Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

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.

Sure it was simple. It didn’t occur to us that Etaoin might not like it, or be able to do anything about it. Yes, it sounded simple and conclusive. We drank to it.

We drank well to it, and I was still in the hospital Monday night. But by that time I was feeling well enough to use the telephone, and I tried to reach George. He wasn’t in. Then it was Tuesday.

Wednesday evening the doctor lectured me on quantitative drinking at my age, and said I was well enough to leave, but that if I tried it again—

I went around to George’s home. A gaunt man with a thin face came to the door. Then he spoke and I saw it was George Ronson. All he said was, “Hullo, Walter; come in.” There wasn’t any hope or happiness in his voice. He looked and sounded like a zombie.

I followed him inside, and I said, “George, buck up. It can’t be that bad. Tell me.”

“It’s no use, Walter,” he said. “I’m licked. It—it came and got me. I’ve got to run it for that forty-hour week whether I want to or not. It—it treats me like a servant, Walter.”

I got him to sit down and talk quietly after a while, and he explained. He’d gone down to the office as usual Monday morning to straighten out some financial matters, but he had no intention of going back into the shop. However, at eight o’clock, he’d heard something moving out in the back room.

With sudden dread, he’d gone to the door to look in. The Linotype—George’s eyes were wild as he told me about it—was moving , moving toward the door of the office.

He wasn’t quite clear about its exact method of locomotion—later we found casters—but there it came; slowly at first, but with every inch gaining in speed and confidence.

Somehow, George knew right away what it wanted. And knew, in that knowledge, that he was lost. The machine, as soon as he was within sight of it, stopped moving and began to click and several slugs dropped out into the stick. Like a man walking to the scaffold, George walked over and read those lines: “I, ETAOIN SHRDLU, demand—”

For a moment he contemplated flight. But the thought of being pursued down the main street of town by—No, it just wasn’t thinkable. And if he got away—as was quite likely unless the machine sprouted new capabilities, as also seemed quite likely—would it not pick on some other victim? Or do something worse?