Dream d1968-s: The Sagging Side

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Bellows Court received us again on the second pass, and nothing greeted us warmly. The bench we had worked before sat askew on its bolts, one side dropped a thumb's width lower than the other, and the gauge at its head swung in an arc it had no business swinging. The load we ran across it yesterday had worn the imbalance into something worse. The count could not be trusted.

Lano circled the bench twice, nose low, ears pressed flat against the forge-noise. She stopped at the lower side and sat.

"She found it," the Scavenger said, crouching beside her to peer at the joint. He pressed two fingers against the bolt housing. "This one. The thread is stripped. It was holding by habit."

The Weather Reader had already pulled the reading from the book of channels near the door. "Gauge drift of eleven units across the last six runs," she said, not alarmed, just precise. "It hasn't been honest since yesterday mid-shift."

The Builder moved to the far end of the bench and crouched there, squinting along the length of it the way someone reads a horizon. "We shim the low side first. Then re-run the count from a clean mark. Don't trust any measure we took after the fourth run."

"That undoes half the morning," the Wireman said.

"Half the morning is better than a false record," she said, and nobody argued.

We worked it together. The Listener held the gauge cable clear while the Scavenger extracted the stripped bolt with something from his coat that was not quite a wrench. The Builder shimmed with a piece of flat plate she had carried since the Foundry gates, as if she had known this would come. The Weather Reader called numbers from the book while I turned the adjustment collar, small clicks, slow going, Rurik watching the gauge needle from where he sat on a cold conduit above us, reporting each tick with a patience I have come to expect from him.

Oxy rested in the cool channel beside the bench through all of it, watching the needle with large still eyes.

When the bench sat level and the gauge held a steady mark, the Builder ran a short count. Clean. Eleven units, recovered.

"Four hours of bad data," the Wireman said.

"Four hours of honest data now," the Scavenger said, and there was a lightness in it.

Lano wagged once and trotted to the warm side of the forge-wall. The rest of us followed, because she is usually right about where to rest.