The Fredric Brown Megapack

by Brown, Fredric

  “It—what?”

  “That’s why I wanted you to try it out, Walter,” he said. “Just to make sure it was the machine and not me. Lookit; that copy in the clipboard has w-e-d-i-n-g for wedding, and M-a-r-g-o-r-i-e— for Marjorie—and no matter what keys you hit, that’s the way the mats drop.”

  I said, “Bosh. George, have you been drinking?”

  “Don’t believe me,” he said. “Keep on trying to set those lines right. Set your correction for the fourth line; the one that has b-r-i-d-e-s-m-a-d-e-s in it.”

  I grunted, and I looked back at the stick of type to see what word the fourth line started with, and I started hitting keys. I set, “The bridesma,” and then I stopped. Slowly and deliberately and looking at the keyboard while I did it, I put my index finger on the i key and pushed. I heard the mat click through the escapement, and I looked up and saw it fall over the star wheel. I knew I hadn’t hit the wrong key on that one. The mats in the assembly elevator read—yes, you’ve guessed it: “bridesmad—”

  I said, “I don’t believe it.”

  George Ronson looked at me with a sort of lopsided, worried grin. He said, “Neither did I. Listen, Walter, I’m going out to take a walk. I’m going nuts. I can’t stand it here right now. You go ahead and convince yourself. Take your time.”

  I watched him until he’d gone out the door. Then with a kind of funny feeling, I turned back to the Linotype. It was a long time before I believed it, but it was so.

  No matter what keys I hit, the damn machine followed copy, errors and all.

  I went the whole hog finally. I started over again, and set the first couple of words and then began to sweep my fingers down the rows of keys in sweeps like an operator uses to fill out a pi line: ETAOIN SHRDLU ETAOIN SHRDLU ETAOIN SHRDLU—and I didn’t look at the matrices in the assembler slide. I sent them in to cast, and I picked up the hot slug that the ejector pushed out of the mold and I read: “The weding of H. M. Klaflin and—”

  There was sweat on my forehead. I wiped it off and then I shut off the machine and went out to look for George Ronson. I didn’t have to look very hard because he was right where I knew I’d find him. I ordered a drink, too.

  He’d taken a look at my face when I walked into the bar, and I guess he didn’t have to ask me what had happened.

  We touched our glasses together and downed the contents before either of us said anything at all. Then I asked, “Got any idea why it works like that?”

  He nodded.

  I said, “Don’t tell me. Wait until I’ve had a couple more drinks and then I can take it—maybe.” I raised my voice and said, “Hey, Joe; just leave that bottle in reach on the bar. We’ll settle for it.”

  He did, and I had two more shots fairly quick. Then I closed my eyes and said, “All right, George, why?”

  “Remember that guy who had those special mats cut and rented the use of my Linotype to set up something that was too secret for anybody to read? I can’t remember his name—what was it?”

  I tried to remember, and I couldn’t. I had another drink and said, “Call him the L.G.W.T.P.”

  George wanted to know why and I told him, and he filled his glass again and said, “I got a letter from him.”

  I said, “That’s nice.” And I had another drink and said, “Got the letter with you?”

  “Huh-uh. I didn’t keep it.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  Then I had another drink and asked, “Do you remember what it said?”

  “Walter, I remember parts of it. Didn’t read it cl-closely. I thought the guy was screwy, see? I threw it ’way.”

  He stopped and had another drink, and finally I got tired waiting and said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “The letter. What did the part you remember shay?”

  “Oh, that,” said George. “Yeah. Something about Lilo—Linotl—you know what I mean.”

  By that time the bottle on the bar in front us couldn’t have been the same one, because this one was two-thirds full and the other one had been only one-third full. I took another drink. “What’d he shay about it?”

  “Who?”

  “Th’ L.G.—G.P.—aw, th’ guy who wrote th’ letter.”

  “Wha’ letter?” asked George.

  * * * *

  I woke up somewhere around noon the next day, and I felt awful. It took me a couple of hours to get bathed and shaved and feeling good enough to go out, but when I did I headed right for George’s printing shop.

  He was running the press, and he looked almost as bad as I felt. I picked up one of the papers as it came off and looked at it. It’s a four-sheet and the inside two are boiler plate, but the first and fourth pages are local stuff.

  I read a few items, including one that started off: “The wedding of H.M. Klaflin and Miss Margorie—” and I glanced at the silent Linotype back in the corner and from it to George and back to that silent hulk of steel and cast iron.

  I had to yell to George to be heard over the noise of the press. “George, listen. About the Lino—” Somehow I couldn’t make myself yell something that sounded silly, so I compromised. “Did you get it fixed?” I asked.

  He shook his head, and shut off the press. “That’s the run,” he said. “Well, now to get them folded.”

  “Listen,” I said, “the hell with the papers. What I want to know is how you got to press at all. You didn’t have half your quota set when I was here yesterday, and after all we drank, I don’t see how you did it.”

  He grinned at me. “Easy,” he said. “Try it. All you got to do, drunk or sober, is sit down at that machine and put copy on the clipboard and slide your fingers around on the keys a bit, and it sets the copy. Yes, mistakes and all—but, after this, I’ll just correct the errors on copy before I start. This time I was too tight, Walter, and they had to go as was. Walter, I’m beginning to like that machine. This is the first time in a year I’ve got to press exactly on time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but—”

  “But what?”

  “But—” I wanted to say that I still didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t. After all, I’d tried out that machine yesterday while I’d been cold sober.

  I walked over closer and looked at it again. It looked exactly like any other one-magazine model Linotype from where I stood. I knew every cog and spring in it.

  “George,” I said uneasily, “I got a feeling the damn thing is looking at me. Have you felt—”

  He nodded. I turned back and looked at the Linotype again, and I was sure this time, and I closed my eyes and felt it even more strongly. You know that feeling you get once in a while, of being stared at? Well, this was stronger. It wasn’t exactly an unfriendly stare. Sort of impersonal. It made me feel scared stiff.

  “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 coupl
e 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?”

  “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—”