I laughed quickly but efficiently—shortly, I believe they call it. "Nothing good, I hope."
High-Pockets Jones paused a moment before he answered: "Not bad, until lately."
It took me a moment or two to realize what he had said. I bent back to look at his face. He was quite sober about it.
"Okay," I said hastily. "I don't want to keep you from your work."
I worried a little about High-Pockets. I had heard a lot about him; he was a sort of mystery man in the printing business, going from place to place, wherever printers felt they were having trouble, and trying to straighten things out.
The stories about him indicated that he had some odd ways of doing that, based largely on a sort of legendary influence that he had over machinery. I remembered even the theory that all machinery was negatively charged with some sort of "personal" electricity, and that High-Pockets—having been hit by lightning—had a terrifically high charge of positive electricity of the same sort, which enabled him to do miraculous things on occasion with machinery—especially linecasting machines.
Well, I dismissed that as a bunch of talk, but what I didn't quite like was the fact that High-Pockets traditionally appeared in places where he was needed to straighten out things for the men.
I went into conference with Dr. Hudson, and he agreed with me that we should go right ahead; but we'd keep an eye on High-Pockets Jones, and at the first sign of interference Mr. Jones would find himself in a great deal of trouble. I would even, I decided, stoop to having him thrown in jail on a phony charge, if that should be necessary.
By this time we had started on the Legal Printing Company job, and we went ahead with our next offensive. Mind-reading came first. Dr. Hudson installed a black box at the water-fountain, and he explained to the men what it was for. He had a private wire to his desk, and a transformer that turned the current from the box back into thoughts. It was quite efficient. Some of the thoughts we got the first day were vituperative, some were quite obscene, and some were pretty feeble, but that didn't matter. It got the boys to worrying, and it saved us a bottle of spring water a day.