It was dusk when Epimeles got back to the Ortygia, but he did not go directly to the barracks next to the workshops, where he and the other workmen lived. Instead he went to the king's house and knocked upon the door.
Agathon opened it- that was his job, after all- and regarded the workshop foreman with displeasure. "Your business?" he demanded.
"Came to show you something," replied Epimeles calmly.
Agathon snorted and invited him in.
The doorkeeper had a lodge beside the door, a small but comfortable room with a couch and a carpet and a stone water cooler against the interior wall. Epimeles sat down on the end of the couch with a sigh of relief and began rubbing his calves. "Walked up to the Euryalus and back this afternoon," he commented. "I could do with a cup of wine."
Agathon looked even more disapproving than usual, but took a jar from beside the wall, poured some into two cups, and added some water, fresh and chill from the stone. "Why should I be interested that you were up at the Euryalus?" he asked, sipping.
Epimeles drank most of his wine off at once, then set the cup down. "Because I went up there for that engineer you told us tolook after," he said. "I found this." He opened the small sack he'd been carrying and brought out a coil of fine cord. It was divided into sections by a series of regular knots, which had been dyed red or black.
Agathon inspected it straight-faced, then said, "There's something peculiar about a fort having a measuring line, is there?"
Epimeles pulled a second measuring line out of the sack. It was seemingly identical to the first, but older, fraying a little and discolored. He stretched the two cords out side by side, and it was immediately apparent that they weren't identical after alclass="underline" the new cord's divisions were shorter than the old one's. "This one's mine," said Epimeles, touching the old cord. "It's accurate."
Agathon looked at the two cords expressionlessly.
"You know that when you're building a catapult, the essential thing is to make all the parts stand in exactly the right proportion to the diameter of the bore?" coaxed Epimeles. "You get a catapult that works, and you measure it, and then you either reproduce it exactly or scale it up or down."
"I believe I'd heard that," said Agathon. He did not, in fact, know very much about catapults, but he had no intention of admitting it- and he understood enough to grasp the implication of the cord. "You're suggesting that Eudaimon left this"- he touched the new measuring cord- "at the Euryalus, so that anyone who took measurements of the machines there would get the wrong figures, and any catapult built in imitation wouldn't work?"
Epimeles nodded. "See," he said, "the two fifty-pounders up at the Euryalus are the biggest catapults in the city at the moment. Eudaimon assumed that Archimedes would measure them, then guess at the increases necessary to make them throw the extra ten pounds: it's the way he'd have gone about designing a one-talenter himself. This afternoon it came out that Archimedes couldn't be bothered to walk up to the Euryalus and took his measurements from some little fifteen-pounder close by. Eudaimon was…" The foreman hesitated, picking his words, then said, "… outraged, shocked, and disappointed. When I saw that, I thought I'd go up to the Euryalus and see what he'd been up to- and sure enough, I found this, in the storeroom where the gear's kept. The lads at the fort all agree that it was just where their old one was, but that it's new, and they don't know how it got there. But they remember Eudaimon coming up there in the afternoon four days ago."
"I see," said Agathon grimly.
It wasn't evidence to convict a man of treason: they both knew that. But it could be an underminer, a question mark, a stone in the shoe. It could hurt Eudaimon.
Epimeles shifted the cord toward the doorkeeper. "I thought you should look after it."
Agathon nodded thoughtfully and picked up the false measuring cord. He began winding it about his hand. "I'm surprised you went all the way up to the Euryalus to look for it," he said. The fortress lay at the extreme point of the city wall, six miles from the Ortygia.
At that Epimeles grinned. "I would have gone twice as far if it'd help get your lad put in charge of catapults. It will, won't it?"
Agathon looked up in surprise.
"Well, you know he's good!" said Epimeles, surprised at the question on his face. "You told us to look after him and make sure nobody interfered with his one-talenter, and we realized why pretty quickly. He's so good he doesn't even realize how good he is. That one-talenter- you know what he's done with it? The little fifteen-pounder he copied can be pivoted, of course, so he thought up a system with windlasses so that his will pivot as well. When I told him that the fifty-pounders at the Euryalus don't pivot, he just looked surprised and said, 'Well, that's stupid!' "
Epimeles laughed. Agathon looked at him sourly and asked, "Is it?"
"People will say so now, won't they? But nobody ever used to expect anything bigger than a forty-pounder to pivot. Archimedes has just invented an entirely new system for aiming big machines- and he doesn't even realize! It was easier for him to design it than it was to walk up to the Euryalus and have a look at how other people did it. Some of the lads laughed about that, and he didn't even understand why. Zeus! I almost feel sorry for Eudaimon. He's never built a catapult that wasn't copied piece by piece from another catapult, and when he can't get definitive measurements- and on the big machines, each one is a bit different- he guesses and he struggles and he runs all over the city trying to find out what the right figure is. Archimedes sits down and scribbles for half an hour and has the perfect number there in his hand. Zeus!" he said again. "Eudaimon's like some little local athletics teacher who trains hard every year and toils to come third or fourth in the city games- and he's trying to race against a fellow who could take the crown at Olympia and barely raise a sweat. He's not good enough to compete in the same event. He's not even good enough to realize that!"
"So he cheats," said Agathon sourly.
" 'Course he does," agreed Epimeles. "Mind you, he would against any opponent, and I can't entirely blame him. When he loses this job, where will he go? He's got family, too, depending on him."
"You're almost sorry for him?"
The foreman looked down. "No," he said, quietly, "I am sorry for him. But I don't want him in charge. Nobody likes building catapults that are feeble, or kick over, or can't shoot straight. That one-talenter, now- that will be a real Zeus, a hurler of thunderbolts. You can feel it when you look at it. It sort of pulls the whole workshop in around it like a whirlpool and it makes my hair stand up to touch it." He paused, then added, "And don't worry. Nobody's going to hurt that machine now. The lads and I will see to that."
"Has Archimedes asked you to guard it?"
Epimeles looked offended. "You think we need him to ask us? A divine thing like that? That catapult is our work as well! But no, he hasn't asked us. I don't think he's even noticed that he's putting Eudaimon out of a job, and it's never occurred to him that Eudaimon would ruin the catapult to hurt him. He doesn't notice Eudaimon much. He doesn't notice people much anyway, and when it's a person he doesn't like he notices him even less. He's pleasant enough when he does notice, though, and he treats the lads decently. I'll have no trouble working with him." He grinned at the prospect, and finished his cup of wine. "Will you show that"- he gestured at the measuring cord- "to the regent?"
Agathon sucked his teeth thoughtfully for a minute, then shook his head. He had a low opinion of Leptines. "I'll wait for the master to come home," he said. "He'll be very interested."