessons from a long-trousered barbarian? I —" he started to say more, but
Thomasus cut him off by saying that he'd do as he was told, and no back talk.
"Is that so?" sneered the man. "I'm a free Roman citizen, and
I've been keeping books for twenty years. I guess I know my business. If you
want a man to use that heathen system, go buy yourself some cringing Greek
slave. I'm through!"

            "Now see what you've
done!" cried Thomasus when the clerk had taken his coat off the peg and
marched out. "I shall have to hire another man, and with this labor
shortage —"

            "That's all
right," soothed Padway. "These two boys will be able to do all the
work of three easily, once they learn American arithmetic. And that isn't all;
we have something called double-entry bookkeeping, which enables you to tell
any time how you stand financially, and to catch errors —"

            "Do You hear that, God?
He wants to turn the whole banking business upside down! Please, dear sir, one
thing at a time; or you'll drive us mad! I'll grant your loan, I'll help you
buy your equipment. Only don't spring any more of your revolutionary methods
just now!" He continued more calmly: "What's that bracelet I see you
looking at from time to time?"

            Padway extended his wrist.
"It's a portable sundial, of sorts. We call it a watch."

            "A
vatcha
, hm?
It looks like magic. Are you sure you aren't a sorcerer after all?" He
laughed nervously.

            "No," said Padway.
"It's a simple mechanical device, like a — a water clock."

            "Ah. I see. But why a
pointer to show sixtieths of an hour? Surely nobody in his right mind would
want to know the time as closely as that?"

            "We find it
useful."

            "Oh, well, other lands,
other customs. How about giving my boys a lesson in your American arithmetic
now? Just to assure us that it is as good as you claim."

            "All right. Give me a
tablet." Padway scratched the numerals 1 to 9 in the wax, and explained
them. "Now," he said, "this is the important part." He drew
a circle. "This is our character meaning
nothing
."

            The younger clerk scratched
his head. "You mean it's a symbol without meaning? What would be the use
of that?"

            "I didn't say it was
without meaning. It means nil, zero — what you have left when you take two away
from two."

            The older clerk looked
skeptical. "It doesn't make sense to me. What is the use of a symbol for
what does not exist?"

            "You have a
word
for it, haven't you? Several words, in fact. And you find them useful, don't
you?"

            "I suppose so,"
said the older clerk. "But we don't use nothing in our calculations.
Whoever heard of figuring the interest on a loan at no per cent? Or renting a
house for no weeks?"

            "Maybe," grinned
the younger clerk, "the honorable sir can tell us how to make a profit on
no sales —"

            Padway snapped: "And
we'll get through this explanation sooner with no interruptions. You'll learn
the reason for the zero symbol soon enough."

            It took an hour to cover the
elements of addition. Then Padway said the clerks had had enough for one day;
they should practice addition for a while every day until they could do it
faster than by Roman numerals. Actually he was worn out. He was naturally a
quick speaker, and to have to plod syllable by syllable through this foul
language almost drove him crazy.

            "Very ingenious,
Martinus," wheezed the banker. "And now for the details of that loan.
Of course you weren't serious in setting such an absurdly low figure as ten and
a half per cent —"

            "What? You're damn
right I was serious! And you agreed —"

            "Now, Martinus. What I
meant was that
after
my clerks had learned your system, if it was as
good as you claimed, I'd consider lending you money at that rate. But meanwhile
you can't expect me to give you my —"

            Padway jumped up. "You
— you wielder of a — oh, hell, what's Latin for
chisel
? If you won't
—"

            "Don't be hasty, my
young friend. After all, you've given my boys their start; they can go alone
from there if need be. So you might as well —"

            "All right, you just
let them try to go on from there. I'll find another banker and teach his clerks
properly. Subtraction, multiplication, div —"

            "
Ai!
"
yelped Thomasus. "You can't go spreading this secret all over Rome! It
wouldn't be fair to me!"

            "Oh,
can't
I?
Just watch. I could even make a pretty good living teaching it. If you think
—"

            "Now, now, let's not
lose our tempers. Let's remember Christ's teachings about patience. I'll make a
special concession because you're just starting out in business ..."

            Padway got his loan at ten
and a half. He agreed grudgingly not to reveal his arithmetic elsewhere until
the first loan was paid off.

            Padway bought a copper
kettle at what he would have called a junk shop. But nobody had ever heard of
copper tubing. After he and Thomasus had exhausted the second-hand metal shops
between the latter's house and the warehouse district at the south end of town,
he started in on coppersmith's places. The coppersmiths had never heard of
copper tubing, either. A couple of them offered to try to turn out some, but at
astronomical prices.

            "Martinus!" wailed
the banker. "We've walked at least five miles, and my feet are giving out.
Wouldn't lead pipe do just as well? You can get all you want of that."

            "It would do fine
except for one thing," said Padway, "we'd probably poison our
customers. And that might give the business a bad name, you know."

            "Well, I don't see that
you're getting anywhere as it is."

            Padway thought a minute
while Thomasus and Ajax, the Negro slave, who was carrying the kettle, watched
him. "If I could hire a man who was generally handy with tools, and had
some metal-working experience, I could show him how to make copper tubing. How
do you go about hiring people here?"

            "You don't," said
Thomasus. "It just happens. You could buy a slave — but you haven't enough
money. I shouldn't care to put up the price of a good slave into your venture.
And it takes a skilled foreman to get enough work out of a slave to make him a
profitable investment."

            Padway said, "How would
it be to put a sign in front of your place, stating that a position is
open?"

            "What?" squawked
the banker. "Do You hear that, God? First he seduces my money away from me
on this wild plan. Now he wants to plaster my house with signs! Is there no
limit —"

            "Now, Thomasus, don't
get excited. It won't be a big sign, and it'll be very artistic. I'll paint it
myself. You want me to succeed, don't you?"

            "It won't work, I tell
you. Most workmen can't read. And I won't have you demean yourself by manual
labor that way. It's ridiculous; I won't consider it. About how big a sign did
you have in mind?"

            Padway dragged himself to
bed right after dinner. There was no way, as far as he knew, of getting back to
his own time.

            Never again would he know
the pleasures of the
American Journal of Archaeology
, of Mickey Mouse,
of flush toilets, of speaking the simple, rich, sensitive English language ...

-

            Padway hired his man the
third day after his first meeting with Thomasus the Syrian. The man was a dark,
cocky little Sicilian named Hannibal Scipio.

            Padway had meanwhile taken a
short lease on a tumble-down house on the Quirinal, and collected such
equipment and personal effects as he thought he would need. He bought a
short-sleeved tunic to wear over his pants, with the idea of making himself
less conspicuous. Adults seldom paid much attention to him in this motley town,
but he was tired of having small boys follow him through the streets. He did,
however, insist on having ample pockets sewn into the tunic, despite the
tailor's shocked protests at ruining a good, stylish garment with this heathen
innovation.

            He whittled a mandrel out of
wood and showed Hannibal Scipio how to bend the copper stripping around it.
Hannibal claimed to know all that was necessary about soldering. But when
Padway tried to bend the tubing into shape for his still, the seams popped open
with the greatest of ease. After that Hannibal was a little less cocky — for a
while.

            Padway approached the great
day of his first distillation with some apprehension. According to Tancredi's
ideas this was a new branch of the tree of time. But mightn't the professor
have been wrong, so that, as soon as Padway did anything drastic enough to
affect all subsequent history, he would make the birth of Martin Padway in 1908
impossible, and disappear?

-

            "Shouldn't there be an
incantation or something?" asked Thomasus the Syrian.

            "No," said Padway.
"As I've already said three times, this isn't magic." Looking around
though, he could see how some mumbo-jumbo might have been appropriate: running
his first large batch off at night in a creaky old house, illuminated by
flickering oil lamps, in the presence of only Thomasus, Hannibal Scipio, and
Ajax. All three looked apprehensive, and the Negro seemed all teeth and
eyeballs. He stared at the still as if he expected it to start producing demons
in carload lots any minute.