I filled my pipe, and lighted it thoughtfully. “George,” I said after a while, “you better smash it.”
Ronson looked at me, his eyes wide. “Smash it? Walter, you’re nuts. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Why, there’s a fortune in this thing. Do you know how long it took me to set the type for this edition, drunk as I was? About an hour; that’s how I got through the press run on time.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “Phooey,” I said. “Animate or inanimate, that Lino’s geared for six lines a minute. That’s all she’ll go, unless you geared it up to run faster. Maybe to ten lines a minute if you taped the roller. Did you tape—”
“Tape hell,” said George. “The thing goes so fast you can’t hang the elevator on short-measure pi lines! And, Walter, take a look at the mold—the minion mold. It’s in casting position.”
A bit reluctantly, I walked back to the Linotype. The motor was humming quietly and again I could have sworn the damn thing was watching me. But I took a grip on my courage and the handles and I lowered my vise to expose the mold wheel. And I saw right away what George meant about the minion mold; it was bright-blue. I don’t mean the blue of a gun barrel; I mean a real azure color that I’d never seen metal take before. The other three molds were turning the same shade.
I closed the vise and looked at George.
He said, “I don’t know, either, except that that happened after the mold overheated and a slug stuck. I think it’s some kind of heat treatment. It can cast a hundred lines a minute now without sticking, and it—”
“Whoa,” I said, “back up. You couldn’t even feed it metal fast enough to—”
He grinned at me, a scared but triumphant grin. “Walter, look around at the back. I built a hopper over the metal pot. I had to; I ran out of pigs in ten minutes. I just shovel dead type and swept-up metal into the hopper, and dump the hellboxes in it, and—”
I shook my head. “You’re crazy. You can’t dump unwashed type and sweepings in there; you’ll have to open her up and scrape off the dross oftener than you’d otherwise have to push in pigs. You’ll jam the plunger and you’ll—”