The Collection (31 page)

^"
George,
^"
I said,
^"
Let
^'
s
get out of here.
^"

"What for?"

^"
I—I want to talk to you, George. And,
somehow, I just don
^'
t want to talk here.
^"

He looked at me, and then back at the stack of papers he was
folding by hand.
^"
You needn't be afraid, Walter,
^"
he said quietly. "It won
^'
t hurt you. It's friendly.
^"

^"
You
^'
re—
^"
Well, I
started to say, "crazy,
^"
but if he was, then I was, too,
and I stopped. I thought a minute and then said,
^"
George, you
started yesterday to tell me what you remembered of the letter you got
from—from the L.G.W.T.P. What was it?
^"

^"
Oh, that. Listen, Walter, will you promise
me something? That you
^'
ll keep this whole business strictly
confidential? I mean, not tell anybody about it?
^"

^"
Tell anybody?
^"
I demanded.
^"
And
get locked in a booby hatch? Not me. You think anybody would believe me? You
think I would have believed it myself, if—But what about the letter?
^"

You promise?
^"

^"
Sure.
^"

^"
Well,
^"
he said,
^"
like
I think I told you, the letter was vague and what I remember of it is vaguer.
But it explained that he'd used my Linotype to compose a—a metaphysical
formula. He needed it, set in type, to take back with him.
^"

"Take back where, George?"

^"
Take back where? He said to—I mean he didn
^'
t
say where. Just to where he was going back, see? But he said it might have an
effect on the machine that composed it, and if it did, he was sorry, but there
wasn
^'
t anything he could do about it. He couldn't tell, because it
took a while for the thing to work."

^"
What thing?
^"

^"
Well,
^"
said George.
^"
It
sounded like a lot of big words to me, and hooey at that." He looked back down
at the papers he was folding.
^"
Honest, it sounded so nuts I
threw it away. But, thinking back, after what
^'
s happened—Well, I
remember the word
^`
pseudolife.' I think it was a formula for giving
pseudolife to inanimate objects. He said they used it on their—their robots.
^"

"They? Who is `they'?"

^"
He didn
^'
t say.
^"

I filled my pipe, and lighted it thoughtfully.
^"
George,
^"
I said after a while,
^"
you better smash it."

Ronson looked at me, his eyes wide. "Smash it? Walter,
you're nuts. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Why, there
^'
s
a fortune in this thing. Do you know how long it took me to set the type for
this edition, drunk as I was? About an hour; that
^'
s how I got
through the press run on time.
^"

I looked at him suspiciously. "Phooey," I said.
"Animate or inanimate, that Lino
^'
s geared for six lines a
minute. That
^'
s all she
^'
ll go, unless you geared it up to
run faster. Maybe to ten lines a minute if you taped the roller. Did you tape—
^"

^"
Tape hell,
^"
said George.
^"
The
thing goes so fast you can
^'
t hang the elevator on short-measure pi
lines! And, Walter, take a look at the mold—the minion mold. It
^'
s in
casting position.
^"

A bit reluctantly, I walked back to the Linotype. The motor
was humming quietly and again I could have sworn the damn thing was watching me.
But I took a grip on my courage and the handles and I lowered my vise to expose
the mold wheel. And I saw right away what George meant about the minion mold;
it was bright-blue. I don't mean the blue of a gun barrel; I mean a real azure
color that I'd never seen metal take before. The other three molds were turning
the same shade.

I closed the vise and looked at George.

He said, "I don't know, either, except that that
happened after the mold overheated and a slug stuck. I think it
^'
s
some kind of heat treatment. It can cast a hundred lines a minute now without
sticking, and it—
^"

"Whoa,
^"
I said,
^"
back
up. You couldn
^'
t even feed it metal fast enough to—"

He grinned at me, a scared but triumphant grin.
"Walter, look around at the back. I built a hopper over the metal pot. I
had to; I ran out of pigs in ten minutes. I just shovel dead type and swept-up
metal into the hopper, and dump the hellboxes in it, and—"

I shook my head. "You're crazy. You can't dump unwashed
type and sweepings in there; you
^'
ll have to open her up and scrape
off the dross oftener than you
^'
d otherwise have to push in pigs. You
^'
ll
jam the plunger and you
^'
ll—"

^"
Walter,
^"
he said quietly—a
bit too quietly—
^"
there
isn
^'
t any dross.
^"

I just looked at him stupidly, and he must have decided he
^'
d
said more than he wanted to, because he started hurrying the papers he
^'
d
just folded out into the office, and he said,
^"
See you later,
Walter. I got to take these—"

***

The fact that my daughter-in-law had a narrow escape from
pneumonia in a town several hundred miles away has nothing to do with the
affair of Ronson's Linotype, except that it accounts for my being away three
weeks. I didn
^'
t see George for that length of time.

I got two frantic telegrams from him during the third week
of my absence; neither gave any details except that he wanted me to hurry back.
In the second one, he ended up:

^"
HURRY. MONEY NO OBJECT. TAKE PLANE.
^"

And he
^'
d wired an order for a hundred dollars
with the message. I puzzled over that one. "Money no object,
^"
is a strange phrase from the editor of a country newspaper. And I hadn
^'
t
known George to have a hundred dollars cash in one lump since I
^'
d
known him, which had been a good many years.

But family ties come first, and I wired back that I
^'
d
return the instant Ella was out of danger and not a minute sooner, and that I
wasn
^'
t cashing the money order because plane fare was only ten
dollars, anyway; and I didn't need money.

Two days later everything was okay, and I wired him when I
^'
d
get there. He met me at the airport.

He looked older and worn to a frazzle, and his eyes looked
like he hadn
^'
t slept for days. But he had on a new suit and he drove
a new car that shrieked money by the very silence of its engine.

He said,
^"
Thank God you
^'
re back,
Walter—I'll pay you any price you want to—
^"

^"
Hey,
^"
I said,
^"
slow
down; you
^'
re talking so fast you don
^'
t make sense. Now
start over and take it easy. What's the trouble?
^"

^"
Nothing
^'
s the trouble.
Everything's wonderful, Walter. But I got so much job work I can
^'
t
begin to handle it, see? I been working twenty hours a day myself, because I
^'
m
making money so fast it costs me fifty dollars every hour I take off, and I can
^'
t
afford to take off time at fifty dollars an hour, Walter, and—
^"

^"
Whoa," I said.
^"
Why
can
^'
t you afford to take off time? If you
^'
re averaging
fifty an hour, why not work a ten-hour day and —Holy cow, five hundred dollars
a day! What more do you want?
^"

^"
Huh? And lose the other seven hundred a
day! Golly, Walter, this is too good to last. Can
^'
t you see that?
Something
^'
s likely to happen and for the first time in my life I
^'
ve
got a chance to get rich, and you
^'
ve got to help me, and you can get
rich yourself doing it! Lookit, we can each work a twelve-hour shift on Etaoin,
and—
^"

^"
On what?"

^"
On Etaoin Shrdlu. I named it, Walter. And
I'm farming out the presswork so I can put in all my time setting type. And,
listen, we can each work a twelve-hour shift, see? Just for a little while,
Walter, till we get rich. I'll—I'll cut you in for a one-fourth interest, even
if it
^'
s my Linotype and my shop. That
^'
ll pay you about
three hundred dollars a day; two thousand one hundred dollars for a seven-day
week! At the typesetting rates I
^'
ve been quoting, I can get all the
work we can—
^"

^"
Slow down again," I said.
"Quoting whom? There isn't enough printing in Centerville to add up to a
tenth that much.
^"

^"
Not Centerville, Walter. New York. I
^'
ve
been getting work from the big book publishers. Bergstrom, for one; and Hayes
& Hayes have thrown me their whole line of reprints, and Wheeler House, and
Willet & Clark. See, I contract for the whole thing, and then pay somebody
else to do the presswork and binding and just do the typography myself. And I
insist on perfect copy, carefully edited. Then whatever alterations there are,
I farm out to another typesetter. That's how I got Etaoin Shrdlu licked,
Walter. Well, will you?
^"

^"
No,
^"
I told him.

We
^'
d been driving in from the airport while he
talked, and he almost lost control of the wheel when I turned down his
proposition. Then he swung off the road and parked, and turned to look at me
incredulously.

'Why not, Walter? Over
two thousand dollars a week
for
your share? What more do you—"

"George," I told him, "there are a lot of
reasons why not, but the main one is that I don't want to. I've retired. I've got
enough money to live on. My income is maybe nearer three dollars a day than
three hundred, but what would I
do
with three hundred? And I
^'
d
ruin my health—like you
^'
re ruining yours—working twelve hours a day,
and—Well, nix. I
^'
m satisfied with what I got."

^"
You must be kidding, Walter. Everybody
wants to be rich. And lookit what a couple thousand dollars a week would run to
in a couple of years. Over half a million dollars! And you've got two grown
sons who could use—"

"They're both doing fine, thanks. Good jobs and their
feet on the ladder. If I left 'em fortunes, it would do more harm than good.
Anyway, why pick on me? Anybody can set type on a Linotype that sets its own
rate of speed and follows copy and can't make an error! Lord, man, you can find
people by the hundreds who'd be glad to work for less than three hundred
dollars a day. Quite a bit less. If you insist on capitalizing on this thing,
hire three operators to work three eight-hour shifts and don
^'
t
handle anything but the business end yourself. You're getting gray hairs and
killing yourself the way you
^'
re doing it.
^"

He gestured hopelessly.
^"
I can
^'
t,
Walter. I can
^'
t hire anybody else. Don't you see this thing has
got
to be kept a secret! Why, for one thing the unions would clamp down on me
so fast that—But you're the only one I can trust, Walter, because you—"

"Because I already know about it?
^"
I
grinned at him.
^"
So you've got to trust me, anyway, whether you
like it or not. But the answer is still no. I've retired and you can't tempt me.
And my advice is to take a sledge hammer and smash that—that
thing.
^"

"Good Lord, why?
^"

"Damnit, I don
^'
t know why. I just know I
would. For one thing if you don't get this avarice out of your system and work
normal hours, I bet it will kill you. And, for another, maybe that formula is
just starting to work. How do you know how far it will go?"

He sighed, and I could see he hadn
^'
t been
listening to a word I
^'
d said.
^"
Walter," he
pleaded, "I'll give you five hundred a day:"

I shook my head firmly.
^"
Not for five
thousand, or five hundred thousand.
^"

He must have realized that I meant it, for he started the
car again. He said,
^"
Well, I suppose if money really doesn
^'
t
mean anything to you—
^"

^"
Honest, it doesn
^'
t,
^"
I assured him.
^"
Oh, it would if I didn
^'
t have it.
But I
^'
ve got a regular income and I
^'
m just as happy as if
it were ten times that much. Especially if I had to work with—with—
^"