Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

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.”

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.”