“Vivaparous,” said Lal. “Five-fingered, with hands suited to reasonably delicate work. But—let’s try the most important test, intelligence.”
Kar got the paired headsets. He handed one pair to Lal, who )ut one on his own head, one on the head of one of the specimens. Kar did the same with the other specimen.
After a few minutes, Kar and Lal stared at each other bleakly.
“Seven points below minimum,” Kar said. “They could not be trained even for the crudest labor in the mines. Incapable of understanding the most simple instructions. Well, we’ll take hem back to the Xandor museum.”
“Shall I destroy the planet?”
“No,” Kar said. “Maybe a million years from now—if our race lasts that long—they’ll have evolved enough to become suitable for our purpose. Let us move on to the next star with planets.”
The make-up editor of the Milwaukee Star was in the composing room, supervising the closing of the local page. Jenkins, the head make-up compositor, was pushing in leads to tighten the second last column.
“Room for one more story in the eighth column, Pete,” he said. “About thirty-six picas. There are two there in the overset that will fit. Which one shall I use?”
The make-up editor glanced at the type in the galleys lying on the stone beside the chase. Long practice enabled him to read the headlines upside down at a glance. “The convention story and the zoo story, huh? Oh, hell, run the convention story. Who cares if the zoo director thinks two monkeys disappeared off Monkey Island last night?”
Etaoin Shrdlu
IT WAS rather funny for a while, the business about Ronson’s Linotype. But it began to get a bit too sticky for comfort well before the end. And despite the fact that Ronson came out ahead on the deal, I’d have never sent him the little guy with the pimple, if I’d guessed what was going to happen. Fabulous profits or not, poor Ronson got too many gray hairs out of it.
“You’re Mr. Walter Merold?” asked the little guy with the pimple. He’d called at the desk of the hotel where I live, and I’d told them to send him on up.
I admitted my identity, and he said, “Glad to know you, Mr. Merold. I’m—” and he gave me his name, but I can’t remember now what it was. I’m usually good at remembering names.
I told him I was delighted to meet him and what did he want, and he started to tell me. I interrupted him before he got very far, though.
“Somebody gave you a wrong steer,” I told him. “Yes, I’ve been a printing technician, but I’m retired. Anyway, do you know that the cost of getting special Linotype mats cut would be awfully high? If it’s only one page you want printed with those special characters, you’d do a lot better to have somebody hand-letter it for you and then get a photographic reproduction in zinc.
“But that wouldn’t do, Mr. Merold. Not at all. You see, the thing is a secret. Those I represent— But skip that. Anyway, I daren’t let anyone see it, as they would have to, to make a zinc.”
Just another nut, I thought, and looked at him closely.
He didn’t look nutty. He was rather ordinary-looking on the whole, although he had a foreign—rather an Asiatic—look about him, somehow, despite the fact that he was blond and fair-skinned. And he had a pimple on his forehead, in dead center just above the bridge of the nose. You’ve seen ones like it on statues of Buddha, and Orientals call it the pimple of wisdom and it’s something special.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Well,” I pointed out, “you can’t have the matrices cut for Linotype work without letting somebody see the characters you want on them, can you? And whoever runs the machine will also see—”
“Oh, but I’ll do that myself,” said the little guy with the pimple. (Ronson and I later called him the L.G.W.T.P., which stands for “little guy with the pimple,” because Ronson couldn’t remember his name, either, but I’m getting ahead of my story.) “Certainly the cutter will see them, but he’ll see them as individual characters, and that won’t matter. Then the actual setting of the type on the Linotype I can do myself. Someone can show me how to run one enough for me to set up one page—just a score of lines, really. And it doesn’t have to be printed here. Just the type is all I’ll want. I don’t care what it costs me.”
“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll send you to the proper man at Merganthaler, the Linotype people. They’ll cut your mats. Then, if you want privacy and access to a Linotype, go see George Ronson. He runs a little country biweekly right here in town. For a fair price, he’ll turn his shop over to you for long enough for you to set your type.”
And that was that. Two weeks later, George Ronson and I went fishing on a Tuesday morning while the L.G.W.T.P. used George’s Linotype to assemble the weird-looking mats he’d just received by air express from Mergenthaler. George had, the afternoon before, showed the little guy how to run the Linotype.
We caught a dozen fish apiece, and I remember that Ronson chuckled and said that made thirteen fish for him because the L.G.W.T.P. was paying him fifty bucks cash money just for one morning’s use of his shop.
And everything was in order when we got back except that George had to pick brass out of the hellbox because the L.G.W.T.P. had smashed his new brass matrices when he’d finished with them, and hadn’t known that one shouldn’t throw brass in with the type metal that gets melted over again.
The next time I saw George was after his Saturday edition was off the press. I immediately took him to task.
“Listen,” I said, “that stuff about misspelling words and using bum grammar on purpose isn’t funny anymore. Not even in a country newspaper. Were you by any chance trying to make your newsletters from the surrounding towns sound authentic by following copy out the window, or what?”
Ronson looked at me kind of funny and said, “Well—yes.”
“Yes, what?” I wanted to know. “You mean you were deliberately trying to be funny, or following copy out the—”
He said, “Come on around and I’ll show you.”
“Show me what?”
“What I’m going to show you,” he said, not very lucidly. “You can still set type, can’t you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Come on, then,” he said firmly. “You’re a Linotype technician, and besides you got me into this.”
“Into what?”
“Into this,” he said, and wouldn’t tell me a thing more until we got there. Then he rummaged in all pigeonholes of his desk and pulled out a piece of dead copy and gave it to me.
His face had a kind of wistful look. ‘Walter,” he said, “maybe I’m nuts, and I want to find out. I guess running a local paper for twenty-two years and doing all the work myself and trying to please everybody is enough to get a man off his rocker, but I want to find out.”
I looked at him, and I looked at the copy sheet he’d handed to me. It was just an ordinary sheet of foolscap and it was in handwriting that I recognized as that of Hank Rogg, the hardware merchant over at Hales Corners who sends in items from there. There were the usual misspellings one would expect from Hank, but the item itself wasn’t news to me. It read: “The weding of H.M. Klaflin and Miss Margorie Burke took place yesterday evening at the home of the bride. The bridesmades were—”
I quit reading and looked up at George and wondered what he was getting at. I said, “So what? This was two days ago, and I attended the wedding myself. There’s nothing funny about—”
“Listen, Walter,” he said, “set that for me, will you? Go over and sit down at the Linotype and set that whole thing. It won’t run over ten or twelve lines.”