Lest Darkness Fall (9 page)

            Padway refused permission.
Thomasus suggested swearing out a complaint and having Hannibal arrested;
Padway said no, he didn't want to get mixed up with the law. He did allow
Fritharik to send Hannibal, when the Sicilian came to, out the front door with
a mighty lack in the fundament. Exit villain, sneering, thought Padway as he
watched the ex-foreman slink off.

            Fritharik said: "I
think that was a mistake, Martinus. I could have sunk his body in the Tiber
without anybody's knowing. He'll make trouble for us."

            Padway suspected that the
last statement was correct. But he merely said: "We'd better bind your arm
up. Your whole sleeve is blood-soaked. Julia, get a strip of linen and boil it.
Yes,
boil
it!"

-

            PADWAY HAD RESOLVED not to
let anything distract him from the task of assuring himself a livelihood. Until
that was accomplished, he didn't intend to stick his neck out by springing
gunpowder or the law of gravitation on the unsuspecting Romans.

            But the banker's war talk
reminded him that he was, after all, living in a political and cultural as well
as an economic world. He had never, in his other life, paid more attention to
current events than he had to. And in post-Imperial Rome, with no newspapers or
electrical communication, it was even easier to forget about things outside
one's immediate orbit.

            He was living in the
twilight of western classical civilization. The Age of Faith, better known as
the Dark Ages, was closing down. Europe would be in darkness, from a scientific
and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years. That aspect was, to
Padway's naturally prejudiced mind, the most, if not the only, important aspect
of a civilization. Of course, the people among whom he was living had no
conception of what was happening to them. The process was too slow to observe
directly, even over the span of a life-time. They took their environment for
granted, and even bragged about their modernity.

            So what? Could one man
change the course of history to the extent of preventing this interregnum? One
man had changed the course of history before. Maybe. A Carlylean would say yes.
A Tolstoyan or Marxian would say no; the environment fixes the pattern of a
man's accomplishments and throws up the man to fit that pattern. Tancredi had expressed
it differently by calling history a tough web, which would take a huge effort
to distort.

            How would one man go about
it? Invention was the mainspring of technological development. But even in his
own time, the lot of the professional inventor had been hard, without the
handicap of a powerful and suspicious ecclesiasticism. And how much could he
accomplish by simply "inventing," even if he escaped the unwelcome
attentions of the pious? The arts of distilling and metal rolling were launched,
no doubt, and so were Arabic numerals. But there was so much to be done, and
only one lifetime to do it in.

            What then? Business? He was
already in it; the upper classes were contemptuous of it; and he was not
naturally a businessman, though he could hold his own well enough in
competition with these sixth-century yaps. Politics? In an age when victory
went to the sharpest knife, and no moral rules of conduct were observable?
Br-r-r-r!

            How to prevent darkness from
falling?

            The Empire might have held
together longer if it had had better means of communication. But the Empire, at
least in the west, was hopelessly smashed, with Italy, Gaul, and Spain under
the muscular thumbs of their barbarian "garrisons."

            The answer was
Rapid
communication and the multiple record
— that is, printing. Not even the
most diligently destructive barbarian can extirpate the written word from a
culture wherein the
minimum
edition of most books is fifteen hundred
copies. There are just too many books.

            So he would be a printer.
The web might be tough, but maybe it had never been attacked by a Martin
Padway.

-

            "Good morning, my dear
Martinus," said Thomasus. "How is the copper-rolling business?"

            "So-so. The local
smiths are pretty well stocked with strip, and not many of the shippers are
interested in paying my prices for such a heavy commodity. But I think I'll
clean up that last note in a few weeks."

            "I'm glad to hear that.
What will you do then?"

            "That's what I came to
see you about. Who's publishing books in Rome now?"

            "Books? Books? Nobody,
unless you count the copyists who replace wornout copies for the libraries.
There are a couple of bookstores down in the Agiletum, but their stock is all
imported. The last man who tried to run a publishing business in Rome went
broke years ago. Not enough demand, and not enough good authors. You're not
thinking of going into it, I hope?"

            "Yes, I am. I'll make
money at it, too."

            "What? You're crazy,
Martinus. Don't consider it. I don't want to see you go broke after making such
a fine start."

            "I shan't go broke. But
I'll need some capital to start."

            "What? Another loan?
But I've just told you that nobody can make money publishing in Rome. It's a
proven fact. I won't lend you an as on such a harebrained scheme. How much do
you think you'd need?"

            "About five hundred
solidi."

            "
Ai, ai!
You've
gone mad, my boy! What would you need such a lot for? All you have to do is buy
or hire a couple of scribes —"

            Padway grinned. "Oh,
no. That's the point. It takes a scribe months to copy out a work like
Cassiodorus'
Gothic History
by hand, and that's only one copy. No wonder
a work like that costs fifty solidi per copy! I can build a machine that will
turn out five hundred or a thousand copies in a few weeks, to retail for five
or ten solidi. But it will take time and money to build the machine and teach
an operator how to run it."

            "But that's real money!
God, are You listening? Well, please make my misguided young friend listen to
reason! For the last time, Martinus, I won't consider it! How does the machine
work?"

            If Padway had known the
travail that was in store for him, he might have been less confident about the
possibilities of starting a printshop in a world that knew neither printing
presses, type, printer's ink, nor paper. Writing ink was available, and so was
papyrus. But it didn't take Padway long to decide that these would be
impractical for his purposes.

            His press, seemingly the
most formidable job, proved the easiest. A carpenter down in the warehouse district
promised to knock one together for him in a few weeks, though he manifested a
not unnatural curiosity as to what Padway proposed to do with the contraption.
Padway wouldn't tell him.

            "It's not like any
press I ever saw," said the man. "It doesn't look like a felt press.
I
know! You're the city's new executioner, and this is a newfangled torture
instrument! Why didn't you want to tell me, boss? It's a perfectly respectable
trade! But say, how about giving me a pass to the torture chamber the first time
you use it? I want to be sure my work holds up, you know!"

            For a bed they used a piece
sawn off the top of a section of a broken marble column and mounted on wheels.
All Padway's instincts revolted at this use of a monument of antiquity, but he
consoled himself with the thought that one column mattered less than the art of
printing.

            For type, he contracted with
a seal cutter to cut him a set of brass types. He had, at first, been appalled
to discover that he would need ten to twelve thousand of the little things,
since he could hardly build a type-casting machine, and would therefore have to
print directly from the types. He had hoped to be able to print in Greek and
Gothic as well as in Latin, but the Latin types alone set him back a round two
hundred solidi. And the first sample set that the seal cutter ran off had the
letters facing the wrong way and had to be melted up again. The type was what a
twentieth-century printer would have called fourteen-point Gothic, and an
engraver would have called sans-serif. With such big type he would not be able
to get much copy on a page, but it would at least, he hoped, be legible.

            Padway shrank from the idea
of making his own paper. He had only a hazy idea of how it was done, except
that it was a complicated process. Papyrus was too glossy and brittle, and the
supply in Rome was meager and uncertain.

            There remained vellum.
Padway found that one of the tanneries across the Tiber turned out small
quantities as a side line. It was made from the skins of sheep and goats by
extensive scraping, washing, stretching, and paring. The price seemed
reasonable. Padway rather staggered the owner of the tannery by ordering a
thousand sheets at one crack.

            He was fortunate in knowing
that printer's ink was based on linseed oil and lampblack. It was no great
trick to buy a bag of flaxseed and run it through a set of rolls like those he
used for copper rolling, and to rig up a contraption consisting of an oil lamp,
a water-filled bowl suspended and revolved over it, and a scraper for removing
the lampblack. The only thing wrong with the resulting ink was that it wouldn't
print. That is, it either made no impression or came off the type in shapeless
gobs.

            Padway was getting nervous
about his finances; his five hundred solidi were getting low, and this seemed a
cruel joke. His air of discouragement became so obvious that he caught his
workers remarking on it behind their hands. But he grimly set out to experiment
on his ink. Sure enough, he found that with a little soap in it, it would work
fairly well.

            In the middle of February
Nevitta Grummund's son wandered in through the raw drizzle. When Fritharik
showed him in, the Goth slapped Padway on the back so hard as to send him
halfway across the room. "Well, well!" he bellowed. "Somebody
gave me some of that terrific drink you've been selling, and I remembered your
name. So I thought I'd look you up. Say, you got yourself well established in
record time, for a stranger. Pretty smart young man, eh? Ha, ha!"

            "Would you like to look
around?" invited Padway. "Only I'll have to ask you to keep my
methods confidential. There's no law here protecting ideas, so I have to keep
my things secret until I'm ready to make them public property."

            "Sure, you can trust
me. I wouldn't understand how your devices work anyhow."

            In the machine shop Nevitta
was fascinated by a crude wire-drawing machine that Padway had rigged up.
"Isn't that pretty?" he said, picking up the roll of brass wire.
"I'd like to buy some for my wife. It would make nice bracelets and
earrings."

            Padway hadn't anticipated
that use of his products, but said he would have some ready in a week.

            "Where do you get your
power?" asked Nevitta.

            Padway showed him the
work-horse in the back yard walking around a shaft in the rain.

            "Shouldn't think a
horse would be efficient," said the Goth. "You could get a lot more
power out of a couple of husky slaves. That is, if your driver knew his whip.
Ha, ha!"

            "Oh, no," said
Padway. "Not this horse. Notice anything peculiar about his harness?"

            "Well, yes, it is
peculiar. But I don't know what's wrong with it."

            "It's that collar over
his neck. You people make your horses pull against a strap around the throat.
Every time he pulls, the strap cuts into his windpipe and shuts off the poor
animal's breath. That collar puts the load on his shoulders. If you were going
to pull a load, you wouldn't hitch a rope around your neck to pull it with,
would you?"