Seokbeom's Mentor's Die Sat on the Workbench All Night

Seokbeom's mentor's die had sat on the workbench all night.

A piece of steel that matched none of the eleven lines. One side of the handle gleamed from long years of gripping, and on the inside of the blade, instead of a number, there were three punched dots. The moment Baek Mujeong lit the dawn fire, he copied those dots onto paper first.

Seokbeom shook the dust off his shoes at the door.

"Are you going to throw it out?"

"Haven't chosen yet."

"And when you do?"

Instead of answering, Mujeong oiled the die. Yesterday he hadn't had an answer. Today he still didn't.

The workshop walls were bare. The tap dies, files, and half the angle irons the craftsmen hung up every night were gone. Their owners had carried them home in their own arms. On the empty nails, only the black shadow of oil remained.

The army supply officer barged in before sunrise. Behind him were three soldiers holding a repair waiting list.

"The number of usable guns at the gate dropped by four from yesterday. Let's settle on one today."

"Settle on what?"

"The most precise one."

Mujeong picked, among the eleven numbered candidates, the one with the finest and most uniform thread groove. It was Gap, from the Japanese trading company's warehouse. There was only one die in the workshop that matched that screw. It was the very jig the owner craftsman had carried off the night before.

He pointed at the empty nail.

"Who's going to cut it with that?"

The officer said nothing.

"The precise one is on paper."

"Guns don't lock with paper."

Mujeong laid the eleven screws in a row on the workbench. Beneath them he drew the test grid he'd made yesterday again. First fit. Ten cycles. Field reassembly. Today he added three more columns on the right.

Available tools. Time to cut one. Number of people who produced the same result.

"Master craftsmen hands off. Apprentices only."

A low curse rippled through the workshop. Two craftsmen who had come back carrying their own tap dies stopped at the threshold. One of them signaled to his own apprentice with his eyes not to touch anything.

Mujeong turned the number tags over. From Gap to Gye, the names were hidden.

"You cut without knowing whose piece it is. Use only the existing tools. Three tries."

"Who provides the steel?" a craftsman asked.

"The army supply office."

"And broken blades?"

The officer spoke.

"If it's the chosen standard, we'll compensate."

Mujeong set down his tongs.

"Then we can't test."

"Why not?"

"Because the rejected standards break first."

He wouldn't light the forge while the compensation column stayed empty. The gate soldier rolled up the waiting list, and the officer looked toward the rising sun three times. In the end, a line was added stating that any blade broken and any steel discarded during testing would also go into the army supply receipt. The officer signed it. Each tool owner would confirm it.

Only then did Mujeong step on the bellows.

The first test was Gap. When Seokbeom tried to borrow the Japanese-style die, the owner craftsman grabbed the handle.

"Oil it first."

"Don't speak," Mujeong cut in.

The craftsman's hand went stiff.

Seokbeom turned it two full rotations without oil. The metallic sound rose in pitch. Filings clumped at the tip of the blade. On the third turn, the screw went crooked.

The craftsman snorted.

"See that. A hand that doesn't even know how, and it wants to talk standards."

"It's a standard that doesn't work without your hand."

The laughter cut off.

The second apprentice applied oil but released the hand pressure too late. The third chamfered the edge first and barely got it to fit. Same die, same steel, one success out of three people.

Mujeong wrote one beneath Gap.

Eul couldn't be gripped in the workshop's large tap die. Byeong required long filing to match the diameter. Jeong cut quickly, but after ten cycles the tip of the groove had worn smooth. As the test screws multiplied, the color of the metal filings on the floor kept changing.

By the time the noon bell rang, only four had passed.

Only one person managed the finest, Gap. All three people succeeded at the first fit with Jeong, but it failed on the repeat test. With Mu, three out of three cut it, and after ten cycles there was almost no metal filing. But it took half a shi longer to cut one piece than Gap.

Gyeong went in fast from the start. Too fast was the problem. When the bolt was slammed shut hard, the screw head turned back half a turn. When Seokbeom tried to tighten it, Mujeong drew a white ink line straight across the head and the body.

"Close it."

Seokbeom opened and closed the bolt. On the fifth try, the ink line cracked. On the tenth, it had shifted by the width of a fingernail.

"Going in and locking in place aren't the same thing."

"Write it on the chart."

Sin could be cut with the Joseon style tap die, but the apprentice who turned the handle with his left hand produced a groove that was deeper on one side. Instead of switching people, Mujeong hung a weight of equal mass on the end of the handle. On the third test, the deviation shrank. It wasn't a problem with the standard, it was a problem with the tool's handle.

"Then Sin can be saved too, can't it?"

"If you add the cost and time of a new handle."

Seokbeom moved Sin to the passing column, then stopped. The officer pressed him to hurry, but Mujeong measured the weight of the counterweight and the length of the fixing cord before letting the chart be moved.

Im was a screw pulled from a heat damaged contact point. Cutting the same shape from new steel made it fit, but in the old contact point it caught on the second turn. The tap side of the contact point was already worn down. Mujeong didn't pass the new screw alone. He tied the screw and the receiving hole together as a pair and wrote, "inspect tap threads before replacement."

Gye had only one groove left in its original thread because of hammer strike marks. Three apprentices each produced a different test piece. There was no original tool left to judge which one was correct. Mujeong moved Gye to the very bottom and wrote in red ink, "cannot be reproduced."

"We found eleven, and you're throwing one out?"

"It's not throwing out. It's not passing what we don't know."

Even the four that passed ranked differently for the same reasons. What cut quickly. What locked longest. What could be made with current tools. What produced the same result across many hands. No single column alone was the answer.

The army supply officer picked up Mu.

"It's slow."

"It can be cut again."

"It's not the best one."

Mujeong pointed at the single mark beside Gap and the three beside Mu.

"Is the one who calls it good one person, or three?"

The officer had no answer.

In the afternoon, a messenger from the inspection office brought a folded paper. There was no seal. On the outside it said, twice, "not a decision." It was the test chart Yun Haejun had sent back.

He had no transmission stamp, no priority code. He had no authority to write orders beside numbers either. Instead, beneath each of the eleven candidates, a question was attached.

How many current tools. How many people reproduced it. How many broken blades. How many guns missing from the gate while one is being repaired.

At the end there was a short sentence.

"Not the most precise one. I choose the middle one that three people repeated with current tools. Count my vote as only one."

There was no signature, no title, only a name written by itself.

The officer reached to snatch the paper. Mujeong pinned it down with his tongs.

"If you use it as an order, I'll burn it."

"That man started this whole undertaking."

"Right now it's just one vote."

Mujeong set the paper among the other apprentices' votes. Haejun's was neither red nor large. When Seokbeom counted, five votes had gone to Mu, two to Gap, one to Gyeong. The three craftsmen had marked nothing at all.

"Write down the abstentions too," Mujeong said.

The craftsman crossed his arms.

"I won't put a mark on a vote that hands over my measurements and drops my own tool."

Mujeong picked up his own vote. With his own hand, he could have cut Gap. Gap's groove was clean, and even in a short screw the gripping surface was wide. Mu was crude. To bear the same load it had to be made longer, and it wouldn't fit into the narrow terminal board.

He rolled the test piece made from Gap between his fingers. The feel of an evenly standing blade was good. It was close to his own way of working. Among the craftsmen left in the workshop, Mujeong was the only one who could repeat Gap three times.

Seokbeom asked.

"Where do you cast your master's vote?"

Mujeong stamped his ink mark in Mu's column.

With his own hand, he threw his vote to the losing side.

"Why Mu?"

"Because three people did it without me."

"It's slow."

"You can write down time and cut it shorter. You can't write down a hand."

He didn't write "standard" right away. He wrote, "temporary common thread for workshop repairs." He limited where it could be applied too. Two interchangeable spots on the rifle bolt. One spot with margin on the telegraph terminal board. Not to be used on the barrel joint under heavy pressure, nor on tight contact points.

He didn't discard Gap either, though it had only passed the first fit. He kept it stored with its origin and tool attached, for repairing the original equipment it came from. For the remaining nine kinds, he recorded the matching machines and the quantities left. Choosing one couldn't be allowed to falsely condemn the other ten as defective.

The officer held out the receipt form.

"Then a hundred of Mu."

"Ten."

"Think about the gate repairs."

"Three tools, three apprentices. Ten today. Check the defect rate after ten cycles, then decide the next quantity."

"If it were Haejun, it would be faster, "

Mujeong flipped the paper over. The back was blank.

"He also chose the middle. He didn't choose the fast one."

The officer crossed out a hundred and wrote ten. Mujeong added beside it the compensation for broken blades and the return time for the comparison guns. There were more columns to keep than the vote itself.

As the sun began to set, Seokbeom, about to hang Mu's measurement chart on the wall, stopped.

The middle of the paper had been scratched long and deep with a blade tip. Only the groove angle and depth columns had been scraped away until they were unreadable.

The back door of the workshop stood open. The two craftsmen who had brought their own tap dies that morning were nowhere to be seen. Their apprentices stood with their hands off the bellows.

"Who did this?" Seokbeom asked.

No one answered.

After a while, the old craftsman tucked his own measurement ledger into his coat.

"If we hand over Mu today, tomorrow the office will call even our own hands government property."

"Once they've copied our measurements, they'll have no reason to call on us again. Is that compensation, paying for one broken blade once and losing orders for the rest of our lives?"

Those words were not a threat. In that craftsman's house there were apprentices trained to fit that exact tap die, and order payments not yet received. The one day of retraining that Mujeong had written on today's test chart was not a single meal in that house, it was next month's wages.

When he left, the other craftsmen also gathered up their files and angle irons. The ones who remained lowered their hammers slowly. They heated the same steel three times and struck it only once. They didn't produce defects. They simply let the delivery deadline stretch out.

The army supply officer called for his soldiers. Mujeong stood blocking the workshop door.

"Drag them out and the measurements are gone forever."

"Then what do we do?"

Mujeong looked at the scratched chart and the emptying wall. They had chosen a standard for the apprentices to reproduce, but the knowledge to make that standard was already going into hiding.

At the end of the workbench sat the ten receipt forms for what they had planned to make today.

Every column for finished goods stood empty.