Marcus' face suddenly darkened. "Tired! You were drunk, sack-arse! You wouldn't have noticed if someone had taken a god-hated ax to the machine!"
Elymos whimpered. "I was tired! We'd been working all day to get it set up, and there wasn't no crane. Please, sir"- turning back to Archimedes- "you tell Epimeles I did what he said, I kept near it, I slept right under it all night- but you know how tired I was."
"I don't understand," said Archimedes helplessly. "Are you saying Epimeles expected someone to sabotage my catapult?"
"I don't know anything!" cried Elymos frantically, realizing he'd said too much. If there was a judicial investigation of the incident, he could expect to be tortured- the law rarely trusted the testimony of slaves without torturing them first. "I just did what Epimeles said, sir, that's all!"
Archimedes stared, stunned. He thought of what would have happened if the catapult had failed. The strings alone would have cost him thirty drachmae and the wood… Epirot oak, imported, three drachmae a yard… and then there was the bronze, and the iron. He imagined going home and having to tell his family not only that he was unemployed, but that all his savings had been wiped out, just when the city perhaps faced a siege. "Delian Apollo!" he exclaimed, and sat down heavily on the catapult stock.
"I will show this to the king," said Kallippos, hefting the razor. "And you, fellow"- to Elymos- "you come with me."
Elymos gave another wail, and crawled forward to clutch Archimedes' knees in supplication. "Please, sir!" he begged. "Don't let them beat me!"
Archimedes recovered himself a little with a jump. "Let him alone!" he said.
Kallippos glared at him. Archimedes blinked back, then took a deep breath and said, "We still don't know if this catapult works, and if it doesn't, there's no point in worrying about the razor, is there? And if we're to test the catapult, I need this man's help to restring it."
Kallippos glared a moment longer.
"It's up to the king to say if he wants to talk to Elymos," Archimedes insisted.
Kallippos snorted, but he nodded. He stalked off down the stairs, the razor held gingerly between thumb and middle finger.
Elymos gave a long shuddering sigh of relief. Before he could say anything, however, Marcus strode over and clouted him on the side of the head so hard he knocked him over.
"Among my people," said Marcus in a low fierce voice, "a sentry who falls asleep on watch is beaten to death by the men whose lives he put in danger. You deserve to be beaten senseless! We were going to have pay for this brute ourselves if it didn't work!"
"Marcus!" protested Archimedes. "Leave him alone! We need to string the catapult." He got to his feet and began checking through the oily hair to see how much of it was salvageable.
When the king and his entourage reappeared about half an hour later, they found the catapult restrung, and Archimedes tuning it.
King Hieron looked as bright and interested as he had before, but Eudaimon was not with him. No one made any comment on the catapultist's absence, and no one said anything about the razor. Archimedes finished winding the strings and checked that the two arms of the catapult were at the same tension, and then the great machine was once more aimed and elevated. The string was drawn back, and the missile heaved carefully into place. Everyone stood well clear of the immense arms, which had folded back until they were almost parallel to the slide. Hieron sighted once more along the stock, then eased loose the trigger.
The Welcomer gave a deep bay- a sound made up of the hollow cry of the strings, the roar as the stone rushed along the slide, and the overwhelming crack as the arms hit the heel plates. The missile was gone too fast to follow, but when the watchers ran to the artillery port, they saw the stone falling black and heavy, far out in the chosen field. Hieron laughed and punched his palm with a fist. "Zeus!" he cried. "It's got the range of a machine half its size!" He circled a hand in the air to the others, and the catapult was reloaded. "Closer this time!" the king commanded, and the catapult was depressed, then fired again.
"Beautiful!" said the king. "Now, left a bit- right a bit- fire! Oh, beautiful!"
When the catapult had been fired about a dozen times, the watchers all stood back and grinned at one another. The captain of the Hexapylon was grinning nearly as hard as Archimedes. "Welcomer, you called it?" he said, stroking the machine's trigger. "By all the gods, after a welcome from this hero, the enemy will turn around and run!"
"I think we can all agree that this catapult has been seen to work," said Hieron contentedly.
Archimedes licked his lips eagerly. Now the money- and what was more important to reassure his family, the offer of a salaried position as a royal engineer.
But Hieron's next words were: "Can you build one bigger than this?"
"Oh!" Archimedes was surprised, but pleasantly so. He'd enjoyed making the Welcomer, but duplicating it would be much less interesting, even with the addition of a screw elevator. "Yes, of course. Um- how big?"
Hieron gave him a benevolent smile. "How big a machine could you build?"
"Well, I, uh…" He glanced around the catapult platform. "I mean, it's really a case of where you want it to go. I don't, uh, think you could fit anything bigger than a hundred-pounder on a platform like this."
There was an abrupt silence. Then Kallippos made his disbelieving hiss.
"Of course, if you, uh, put it on the ground," Archimedes continued awkwardly, "you could make a bigger one. I don't think you'd, uh, run into problems with the limits of the materials until you were over three talents. A three-talenter, though, would be a very big machine. It would take up a lot of supplies and you'd need, well, cranes and things"- he waved a hand vaguely in the air- "to load it, and it would be very hard to move it once you'd set it up."
"Could it be aimed, like this one?" asked Hieron quietly.
Archimedes blinked. "Well- might need tackle blocks. But you can move anything, with enough rope."
Kallippos shook his head. "Lord!" he protested to the king. "Nobody has ever built anything bigger than a two-talenter. Not even for Demetrios the Besieger or Ptolemy of Egypt."
"Hush!" said Hieron, still smiling genially at Archimedes. "Let me be sure I understand you. Are you saying there's no limit to the size of catapult you can build?"
"There are no limits in ideal mechanics," said Archimedes. "If you build something correctly and it doesn't work, that will be because your materials are too weak, not because the principles are wrong. It's like levers and pulleys. It is theoretically possible to move any given weight, however large, with any given effort, however small."
"So you say!" exclaimed Kallippos, now openly angry and indignant. "But I've never seen anyone moving a house with levers and pulleys!"
"With a place to stand, I could move the earth!" declared Archimedes.
"This is Syracuse, not Alexandria!" snapped Kallippos. "Earth, not Cloudcuckooland!"
"I could move a house, anyway!" Archimedes told him defiantly. "Or- or a ship."
Hieron was beaming now. "Would you say that's impossible, too?" he asked his chief engineer.
Kallippos divided one glare equally between Archimedes and the king, and nodded.
Hieron turned to Archimedes. "But you say you could do it?"
"Yes," Archimedes replied without thinking. "With enough rope."
"Then do it," ordered the king. "I want to see it. Do me a demonstration of ideal mechanics. I authorize you to use any ship, any of the royal workshops you like, and all the rope you want. Butcatapults." He slapped the Welcomer. "Get Eudaimon to copy this, if he can- by the way, he's under your orders now. He's taking the rest of today off, but he should be back in the workshop tomorrow. If he isn't, or if he gives you any trouble, inform me. Correct any mistakes he makes, but otherwise let him supervise the actual labor; I want you to concentrate on a hundred-pounder. Three hundred-pounders, in fact, but I hope that Eudaimon will be able to copy those as well, once you've built the first of them. When you've finished the first one, you can start thinking about that three-talenter. No, make it a two-talenter- we don't have time for cranes. Don't postpone your demonstration to work on it, though. I do want to see you move a ship single-handed."