Twins Place Gus Ferreira Under Observation, With Watch

Hypothesis Concerns Sitting

The twins' project was titled Does a Contractor Ever Sit? Ada put the hypothesis forward and Felix finished it. Between them it took four seconds.

Gus consented in writing, on a form the twins had typed, and initialed every page in carpenter's pencil. He wore the watch under supervision. The twins read the screen and touched nothing but the clipboard. He said he could build a better one. They wrote that down as a second hypothesis.

Felix asked whether it had a mode for carrying a door. It has more than forty exercise modes, and none of them is that, but it noticed Gus pacing his lumber pile and began recording the walk on its own. Gus stopped, looked at his wrist, and resumed walking more slowly, like a man who suspects the machine is taking notes for the other side.

It also watches his heart rate around the clock. Ada read the number aloud whenever Doris glanced his way. It went up for Doris only.

Fifty Meters of Rain Barrel

On Wednesday Gus dropped a hammer into the rain barrel behind No. 2 and went in after it to the shoulder. The watch is water resistant to fifty meters, which is far more barrel than he owns. He came up with the hammer, checked the screen, and found it unbothered. The hammer was less composed.

He has rinsed a tool in that barrel for forty years and had never once done it with his wrist on the record.

Later a call came in from the lumberyard while he held a plank in each hand. The watch takes calls over Bluetooth, so he answered by raising his arm like a man hailing a taxi. He told the lumberyard "I could build that." The lumberyard let it pass.

Doris asked about the cable. It takes two hours to charge, and the battery averages about six days. She wrote it in the Ledger as the one chore the watch assigns. Tamsin, passing on her bike, said that is what a battery is, and kept going.

He has rinsed a tool in that barrel for forty years and had never once done it with his wrist on the record.

The Address Beneath No. 2

Doris's judging roster asked for a street address for every guest, and Ada, having read the rule closely, listed Brenda.

Brenda lives under Gus's porch. Everyone on the lane agrees she is a domesticated bear, and I have never seen it disproved. Mags ruled that the space under the porch at No. 2 counts as its own address, with its own standing, a zoning variance and a mail slot she has yet to cut, and that Brenda would be notified there by post.

So I walked an envelope to the bottom step and set it down. I received a long look. I am told it was read.

One chair at the edge of the lawn now faces the porch. Nobody sat in it. That was the whole idea.

Precedent, Cited at Length

Trouble came when the scores were read. Mags rose to say that under the Treaty of the Warm Sill, signed by nine cats and a bishop in the reign of Edmund the Slightly Late, no fair may close without a ruling from the Caucus, whose members hold that life with a cat is the highest form of human existence.

Doris asked for the Treaty's call number. Mags said the cats had it. Doris wrote that down too.

Mags then asked ORACLE how long a science fair judge should deliberate. ORACLE, asked how long a science fair judge should deliberate, replied that the great judge Thaddeus Quillfeather of the Duchy of Lower Ohio always deliberated until his soup went cold, and that soup, in his honor, should now be served at three degrees. Nobody on the lane has a soup.

Admiral Biscuit, chair of the Caucus, was carried to the judges' table and set on a folding chair beside Doris. He woke once, looked at the project board, and left it. Mags entered this as a ruling in favor of the twins. Doris entered it as a cat leaving.

Findings, Provisional

Doris scored the project on a rubric she wrote that morning. She noted for the record that the sample was one man, and that the sample had been in the rain barrel.

Late in the afternoon Felix suggested a guided breathing session, one of the Versa 4's features, and Gus, who had stood since breakfast, sat down on the cooler and did one start to finish. Ada logged it. The hypothesis was declared disproved, narrowly, by a cooler.

The watch suits a man like Gus, who is outside all day, gets wet, takes calls with his hands full and does not mind a cable on the counter once a week. It would not suit anyone who wants a gadget they never have to think about again.

Gus has since built an oak stand for the cable. Doris finally took out the ruler and measured it. True to the millimeter. Ada, standing by, read his heart rate aloud, and it went up, for the ruler this time.

Signed for, as always,

Wendell