Printers -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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