“You profess to be a barnstormer and a student of mechanical nature.” The judge smiled sarcastically. “I can offer you an unusual opportunity for research. As an old proofreader, I occasionally help out on the Daily News, and it has come to my attention that there is a linotype on the News known as No. 7 that recently has begun to misbehave. Without apparent reason, it has become almost useless.”
High-Pockets cringed with the impact of the knowledge that His Honor had once been a proofreader. The traditional enmity between proofreaders and operators, High-Pockets perceived, was about to be judicially resolved. So he cringed. He was very sad.
“Suppose you go up there and try your wizardry on No. 7.” His Honor suggested. “In the meantime, thirty days suspended sentence. If you’re back here before your time is up, it will be sixty days. And if there is drunkenness connected with it,” he said, looking disdainfully at High-Pockets’ red nose, “it will be ninety. Is that clear?”
“Yes, your honor.” High-Pockets mumbled, but he was thinking of other things. He had been sentenced to work at his trade. That meant contact with proofreaders, and High-Pockets bristled. But the bristling subsided rapidly, as High-Pockets, simulating a grateful smile from long habit, realized with a sickly feeling that for perhaps the first time in his long career, a proofreader had had the complete and final word, and High-Pockets did not dare to answer back. …
They spotted High-Pockets coming across the composing-room of the Daily News when they saw a red nose following an eccentric orbit up among the fluorescent lights. High-Pockets didn’t exactly duck the lights. When he came face to face with one, his incredibly tall knees limbered up and he sort of weaved under it.
The union chairman met him with a handshake. “High-Pockets Jones,” he said, grinning, “Dean of Barnstormers and Wizard of the Linotype. I know you from your picture. Can you really make a linotype stand up on its hind legs and talk?”
“Well,” High-Pockets said in a modest, booming voice, “I will admit that’s one of my more difficult stunts.”
The chairman guffawed, and they steered High-Pockets to the slip-board. “I can put you on a week’s stretch.”
High-Pockets stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall. “No!” he boomed. “Can’t do it! Haven’t worked five days straight in twenty years.”
“But look, High-Pockets. Look at it this way. You’re an old-time barnstormer, aren’t you?”
High-Pockets winced.
“Well,” the chairman said diplomatically, “there’s not as much call for barnstormers as there used to be, but—” he said it quickly—“here’s a new field. It needs a good barnstormer as much as they ever did.”
High-Pockets listened intently.
“This poor guy has to sit on No. 7. That’s the linotype nobody can do anything with. The poor devil had to lay off because she pretty nearly drove him crazy. Now you are the guy who can make a linotype behave.” His voice was persuasive. “Won’t you help this guy out for a few nights?”
For twenty years it had been High-Pockets’ unbroken rule not to hire out for more than a day at a time. “Short-term contracts,” he insisted. But now—well, the world was changed. Maybe this was to be the future of barnstorming—taming machines instead of foremen. If so, it meant he still had a place in the world. And to fulfill that destiny he would even accept a whole week’s work. He took off his rain-wrinkled coat with a sigh.
He was waiting for time to be called when Arturius Wickware, the linotype machinist on the News, came up to him with short, mincing steps and a scowl that undoubtedly was a habit. “Are you the guy that has such wonderful control over a linotype?” he demanded. He wouldn’t give High-Pockets the satisfaction of looking up at him. He scowled at High-Pockets’ breastbone.
High-Pockets was solemn as he stared over Arturius’ head. “I get along well with them.” He smiled gently then. “Somehow a linotype always does what I want it to do.” He looked down and saw the crowd around him and decided he owed them an explanation. “My theory is that any piece of machinery is electrified by some force that I call personal electricity. I don’t exactly know what that is but it seems to bind the piece of machinery as a whole. I think maybe it’s a negative charge, and I think most men are charged positively with that same force, so that men get along well with machines. Opposite poles attract, you know.”
Arturius Wickware sputtered, but now High-Pockets had to go on. “Sometimes a man comes along who happens to be negatively charged, and he can’t handle a piece of machinery at all. But now I—you see this scar in the middle of my forehead—” he removed his faded hat, “I was struck by lightning on a freight train out in Utah, and I think it multiplied my ‘personal’ electricity potential a lot—maybe millions of times—so machinery just has to do what I want it to, because it wants to do it. You see?”
There was an odd silence; then the chairman spoke. “Old No. 7 started acting up when they built the first uranium pile south of town here, but it really went bad when it was hit by lightning that followed down the ventilation pipe two months ago.”
High-Pockets’ blue eyes opened wide. “Maybe its negative field was reversed by some stray rays from the pile, and then when the lightning hit it, it intensified the field so that the machine is now strongly positive. You know how it is,” he said earnestly. “A body illuminated by ultraviolet light becomes positively charged, and even a hot body becomes positively charged by what they call thermionic emission. Well, that’s okay. A linotype is exactly like a woman. It has a soul—if you know how to reach it.”
Old Arturius snorted so loudly the electric relay on No. 7 made contact and the heating switch came on with
