of producing, Ed wandered over to where the room’s other occupant was working.
This worthy looked up and grinned a welcome. “Name’s Haer, loved one,” he said. “Norm Haer.”
“Ed,” Ed told him. “Ed Wonder. What in the devil are you doing?”
Haer grinned again. “Setting body type. This is a California type box. Ten point, Goudy Old Style.”
“I thought you set type on a machine that looks something like a typewriter.”
Haer laughed. “That was the old fashioned way. Here in Elysium we set it by hand.” His hand darted, flicked out, flicked back again. The lines of type in his hand-held tray were slowly growing.
Ed said, a faint exasperation in his voice: “Look, what’s the point? Ben Franklin used to print like this but since then we’ve dreamed up a few improvements.”
The typesetter’s fingers never stopped their flying. He was evidently the sort who remained in almost perpetual good humor. At least, thus far, his face had never lost its smile.
“There’s several angles,” he told Ed. “One, there’s a lot of satisfaction in turning out a finished product with your own hands. Preferably a superior product. Something went out of the production of commodities when a shoemaker no longer makes footwear starting out with leather and winding up with a finished pair of shoes, but instead stands before a gigantic machine, which he doesn’t understand, watching a few gauges and periodically throwing a switch, or pushing a button, for four or five hours a day.”
Ed said, “Oh, great, but that first shoemaker of yours turned out maybe one pair of shoes a day, and the second one ten or twenty thousand.”
The printer grinned. “That’s right. But the second one has ulcers, hates his wife and is an incipient alcoholic.”
Ed Wonder said suddenly, “What did you use to do before you got this job setting type for Tubber? You don’t sound like some uneducated, small time…” He let the sentence dribble away. It didn’t sound very diplomatic.
Norm Haer was laughing. “I’m not setting type for Tubber, but for Elysium. I used to be managing director of World-Wide Printing Corporation. We had offices in Ultra-New York, Neuve Los Angeles, London, Paris and Peking.”
Ed had experienced the ruggedness of trying to climb the pyramid in the Welfare State. When only a third of the nation’s potential working force was needed in production, the competition could get fierce. He said, in compassion. “Got all the way to the top but then they bounced you, eh?”
“Not exactly,” Haer grinned. “I was too big a stockholder for that. I happened to read one of Josh Tubber’s pamphlets one day. So the next day I got hold of everything of his I could locate. And the next week I told World- Wide what they could do with their job and came here to Elysium to help set up this shop.”
The man was obviously halfway around the corner, good humor or not. Ed left that line of thought. “What are you working on now?” he said.
“A limited edition of Martha Kent’s latest verse.”
“Martha Kent?” Ed Wonder knew the name. Poetry wasn’t his forte but American Nobel Prize winners weren’t so common that you didn’t hear of them. “You mean she’s given you permission to bring out a book of hers!”
“That’s not the way I’d put it,” Haer grinned. “It’s more a matter of Martha bringing it out herself.”
“Martha!” Ed blurted. His eyes went accusingly over to where the woman with whom he had entered the shop was talking with Kelly as he ran his foot-operated platen press. “You mean that’s Martha Kent?”
“As ever was,” Haer chuckled.
Ed Wonder muttered some sort of goodbye and rejoined the other two. He said, in accusation, “You’re Martha Kent.”
“That’s right, loved one,” she smiled.
“Look,” Ed demanded. “I don’t want to appear dense, but why’re you bringing out a book of your latest poems through a little one horse outfit like this?”
“Never let Josh Tubber know I said this,” she said, and there was a quick elfin quality in her face, “but to make money.”
“Make money!” Ed said in disgust.
Kelly ran out of paper, stopped peddling, wiped his hands on his apron and walked to a nearby pile of books. He took one up and returned with it to the newcomer. He handed it to Ed without speaking.
Ed turned it over in his hands. It was bound in leather. Somehow it was different. He opened it and fingered through the pages. The paper was heavy and had sort of an antique finish. He had never heard of the author. He had a strange feeling that he was handling a work of art.
The other two watched him, a disconcerting amusement in their air.
To say something, Ed said, “I’ve never seen paper like this, where did you get it?”
“We made it,” Kelly said.
Ed closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them and said, “What do you need money for? You evidently make everything.” He pointed a finger accusingly at Martha Kent’s dress. “That’s homespun, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But obviously we can’t do completely without money, even in Elysium. For instance, we need postage to mail our publications. Sometimes we need medicines. We have to buy salt. Oh, you’d be surprised.”
“Look,” Ed said plaintively. “You, Martha Kent, write a book that’s potentially a bestseller. You bring it in here and put out a limited edition by setting it by hand, printing it yourself by footpower on paper you made yourself. So how many copies do you print. A thousand?”
“Two hundred,” Martha said.
“So you sell them for how much apiece? A hundred dollars?”
“Two dollars,” Martha said.
Ed closed his eyes again, this time in pure anguish. He said, “Two dollars for a book like this? I’m no biblomaniac, but a first edition, limited edition, hand produced Martha Kent would be all but priceless. But aside from that, if you simply put the manuscript in the hands of any major publisher, you’d realize a small fortune.”
Kelly said reasonably, “You don’t understand. We don’t need a small fortune. It’s just that right at the present Elysium could use about four hundred dollars, for medicine and…”
Martha interrupted hurriedly to say, “But don’t let Josh Tubber know our motivation. Josh isn’t always very practical. He’d be indignant if he knew we were so crass as to publish this work for the sake of raising money.”
Ed had given up. He said bitterly, “What would he do with them? Give them away?”
Martha and Kelly said in unison, and as though nothing were more reasonable, “Yes.”
Ed said, “I’m going outside to get some air.”
He walked back in the direction of the Volkshover, refusing to allow himself to start tearing his hair.
All right, darn it, give them every benefit of the doubt. This little community set in the hills and woods of the Catskills had its virtues. Good clean air. Tremendous scenery—there in the background was Overlook Mountain. Good place to raise children, possibly. Although, the devil knows where they’d get their schooling. He pulled himself up on that one. If Tubber held an academecian’s degree and Martha Kent was one of his followers, then Ed suspected there were others capable of teaching school, in some sort of little red schoolhouse tradition.
All right. So it had its qualities, although it might be another thing in the winter. His eyes went around to two or three of the cottages. They all had chimneys. Holy smokes, these people actually burned wood. Logs, evidently, that they cut themselves. Not even oil heat in the winter! How stoneage could you get?
Come to think of it, though, it was probably beautiful here in the winter. Especially when the snow was newly fallen. Ed Wonder had a custom, when there’d been a heavy new snowfall, of driving out from Kingsburg into the country, just to look at the snow in the early morning, on the tree limbs, on the fields—before man and sun destroyed it. Of course, he never left the main roads. This would be different. It occurred to him that a really heavy snowfall would snow them in here, so that they couldn’t get down to even Woodstock for supplies.
He drew himself up again. They didn’t have to get down to Woodstock, or anywhere else, for supplies. They grew their own supplies, evidently.
But how about medical care, in case one of them fell ill while they were snowed in? He didn’t know, possibly some of them had medical training. They seemed to have everything else.
All right, given all their qualities. They were still as kooky as a bunch of Alice in Wonderland hatters. Getting themselves off here, living like a bunch of pioneers. No TV, no radio. He wondered how often the kids had been allowed to go into town to the movies. And then decided probably never. Perhaps he didn’t know Ezekiel Joshua Tubber too well, but it was obvious that the prophet didn’t exactly hold with modern films, with their endless
