High-Pockets sighed noisily and got up. Arturius was using some uncomplimentary language, and the gleam of satisfaction was all in High-Pockets’ eyes now.
They picked up the mats, and Arturius pulled out the clutch lever to let the machine finish its revolution. But it stuck on ejection. The clutch grabbed and chattered. He threw the clutch lever in and went around behind. He backed the machine by hand and hammered with the ejector lever. The slug wouldn’t come out.
He came back, looked at the knife, looked at the ejector blade, examined the mouthpiece. “This mill is nuts,” he said in his sourest tone, and added some explanatory remarks that verged on redundancy. He held up the ejector lug while High-Pockets pulled the clutch lever and let the machine go on over.
Arturius had to loosen the mold-cap to get the slug out. Then he stood back for High-Pockets to sit down. But by this time High-Pockets had awakened. He looked hard at the copy and whispered to himself, “Oh-oh, no wonder. We’ve got society. Don’t blame her.” He told Arturius he had to get a drink. When he came back, Arturius was gone, and very quietly High-Pockets went over to No. 8 and set the type.
His next take was a nice piece of telegraph on green copy paper. “She ought to like this.” High-Pockets thought, but his face had a wondering look.
He put the copy in the holder and got ready to massage the keyboard. But he’d just got his arms folded up and his fingers stretched out when the mats began to drop into the assembling elevator. They dropped with perfect timing. The assembling elevator filled and High-Pockets’ eyes began to gleam. “She’ll have to wait for me to send the line in,” he thought. But old No. 7 wouldn’t be denied. The elevator went up, the line went in, the elevator came down, and mats started dropping again. High-Pockets got up and went to a window. He leaned out and breathed the crisp night air.
When he got back the take was finished.
He got the second take of the same story and went back to the machine. He put the take in the copy holder and then, out of habit, he looked at the stick. It was already half full of type. He was almost afraid to compare it with his copy, but he did.
After he checked it, he got up and went to the locker room. Nobody else was there. He pulled the pint bottle out of his coal pocket and without hesitation violated another strict office rule—he took a good, long, healthy drink of bourbon.
He wiped his lips and came back. No. 7 was still running over. He looked at the type. There was a guideline that said “Third Add—Nazi Werewolves.” High-Pockets turned on his heel and went back to the locker room. This time he had two drinks, and when he finished he weaved a little more.
“Monkeying with souls,” he muttered, “is dangerous business.”
He was thankful the story had only three takes. First he thought he would dump the third take in the metal pot, but when he picked it up it was so hot that even he, with calloused fingertips from handling hot slugs for twenty years, couldn’t hold it. So he dumped both takes and turned off the motor, then went to lunch.
That is, he borrowed a dollar from the chairman and started for the restaurant. But he passed a saloon on the way, and decided he was more in need of a drink.
When he got back he had a little trouble with the fluorescent lights. They weaved when he weaved, and it took some rather delicate navigation to beat them to the punch. It was fortunate that the light tubes were fixed securely in their sockets, and fortunate that the foreman had gone into the office to check the time cards.
When High-Pockets got back to the copy desk, he was pretty fuzzy around the edges. He looked over his first take as soon as he got behind the desk. Then he gave a relieved sigh. This was Editorial. No. 7 wouldn’t be so fussy—he hoped.
He got four paragraphs through before he ran into trouble. Then some mats jammed up at the top of the assembler entrance cover. High-Pockets started to ring the bell, but decided not to. He could dig it out himself. He’d had enough trouble with Arturius for one night.
He opened the entrance cover, and a hundred mats fell down over his arm and onto the keyboard with an ominous tinkle. Their weight depressed some twenty keys, and the power drive immediately began to function, and the mats from those twenty channels dropped in twenty curving streams on the keyboard, which depressed still more keys and made more mats drop, and in about two minutes No. 7 had poured fifteen hundred mats into High-Pockets’ lap.
He did one thing before he rang the bell. He brushed the mats off the copy holder and looked at the rest of the paragraph. It ended, “—and the blame for Pearl Harbor thus lay at the door of the White House.”
High-Pockets got up, shedding mats by the hundreds. Arturius came, looking as if he were about to detonate. Half the operators in the shop were there to enjoy the fact that at least there was one man who wasn’t afraid to have trouble with No. 7.
Somebody chuckled and said. “Get a basket,” but High-Pockets knew it wasn’t meant for him and nobly disdained a reply. He was muttering to himself, “I’ve heard these machines called a lot of things in my time, but this is the first one I ever saw that could justifiably be called a Republican.”
The machinist was verbose, a little on the vicariously obscene side. High-Pockets helped him pick the mats off the floor, but it was almost an hour before they got the machine going again.
When they did, High-Pockets went back to look at the slip-board. He studied it for a few minutes with a queer look on his face,
