"Monkeying with souls," he muttered, "is dangerous business."
He was thankful the story had only three takes. First he thought he would dump the third take in the metal pot, but when he picked it up it was so hot that even he, with calloused finger-tips from handling hot slugs for twenty years, couldn't hold it. So he dumped both takes and turned off the motor, then went to lunch.
That is, he borrowed a dollar from the chairman and started for the restaurant. But he passed a saloon on the way, and decided he was more in need of a drink.
When he got back he had a little trouble with the fluorescent lights. They weaved when he weaved, and it took some rather delicate navigation to beat them to the punch. It was fortunate that the light tubes were fixed securely in their sockets, and fortunate that the foreman had gone into the office to check the time cards.
When High-Pockets got back to the copy desk, he was pretty fuzzy around the edges. He looked over his first take as soon as he got behind the desk. Then he gave a relieved sigh. This was Editorial. No. 7 wouldn't be so fussy—he hoped.
He got four paragraphs through before he ran into trouble. Then some mats jammed up at the top of the assembler entrance cover. High-Pockets started to ring the bell, but decided not to. He could dig it out himself. He'd had enough trouble with Arturius for one night.
He opened the entrance cover, and a hundred mats fell down over his arm and onto the keyboard with an ominous tinkle. Their weight depressed some twenty keys, and the power drive immediately began to function, and the mats from those twenty channels dropped in twenty curving streams on the keyboard, which depressed still more keys and made more mats drop, and in about two minutes No. 7 had poured fifteen hundred mats into High-Pockets' lap.
He did one thing before he rang the bell. He brushed the mats off the copy holder and looked at the rest of the paragraph. It ended, "—and the blame for Pearl Harbor thus lay at the door of the White House."
High-Pockets got up, shedding mats by the hundreds. Arturius came, looking as if he were about to detonate. Half the operators in the shop were there to enjoy the fact that at least there was one man who wasn't afraid to have trouble with No. 7.