The Radiant Warrior

Interlude Four

The tape wound to a stop.

"Good God, what a training program!" I said. "Conrad should have been a practical psychologist instead of being an engineer! And that graduation ceremony! I can't help wondering why armies in the twentieth century didn't use the same techniques."

"It wouldn't have worked," Tom said. "You must bear in mind that Conrad was working with some very uneducated and naive troops. With a modem education, it takes a pretty weak mind to fall for things like that firewalking stunt. A good modem soldier is a very well educated and superbly well trained specialist. You don't want stupid troops, not when they have to operate some remarkably sophisticated equipment. But given his situation, cousin Conrad did the right thing. I'm proud of the boy."

"Another thing is that weights and measures system he came up with. I got to working it out during some of the slow parts on the tape."

"Yeah, I saw you playing with the calculator. Did it myself, the first-time I sat through the thing."

"Well, it's flat amazing how many numbers work out tight! The way his mile works out at 1728 of his yards, and his pound comes out at one 1728th of a ton, and even his volt and his pint come out right! All at accuracies better than could be measured with medieval instruments! That's almost too many 'gosh numbers' to believe."

"Well, it wasn't all luck. Conrad was using a base twelve numbering system. It's one of the three natural systems, along with base eight and base sixteen. The ancient Indo-Europeans, our ancestors, used that same base twelve system for many thousands of years, and used it for their own systems of measurements, until some dull person started to count on his fingers and invented the decimal system in the process. A lot of what Conrad was doing was just setting things back to the old, sensible way of doing things."

"But enough of this. Supper is getting cold, and the girls tell me that they have something special planned for tonight's entertainment. Let's close it up!"