Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

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—”