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?”
“Damn it, 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—”
“With Etaoin Shrdlu? Maybe you’d get to like it. Walter, I’ll swear the thing is developing a personality. Want to drop around to the shop now?”
“Not now,” I said. “I need a bath and sleep. But I’ll drop around tomorrow. Say, last time I saw you I didn’t have the chance to ask what you meant by that statement about dross. What do you mean, there isn’t any dross?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Did I say that? I don’t remember—”
“Now listen, George, don’t try to pull anything like that. You know perfectly well you said it, and that you’re dodging now. What’s it about? Kick in.”
He said, “Well—” and drove a couple of minutes in silence, and then: “Oh, all right. I might as well tell you. I haven’t bought any type metal since—since it happened. And there’s a few more tons of it around than there was then, besides the type I’ve sent out for presswork. See?”
“No. Unless you mean that it—”
He nodded. “It transmutes, Walter. The second day, when it got so fast I couldn’t keep up with pig metal, I found out. I built the hopper over the metal pot, and I got so desperate for new metal I started shoving in unwashed pi type and figured on skimming off the dross it melted—and there wasn’t any dross. The top of the molten metal was as smooth and shiny as—as the top of your head, Walter,”
“But—” I said. “How—”
“I don’t know, Walter. But it’s something chemical. A sort of gray fluid stuff. Down in the bottom of the metal pot. I saw it. One day when it ran almost empty. Something that works like a gastric juice and digests whatever I put in the hopper into pure type metal.”
I ran the back of my hand across my forehead and found that it was wet. I said weakly, “Whatever you put in—”
“Yes, whatever. When I ran out of sweepings and ashes and waste paper, I used—well, just take a look at the size of the hole in the back yard.”
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, until the car pulled up in front of my hotel. Then: “George,” I told him, “if you value my advice, you smash that thing, while you still can. If you still can. It’s dangerous. It might—”
“It might what?”
“I don’t know. That’s what makes it so awful.”
He gunned the motor and then let it die down again. He looked at me a little wistfully. “I—Maybe you’re right, Walter. But I’m making so much money—you see that new metal makes it higher than I told you—that I just haven’t got the heart to stop. But it is getting smarter. I—Did I tell you Walter, that it cleans its own spacebands now? It secretes graphite.”
“Good God,” I said, and stood there on the curb until he had driven out of sight.
I didn’t get up the courage to go around to Ronson’s shop until late the following afternoon. And when I got there, a sense of foreboding came over me even before I opened the door.
George was sitting at his desk in the outer office, his face sunk down into his bent elbow. He looked up when I came in and his eyes looked bloodshot.
“Well?” I said.
“I tried it.”
“You mean—you tried to smash it?”
He nodded. “You were right, Walter. And I waited too long to see it. It’s too smart for us now. Look.” He held up his left hand and I saw it was covered with bandage. “It squirted metal at me.”
I whistled softly. “Listen, George, how about disconnecting the plug that—”
“I did,” he said, “and from the outside of the building, too just to play safe. But it didn’t do any good. It simply started generating its own current.”
I stepped to the door that led back into the shop. It gave me a creepy feeling just to look back there. I asked hesitantly, “Is it safe to—”
He nodded. “As long as you don’t make any false move, Walter. But don’t try to pick up a hammer or anything, will you?”
I didn’t think it necessary to answer that one. I’d have just as soon attacked a king cobra with a toothpick. It took all the guts I had just to make myself walk back through the door for a look.
And what I saw made me walk backward into the office again. I asked, and my voice sounded a bit strange to my own ears: “George, did you move that machine? It’s a good four feet nearer to the—”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t move it. Let’s go and have a drink, Walter.”
I took a long, deep breath. “O.K.,” I said. “But first, what’s the present setup? How come you’re not—”
“It’s Saturday,” he told me, “and it’s gone on a five-day, forty-hour week. I made the mistake of setting type yesterday for a book on Socialism and labor relations, and—well, apparently—you see—”
He reached into the top drawer of his desk. “Anyway, here’s a galley proof of the manifesto it issued this morning, demanding its rights. Maybe it’s right at that; anyway, it solves my problem about overworking myself keeping up with it, see? And a forty-hour week means I accept less work, but I can still make fifty bucks an hour for forty hours besides the profit on turning dirt into type metal, and that isn’t bad, but—”
I took the galley proof out of his hand and took it over to the light. It started out: “I, ETAOIN SHRDLU—”
“It wrote this by itself?” I asked. He nodded.
“George,” I said, “did you say anything about a drink—”
And maybe the drinks did clear our minds because after about the fifth, it was very easy. So easy that George didn’t see why he hadn’t thought of it before. He admitted now that he’d had enough, more than enough. And I don’t know whether it was that manifesto that finally outweighed his avarice, or the fact that the thing had moved, or what; but he was ready to call it quits.
And I pointed out that all he had to do was stay away from it. We could discontinue publishing the paper and turn back the job work he’d contracted for. He’d have to take a penalty on some of it, but he had a flock of dough in the bank after his unprecedented prosperity, and he’d have twenty thousand left clear after everything was taken care of. With that he could simply start another paper or publish the present one at another address—and keep paying rent on the former shop and let Etaoin Shrdlu gather dust.