He was there at seven thirty the next morning, as he had said. At eight, the printers were standing around the time-clock, waiting for it to click the hour. It clicked, but the man nearest it was smoking a cigarette. He punched his card and then stood there, finishing the cigarette.
Dr. Hudson stepped up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is now four minutes past eight. Starting-time is eight o’clock.” He looked at his watch and compared it with the clock. “Please do your visiting and your smoking on your own time,” he said coldly.
Well, it bothered me a little. I’d never handled them that way—and anyway, who cared about five minutes? The men would set just so much type, or do so much work. If they lost five minutes in one place, they generally made it up somewhere else. But this was Dr. Hudson’s job.
It was nice that there had been no insolence—only a couple of raised eyebrows. Dr. Hudson’s gesture had had its effect. They knew now who was boss.
For the next few days they kept their heads up. Production did not improve much, but I personally had not expected it to do that. I think Dr. Hudson had not expected it, either.
It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came in from the Legal Publishing Company—a three-volume, four-thousand-page record for the U.S. circuit court. They could not handle the typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.
It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it down, but Dr. Hudson’s eyes glittered when he saw it. “Just what we need,” he said.
“That’s almost two thousand galleys of type,” I reminded him, “besides our regular stuff.” I was very dubious.
But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. “We’ll make history,” he promised.
Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.
As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in time.
So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do the job over—but right. The casterman didn’t like it, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially when the job, reset in the correct face—or rather, set in the correct face, because this now was the first time it had been set—was put on the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn’t occur to me then that a man could be too ambitious.
That afternoon the chairman came in, and I was ready for him. “We are not,” I pointed out, “violating our union contract.”
“But you made the casterman set the job twice, and he doesn’t get paid for it.”
“We pay the casterman two dollars an hour for seven hours a day. When he’s here more than seven hours, he’ll get time and a half,” I said triumphantly.
The chairman frowned, but I didn’t relax; I was on top and I knew it. “He set the job wrong in the first place,” I pointed out, “and he got paid for that. Is there any reason why he shouldn’t correct his own mistake, if it doesn’t take any of his time?”
“It does take time,” he insisted.
“No. He’s only reliving that four hours and doing the job right instead of wrong; you can’t find any fault with that.”
And he couldn’t. I felt wonderful. I wanted to jump and shout, but I compromised by taking Dr. Hudson down for a gleeful drink and planning our next tactic.
We also settled a point of strategy. We decided to confuse them with a few minor things before springing our next real item—which would be, to put it mildly, revolutionary.
Things looked pretty good. The only thing that bothered me was that we hadn’t started the big job yet.
The next morning I saw a new face at the keyboard of one of our linecasting machines. I had long ago adopted democracy as a good policy, so now I stopped to introduce myself. “I’m J. J. Shane, the manager.”
His hands, with incredibly long fingers, had been just flowing over the keyboard—that is the only way to describe it—with the long fingers moving down an inch or so whenever they were above the right key, and doing it all so smoothly it was hard to realize he was actually composing lines. His hands seemed to flow back and forth like the tide, and yet he was setting twenty ems eight-point and keeping the machine hung. Here, I thought right away, was a valuable man. This fellow could be a pacesetter if we would handle him right.
But when I spoke to him and held out my hand, he looked at me for a second without missing a stroke, then his hands dropped away from the keyboard and he started to unfold himself from the chair.
“You don’t need to get up,” I said hastily. “I don’t want to take up any of your time.”
But he finished unfolding himself and stood up. “I have plenty of time,” he said. He was over seven feet tall, and that meant a foot and a half over me—and very thin. His clothes looked pretty weatherbeaten, as if maybe he’d been
