They even had the date set for the execution, and I knew they intended
to go through with it. Only a revolution would change that.
I wanted that job; it was my chance to make a name for myself. If they
should close the plant now, I'd have a black eye. You can't go around
asking for a job and saying, "But I was making money for them." They'll
wonder what else was wrong.
I thought I knew why they were so willing to close the plant; it was
part of an estate, and the way things were, it took a lot of their time
each month for not too big a fee. But if the estate should be
liquidated--well, figure it out yourself. This business was all mixed up
between an administratorship and a receivership, and the attorney's fees
for liquidation would be a percentage of a hundred-thousand-dollar shop.
It could run to a nice sum. They'd sell out, collect their fee, and
forget it. A nice clean deal for them. And no more worry.
That is what I was up against, so perhaps it was inevitable that I
should find Dr. Hudson--Lawrence Edward Hudson. That was 1983, really
about the beginning of the scientific age in industry, and I dug this
idea up out of the back of my head where it had been for some time. Dr.
Hudson was the result. I did not label him efficiency-expert, for
printers have always been notoriously allergic to that title. I called
him production-engineer.
He was a small, thin-faced man with a face that seemed to all flow into
a point where his nose should have been, and he started talking things
over with me before he got his coat off.
"Printing," he said, "is really _the_ backward industry. There has been
no basic advance since the invention of the linecasting machine around
1890, and possibly the development of offset printing."
"That," I said, "is why you are here--to bring out something startling."
"Well," he said, "you've heard the old one about the man who had
something to do with each hand, and if you'd give him a broom he could
sweep out the shop, too?" He leaned forward, his nose jutting at me, and
said impressively, "Mr. Shane, we shall make that come literally true;
we'll have men working in two places at once before we're through."
"Okay."
"In the meantime, there are certain old-fashioned fundamental principles
on which we shall start. I shall be here at seven-thirty in the
morning."
I should have known. Man, being mass, possesses inertia, mentally as
well as physically, and therefore offers a certain amount of resistance
to being kicked around. That applies to printers as well as to people.
But at that time I was too worried. I gave Dr. Hudson full authority.
* * * * *
He was there at seven-thirty the next morning, as he had said. At eight,
the printers were standing around the time-clock, waiting for it to
click the hour. It clicked, but the man nearest it was smoking a
cigarette. He punched his card and then stood there, finishing the
cigarette.
Dr. Hudson stepped up. "Gentlemen," he said, "it is now four minutes
past eight. Starting-time is eight o'clock." He looked at his watch and
compared it with the clock. "Please do your visiting and your smoking on
your own time," he said coldly.
Well, it bothered me a little. I'd never handled them that way--and
anyway, who cared about five minutes? The men would set just so much
type, or do so much work. If they lost five minutes in one place, they
generally made it up somewhere else. But this was Dr. Hudson's job.
It was nice that there had been no insolence--only a couple of raised
eyebrows. Dr. Hudson's gesture had had its effect. They knew now who was
boss.
For the next few days they kept their heads up. Production did not
improve much, but I personally had not expected it to do that. I think
Dr. Hudson had not expected it, either.
It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came
in from the Legal Publishing Company--a three-volume, four-thousand-page
record for the U. S. circuit court. They could not handle the
typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.
It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had
been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it
down, but Dr. Hudson's eyes glittered when he saw it. "Just what we
need," he said.
"That's almost two thousand galleys of type," I reminded him, "besides
our regular stuff." I was very dubious.
But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. "We'll make history," he promised.
Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the
modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against
having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first
idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.
As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might
say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do
all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in
time.
So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been
set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him
into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do
the job over--but right. The casterman didn't like it, but he didn't
know what to do about it.
There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially
when the job, re-set in the correct face--or rather, set in the correct
face, because this now was the first time it had been set--was put on
the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the
proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn't occur to me then
that a man could be _too_ ambitious.
That afternoon the chairman came in, and I was ready for him. "We are
not," I pointed out, "violating our union contract."
"But you made the casterman set the job twice, and he doesn't get paid
for it."
"We pay the casterman two dollars an hour for seven hours a day. When
he's here more than seven hours, he'll get time and a half," I said
triumphantly.
The chairman frowned, but I didn't relax; I was on top and I knew it.
"He set the job wrong in the first place," I pointed out, "and he got
paid for that. Is there any reason why he shouldn't correct his own
mistake, if it doesn't take any of his time?"
"It does take time," he insisted.
"No. He's only re-living that four hours and doing the job right instead
of wrong; you can't find any fault with that."
And he couldn't. I felt wonderful. I wanted to jump and shout, but I
compromised by taking Dr. Hudson down for a gleeful drink and planning
our next tactic.
We also settled a point of strategy. We decided to confuse them with a
few minor things before springing our next real item--which would be, to
put it mildly, revolutionary.
Things looked pretty good. The only thing that bothered me was that we
hadn't started the big job yet.
* * * * *
The next morning I saw a new face at the keyboard of one of our
linecasting machines. I had long ago adopted democracy as a good policy,
so now I stopped to introduce myself. "I'm J. J. Shane, the manager."
His hands, with incredibly long fingers, had been just flowing over the
keyboard--that is the only way to describe it--with the long fingers
moving down an inch or so whenever they were above the right key, and
doing it all so smoothly it was hard to realize he was actually
composing lines. His hands seemed to flow back and forth like the tide,
and yet he was setting twenty ems eight-point and keeping the machine
hung. Here, I thought right away, was a valuable man. This fellow could
be a pace-setter if we would handle him right.
But when I spoke to him and held out my hand, he looked at me for a
second without missing a stroke, then his hands dropped away from the
keyboard and he started to unfold himself from the chair.
"You don't need to get up," I said hastily. "I don't want to take up any
of your time."
But he finished unfolding himself and stood up. "I have plenty of time,"
he said. He was over seven feet tall, and that meant a foot and a half
over me--and very thin. His clothes looked pretty weatherbeaten, as if
maybe he'd been caught in a few rainstorms.
"Jones," said his booming voice from somewhere far above me.
"High-Pockets Jones, sometimes known as the Dean of Barn-stormers."
I leaned back to look up at him. His face was as weatherbeaten as his
clothes. I recognized the reddish tan that comes from facing a hot wind
on the top of a moving boxcar. He was obviously a bum, and probably
wouldn't be with us long, but there was something almost of nobility in
his eyes--calmness, gentleness, or perhaps just the knowledge of having
been in many, many situations and the experience gained from getting out
of them, and the self-assurance that he would always be able to get out
of any situation.
I reached up to shake hands. "Yes, I've heard of you," I said. "You're
sort of a throwback to the days when they needed barnstormers to correct
bad working-conditions, aren't you?"
He chose to pass that remark, "I've heard of you, too," he said, that
last word sounding like the low string on a bull fiddle.
I laughed quickly but efficiently--shortly, I believe they call it.
"Nothing good, I hope."
High-Pockets Jones paused a moment before he answered: "Not bad, until
lately."
It took me a moment or two to realize what he had said. I bent back to
look at his face. He was quite sober about it.
"Okay," I said hastily. "I don't want to keep you from your work."
I worried a little about High-Pockets. I had heard a lot about him; he
was a sort of mystery man in the printing business, going from place to
place, wherever printers felt they were having trouble, and trying to
straighten things out.
The stories about him indicated that he had some odd ways of doing that,
based largely on a sort of legendary influence that he had over
machinery. I remembered even the theory that all machinery was
negatively charged with some sort of "personal" electricity, and that
High-Pockets--having been hit by lightning--had a terrifically high
charge of positive electricity of the same sort, which enabled him to do
miraculous things on occasion with machinery--especially linecasting
machines.
Well, I dismissed that as a bunch of talk, but what I didn't quite like
was the fact that High-Pockets traditionally appeared in places where he
was needed to straighten out things for the men.
* * * * *
I went into conference with Dr. Hudson, and he agreed with me that we
should go right ahead; but we'd keep an eye on High-Pockets Jones, and
at the first sign of interference Mr. Jones would find himself in a
great deal of trouble. I would even, I decided, stoop to having him
thrown in jail on a phony charge, if that should be necessary.
By this time we had started on the Legal Printing Company job, and we
went ahead with our next offensive. Mind-reading came first. Dr. Hudson
installed a black box at the water-fountain, and he explained to the men
what it was for. He had a private wire to his desk, and a transformer
that turned the current from the box back into thoughts. It was quite
efficient. Some of the thoughts we got the first day were vituperative,
some were quite obscene, and some were pretty feeble, but that didn't
matter. It got the boys to worrying, and it saved us a bottle of spring
water a day.
Then there was the installation of the lucite piping. Of course seeing
in curves had been possible for years, but never on this scale. We piped
lucite to every place where a man worked, and so we could throw a switch
in the inner office and check on every man in the shop without their
knowing it. That was a very clever device; it really put the men on the
spot.
Once in a while, when I needed to relax, I would flip a switch and throw
High-Pockets Jones' machine on the screen. The smooth rhythm of those
flowing hands was more soothing than a lullaby, especially because I
knew how much type they were getting up.
Then we advanced to the third step in our strategy: having a man in two
places at once.
Dr. Hudson finished making his cabinet filled with coils and
transformers and condensers and circuits I'd never heard of, and we set
it up in the composing-room one night.
It was that night that full realization hit me that we had set only two
hundred galleys of type out of the two thousand on the Legal Printing
Company job, and that there were only two weeks left to get it out.
Somehow or other, I had let it slip by. I thought Dr. Hudson was
watching those things; I had been busy trying to make an impression for
the receivers.
I was sick when I figured it all out. We had six machines. If we should
run those six machines two shifts a day, our capacity was about three
hundred and sixty galleys a week. Into eighteen hundred that goes
considerably more than two times. We would need five weeks of full
production--and we couldn't possibly give it full production; we had
other jobs, too.
The only hope was Dr. Hudson's new machine.
The next day the electricians hooked it up to a twelve-hundred-volt
feed-line, and by noon it was ready to go. At twelve-thirty, as soon as
the men punched in, I called them together. This was on office time, of
course, so there couldn't be any squawk. Dr. Hudson was there to
explain. I never had fully realized how much of him was nose before I
watched him that day.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this is nothing to be afraid of. This is merely
a modern device to assure continuous production in the composing-room by
eliminating lost time from sickness and accidents. As you know, if a
linotype operator is ill, his machine goes untouched. That day's
production is lost. At a cost per man of around ten dollars an hour,
that represents a considerable loss."
He opened the cabinet and showed them a comfortable leather seat inside.
"There are two compartments in this cabinet," he said. "All this machine
does is to produce, temporarily, an extra man to fill the sick man's
place. One of the men present steps in here; I close the door, see that
the machine is charged here on the other side with plenty of linotype
metal to provide the material of atomic synthesis, press the button, and
lo!--the man in the chair is duplicated on the other side of the
cabinet."
High-Pockets Jones stepped forward with his deep eyes fixed on Dr.
Hudson. "What," High-Pockets asked, "is your theory of this machine?"
Dr. Hudson smiled. "I am glad you asked that, Mr. Jones. Very glad. This
process is in no sense a separation or thinning out of the man in the
chair. It is, in reality; an unusual extension of the well-known fact
that nature tends to follow a pattern. If you want to make a synthetic
sapphire, you start with a seed sapphire, and the artificial process
builds up on that. Now, this machine, which I call an extender, is
merely a far-reaching extension of the synthesis of precious stones."
"By use of a revolutionary type of three-dimensional scanner, which was
invented by myself," he said modestly, "I am able to focus on a certain
object from a certain distance and, if there is material at hand,
synthesize an exact duplicate of the original from the scanner. It
doesn't hurt the original in any way. You merely have two where you had
but one."
The men stood around bug-eyed and stared incredulously--all but
High-Pockets. "Is the second one alive?" he asked. "I mean, would you
say it has a soul?"
"That," said Dr. Hudson crisply, "is out of my field. I suggest you
consult your spiritual adviser."