“Tell anybody?” I demanded. “And get locked in a booby hatch? Not me. You think anybody would believe me? You think I would have believed it myself, if—But what about the letter?”
You promise?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” he said, “like I think I told you, the letter was vague and what I remember of it is vaguer. But it explained that he’d used my Linotype to compose a—a metaphysical formula. He needed it, set in type, to take back with him.”
“Take back where, George?”
“Take back where? He said to—I mean he didn’t say where. Just to where he was going back, see? But he said it might have an effect on the machine that composed it, and if it did, he was sorry, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He couldn’t tell, because it took a while for the thing to work.”
“What thing?”
“Well,” said George. “It sounded like a lot of big words to me, and hooey at that.” He looked back down at the papers he was folding. “Honest, it sounded so nuts I threw it away. But, thinking back, after what’s happened—Well, I remember the word ‘pseudolife.’ I think it was a formula for giving pseudolife to inanimate objects. He said they used it on their—their robots.”
“They? Who is ‘they’?”
“He didn’t say.”