Ed pulled up aside her and said, “Ah… loved one…”
She stopped and frowned, evidently surprised to see a hovercar on the streets—if they could be called streets—of Elysium. She obviously didn’t recognize him. She said hesitantly, “Good afternoon, loved one. Could I be of assistance?”
Ed climbed out of the beetle and said, “You don’t remember me. I’ve attended a couple of the meetings of, ah, the Speaker of the Word.” He should have planned this out better. The fact of the matter was, he hadn’t a clue to what he was going to find here and was playing it by ear.
He said, “I thought I’d come and see Elysium.”
Her face lost stiffness. “You are a pilgrim?”
“Well, maybe not exactly. I’d just like to know more about it.” He fell in beside her, leaving the car where it was. Parking was no problem in Elysium. “I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”
“Oh, no.” She continued to walk along. “I’m only delivering some of my things to the printer.”
“Printer?”
“That building there. It’s our print shop.”
Ed Wonder looked at that building there, which they were approaching. It looked little different from the cottages. “You mean you print…”
“Just about everything.” She didn’t look quite as grim as he’d remembered her at the tent meeting in Kingsburg. Come to think of it, Ed decided, he had expected her to look grim at the tent meeting. A dedicated Holy Roller, or something, all set to froth at the mouth against dancing, drink, card playing and similar sins.
He said, even as they approached the door. “You mean books?” Ed Wonder’s conception of the printing of books involved acres of Rube Goldberg printing presses, entirely automated, with huge rolls of paper unwinding at flashing speed at one end and finished volumes flowing out, to be wrapped and boxed, again automatically, at the other. All at the rate of thousands per hour, if not per minute. This whole building couldn’t have been more than thirty by forty feet, at most.
He followed her through the door.
“Books, pamphlets, even a little weekly newspaper we send out to pilgrims throughout the nation who are not yet quite ready to join us in Elysium.” She greeted one of the two men who occupied the print shop. “Kelly, I’ve finally got the last two verses.”
Kelly had been standing before what Ed vaguely recognized to be a primitive type of printing press. With his left leg he was stomping up and down on a treadle, somewhat similar to the powering of the early sewing machine. At the same time he was picking up sheets of paper with his right hand, inserting them deftly into the moving press, removing them just as deftly with his left hand, repeating the process over and over again.
Kelly said, “Hi, Martha. Good. Norm can set them up.”
Ed was watching in fascination. If the other got his hand caught between that type and…
Kelly grinned at him. “Never saw a platen press before?”
“Well, no,” Ed said.
Martha said, “Kelly, this is a new pilgrim. He’s been to some of Josh’s meetings.”
They exchanged banalities. For a time, Ed watched in complete astonishment. He realized he couldn’t have been more surprised if he had come into a room where women were carding wool and then utilizing spinning wheels to make thread. Had he known it, that was going to come later.
While Martha and Kelly got into some technical discussion about the book they were evidently in the process of producing, Ed wandered over to where the room’s other occupant was working.
This worthy looked up and grinned a welcome. “Name’s Haer, loved one,” he said. “Norm Haer.”
“Ed,” Ed told him. “Ed Wonder. What in the devil are you doing?”
Haer grinned again. “Setting body type. This is a California type box. Ten point, Goudy Old Style.”
“I thought you set type on a machine that looks something like a typewriter.”
Haer laughed. “That was the old fashioned way. Here in Elysium we set it by hand.” His hand darted, flicked out, flicked back again. The lines of type in his hand-held tray were slowly growing.
Ed said, a faint exasperation in his voice: “Look, what’s the point? Ben Franklin used to print like this but since then we’ve dreamed up a few improvements.”
The typesetter’s fingers never stopped their flying. He was evidently the sort who remained in almost perpetual good humor. At least, thus far, his face had never lost its smile.
“There’s several angles,” he told Ed. “One, there’s a lot of satisfaction in turning out a finished product with your own hands. Preferably a superior product. Something went out of the production of commodities when a shoemaker no longer makes footwear starting out with leather and winding up with a finished pair of shoes, but instead stands before a gigantic machine, which he doesn’t understand, watching a few gauges and periodically throwing a switch, or pushing a button, for four or five hours a day.”
Ed said, “Oh, great, but that first shoemaker of yours turned out maybe one pair of shoes a day, and the second one ten or twenty thousand.”
The printer grinned. “That’s right. But the second one has ulcers, hates his wife and is an incipient alcoholic.”
Ed Wonder said suddenly, “What did you use to do before you got this job setting type for Tubber? You don’t sound like some uneducated, small time…” He let the sentence dribble away. It didn’t sound very diplomatic.
Norm Haer was laughing. “I’m not setting type for Tubber, but for Elysium. I used to be managing director of World-Wide Printing Corporation. We had offices in Ultra-New York, Neuve Los Angeles, London, Paris and Peking.”
Ed had experienced the ruggedness of trying to climb the pyramid in the Welfare State. When only a third of the nation’s potential working force was needed in production, the competition could get fierce. He said, in compassion. “Got all the way to the top but then they bounced you, eh?”
“Not exactly,” Haer grinned. “I was too big a stockholder for that. I happened to read one of Josh Tubber’s pamphlets one day. So the next day I got hold of everything of his I could locate. And the next week I told World-Wide what they could do with their job and came here to Elysium to help set up this shop.”
The man was obviously halfway around the corner, good humor or not. Ed left that line of thought. “What are you working on now?” he said.
“A limited edition of Martha Kent’s latest verse.”
“Martha Kent?” Ed Wonder knew the name. Poetry wasn’t his forte but American Nobel Prize winners weren’t so common that you didn’t hear of them. “You mean she’s given you permission to bring out a book of hers!”
“That’s not the way I’d put it,” Haer grinned. “It’s more a matter of Martha bringing it out herself.”
“Martha!” Ed blurted. His eyes went accusingly over to where the woman with whom he had entered the shop was talking with Kelly as he ran his foot-operated platen press. “You mean that’s Martha Kent?”
“As ever was,” Haer chuckled.
Ed Wonder muttered some sort of goodbye and rejoined the other two. He said, in accusation, “You’re Martha Kent.”
“That’s right, loved one,” she smiled.
“Look,” Ed demanded. “I don’t want to appear dense, but why’re you bringing out a book of your latest poems through a little one horse outfit like this?”
“Never let Josh Tubber know I said this,” she said, and there was a quick elfin quality in her face, “but to make money.”
“Make money!” Ed said in disgust.
Kelly ran out of paper, stopped peddling, wiped his hands on his apron and walked to a nearby pile of books. He took one up and returned with it to the newcomer. He handed it to Ed without speaking.