Dream d1940-s: The Bench Drifts True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood at the Gauge Walk under the full voice of the forge, and the numbers were wrong.

Not wrong by much. That was the trouble. The bench had been calibrated in cool quiet, and now the forge-engine was running at load - iron singing in the channel, pressure ticking through the floor plates - and the heat had pulled the frame out of true by three marks, maybe four. The count wandered. You could read a piece twice and get two different answers. Nothing we made on these readings would fit anything else we made.

"There it is," said the Builder. She was crouched beside the adjustment collar, her cheek nearly resting on the rail to sight along it. "You can see it flex when the blower kicks. The whole frame breathes."

The Wireman pressed two fingers to the bench frame and held them there through a blower cycle. He nodded without speaking.

The Weather Reader called from the near side of the gauge column. "It's not the bench alone. The anchor bolt on the south leg is turning in its sleeve. One thing talking to another."

Lano had found the cool channel beside the engine housing and curled into it, nose pointed at the forge-face, ears up. She tracked every sound the machine made with precise small movements of her head. Not alarmed. Attentive.

The Scavenger set down his pack and produced a stub of soapstone and a flat iron block he'd carried since the outer waste. "Lap the collar before we shim," he said. "Otherwise we're just building the same error again on top of itself."

We worked in relay. The Listener read the gauge intervals aloud, holding the numbers steady while the Builder shimmed, while the Wireman torqued the anchor, while the Scavenger lapped the collar against his flat block with long practiced strokes. Rurik walked the length of the bench twice, sniffing each leg, and stopped at the third one - a hairline in the weld, nothing structural but something that needed watching. The Builder marked it with a chalk ring.

I read the gauge after the second pass. The count held. I read it again during a blower cycle. It still held.

"Bueno," said Lano, very quietly, to no one in particular.

The Wireman permitted himself a small sound of satisfaction. The Weather Reader was already logging the correction in the book of readings, her handwriting small and exact in the red forge-light.

We could measure again. That was the whole of it. The bench was true and the count could be trusted, and the party had healed it together without losing a word to argument.