Chapter 98: Field Tests and Margins

The waiting hall at the county bus station had no air-conditioning, only three ceiling fans turning lazily overhead. The air was thick with the smell of diesel, sour sweat, and the tar of cheap tobacco. Lin Chen leaned against the edge of a row of faded green plastic seats, his left foot hanging slightly off the ground to keep the sole from scraping the floor. A canvas bag lay across his knees. Inside it were the deferred-exam application form stamped in red, a transparent document sleeve, and a dog-eared copy of the County Bus Timetable.

He needed to break down the “three-hour ride” on paper into something measurable, something he could actually touch.

At exactly nine o’clock, the slow bus to the provincial capital pulled into the station on time. Its paint was a faded blue and white, the door folded by hand, and the conductor stood hanging at the entrance with a fistful of stiff paper tickets. Lin Chen did not step forward right away. He watched the passengers get off: migrant workers carrying woven sacks, women with children in their arms, students hauling snakeskin bags. From stepping off to reaching the exit took an average of four and a half minutes. Boarding, from ticket check to finding a seat, took six to eight minutes. He lowered his head and wrote in his notebook: boarding and alighting loss, reserve fifteen minutes.

He walked to the ticket window. A faded fare chart was taped to the glass: county town to provincial capital, regular coach, eleven yuan. Lin Chen touched the inner pocket of his jacket. Balance: 0.2 yuan. Buying a ticket today was impossible. He only needed to confirm the departure frequency and the last bus. Behind the window, the ticket clerk was knitting a sweater with her head down. Without even looking up, she said, “Four trips a day. Seven in the morning, nine, one in the afternoon, three. Miss it and that’s it.”

Lin Chen nodded and wrote it down. Nine o’clock departure, arrival at North Station in the provincial capital before noon. Provincial Institute of Technology was in the south of the city. From North Station to the admissions office, with a bus transfer and then walking, it would take at least forty minutes. The verification window closed at twelve-thirty. In theory, the timing locked together perfectly. But theory did not account for traffic, did not account for queues at ticket check, did not account for the actual pace of his left foot.

He decided to walk the route from North Station to Provincial Tech himself.

When his left foot came down, a hollow, blunt pain throbbed at the ankle, like stepping on cotton soaked through with water. He shifted his center of gravity, putting more weight onto his right foot and the outer side of his left leg, shortening his stride to two-thirds of normal. From the bus station to the city bus stop, four hundred meters took six minutes and twenty seconds. He waited seven minutes for the bus. Fare: fifty fen dropped into the box. The bus was crowded. He gripped a hanging strap and swayed with every jolt. He got off at Provincial Capital North Station. Out the exit. Across the road. The traffic light was broken; the stream of cars kept weaving through, and he pressed himself against the railing, waiting for a gap. After crossing, he entered the old city. The streets narrowed, plane trees arched overhead. The side gate of Provincial Tech stood at the end of an uphill road. He looked up at the road sign.

1.2 kilometers.

Uphill.

He started walking.

Every step with his left foot required his right hand to hover instinctively at his side to steady himself. Sweat ran down from his temples and soaked the collar of his shirt. He kept his eyes on the second hand of his watch. One hundred meters: two minutes ten seconds. Two hundred meters: four and a half minutes. Five hundred meters: eleven minutes. On the incline, his cadence dropped even further. He was breathing hard, but he did not speed up. He knew that on Wednesday he would not be able to run. Running would worsen the seepage. If he could not stand steady at the verification site, or if he missed the return bus afterward, every calculation would collapse. He had to complete the route at a normal walking pace and still leave himself margin.

1.2 kilometers took twenty-eight minutes.

He stood outside the iron fence of the side gate at Provincial Tech. The sign for the admissions office hung on the second floor. He checked his watch. If he boarded at nine, arrived at North Station at 12:05, then reached the admissions office at 12:45. The window closed at 12:30.

Fifteen minutes late.

The original timeline for Plan B died here.

Lin Chen leaned against the wall and pulled a sheet of scratch paper from his bag. The pen moved quickly across the page. This was not emotional panic. It was pure parameter substitution.

Variable one: Could he catch an earlier bus? The seven o’clock one. But the first mock exam started at eight. The deferred-exam approval allowed him to make up the test in the afternoon; it did not mean he could skip the morning altogether to leave early. School rules required deferred-exam students to sign in at the examination room, or it would count as forfeiting the exam. He could not leave school ahead of time.

Variable two: Could he compress travel time on the road? The regular coach stopped at three towns along the way, and boarding and alighting at each one took an average of three minutes. If the driver was in a hurry, maybe he could cut that down to two and a half. But that was uncontrollable.

Variable three: Did the verification window really close exactly on time? The admissions staff got off work at twelve-thirty, but materials verification was handled by a manual queue. If he arrived early, he could line up near the front. But twelve-thirty was a hard cutoff. Once your number was called past that point, the system locked.

He crossed out the original plan and rearranged the sequence.

The nine o’clock departure would not work.

He had to make use of the gap between “signing in for the deferred exam” and the actual departure time.

The first mock exam was held in a lecture hall. Sign-in usually began at 7:40, and papers were handed out at eight. He could sign in at 7:40 and leave the exam room at 7:45. His homeroom teacher had already signed off; the invigilators only cared whether his name was on the sign-in sheet. They did not watch the students individually. It was a gray seam in the rules, but still inside them.

Leave campus at 7:45. Walk to the county bus station: fifteen minutes. By eight o’clock, he would miss the seven o’clock bus, but he could still catch the 8:20 passing coach. There was no fixed 8:20 departure from the county town, but long-distance buses from the neighboring county to the provincial capital came down the provincial highway and stopped at the gas station in the northern outskirts to pick up passengers. He had seen that blue-and-white bus yesterday on his way back to the village.

What he needed now was to confirm the exact stop time of that passing coach.

And whether it was actually faster than the slow bus from the station.

He turned and walked back. By now his left foot had gone numb enough to lose the pain, leaving only the mechanical motion of lift and drop. He returned to the gas station in the county’s northern outskirts. Next to it was a small shop, and the owner was sitting on a bamboo chair listening to the radio. Lin Chen walked over and offered him half a bottle of cooled boiled water he had filled at school.

“Uncle, can I ask you something? Around eight-thirty in the morning, does a coach with provincial-capital plates stop here?”

The owner unscrewed the cap, took a sip, and sized him up. “It does. Passing coach. Doesn’t go into town, takes the outer ring. Shows up between eight-thirty and eight-forty, depending on traffic. This one gets you there twenty minutes faster than the station bus. Skips two of the towns.”

Lin Chen wrote it down.

Stops at 8:30.

From school to the gas station, walking plus cutting through side paths: twenty-five minutes. Leave school at 7:45, arrive at the gas station at 8:10. Wait twenty minutes. Board at 8:30. Outer ring road straight to the northern outskirts of the provincial capital, no stops. Travel time: two hours. Arrive at North Station at 10:40. Then walking plus city bus: fifty minutes to Provincial Tech. 11:30.

One hour early.

The verification window closed at 12:30.

Margin: sixty minutes.

The timeline meshed again.

But the price was this: he would have to give up the first half of the science comprehensive paper in the mock exam. He would only sign in, not answer anything. During the make-up exam that afternoon, he would have to finish the entire science paper within three hours. His foundations in physics and chemistry were solid enough, but the big biology questions took time. He would have to use the scraps of time between traveling and verification to write out the biology formulas and answer templates once more from memory. Memorize genetic diagrams while waiting for the bus; write out metabolic pathways on the coach.

Time would have to be chopped into pieces and stuffed into every crack.

He opened the ledger.

Balance: 0.2 yuan.

Transportation costs for Wednesday: passing coach fare, 12 yuan—one yuan more than the station bus. Return slow coach, 11 yuan. Total: 23 yuan. Shortfall: 22.8 yuan. He still owed 1.2 yuan for the photos. Photocopying had already been paid for.

He had to scrape together 23.4 yuan before Wednesday.

The scrap yard had already been cleared out. The old books had already been sold. The only margin left was the repair shop owner’s promise of one day’s work as an apprentice, paid at the end of the day—eight yuan. He could only go after the make-up exam on Wednesday afternoon. That left another 15.4 yuan. The only place it could come from was the old iron wok at home and half a sack of dried chilies. He could not touch his younger brother’s medicine money, and he could not touch the deposit his father had set aside to buy fertilizer. Before Tuesday evening, he had to make a list of everything that could be turned into cash, sort it by weight and price per unit, and pick out the three lightest, easiest items to sell.

He closed the ledger.

The setting sun stretched the gas station’s shadow long across the ground. He got to his feet and prepared to head back to the village. He had only taken two steps when the shop owner’s radio cut into the program with a short bulletin from the county broadcast station:

“Notice from the Transportation Bureau: due to construction on Provincial Highway section K42, all passing coaches will be temporarily rerouted starting tomorrow. The stop will be moved to County South Freight Station. Passengers are asked to inform one another.”

Lin Chen stopped where he was.

County South Freight Station.

Five kilometers from the school.

In the opposite direction from Provincial Tech.

The detour would add forty minutes to the trip. The passing coach’s stop time would also be pushed back.

He lowered his head and looked at his watch. The second hand kept ticking.

The timeline on paper split open in the face of a real-world notice.

He needed to calculate again.

But dusk had already fallen, and the evening buses had stopped running. He could only wait until tomorrow.

He turned around, his left foot moving in its mechanical alternation, and headed toward the dirt road back to the village. Wind passed through the poplar grove by the roadside with a dry rasping sound. He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and his fingertips touched the deferred-exam application form.

The red stamp ink had already dried.

Tomorrow, he would have to make another run.