“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.”