“Idon’t know, Walter. But it’s something chemical. A sort of gray fluid stuff. Down in the bottom of the metal pot. I saw it. One day when it ran almost empty. Something that works like a gastric juice and digests whatever I put in the hopper into pure type metal.”
I ran the back of my hand across my forehead and found that it was wet. I said weakly, “Whatever you put in—”
“Yes, whatever. When I ran out of sweepings and ashes and waste paper, I used—well, just take a look at the size of the hole in the back yard.”
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, until the car pulled up in front of my hotel. Then: “George,” I told him, “if you value my advice, you smash that thing, while you still can. If you still can. It’s dangerous. It might—”
“It might what?”
“Idon’t know. That’s what makes it so awful.”
He gunned the motor and then let it die down again. He looked at me a little wistfully. “I—Maybe you’re right, Walter. But I’m making so much money—you see that new metal makes it higher than I told you—that I just haven’t got the heart to stop. But it is getting smarter. I—Did I tell you Walter, that it cleans its own spacebands now? It secretes graphite.”
“Good God,” I said, and stood there on the curb until he had driven out of sight.
I didn’t get up the courage to go around to Ronson’s shop until late the following afternoon. And when I got there, a sense of foreboding came over me even before I opened the door.
George was sitting at his desk in the outer office, his face sunk down into his bent elbow. He looked up when I came in and his eyes looked bloodshot.