Nine Men in Time.

by Noel Miller Loomis.

[Sidenote: _The idea of sending a man back in time to re-do a job he's botched, so that a deadline can still be met--added to the thought of duplicating a man so there'll be two doing the same work at the same time--adds up to a production-manager's dream. But any dream can suddenly shift into a nightmare...._]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The receivers, two of them lawyers, had long faces when they sat down across from my desk in the office of the Imperial Printing Company.

"Frankly, Mr. Shane," said the older one, "it is a very grave question in our minds whether we should try to continue to operate the business or whether we should close the plant and liquidate the machinery and equipment the best we can."

I was stunned. "I don't understand," I said helplessly. "We've been doing a nice business--and at a profit--in the year I've been here." It was my first big job, and I wanted to make good. I thought I had made good, but here they were jerking the floor out from under me, and I couldn't make any sense out of it.

"Well," said one, "the business isn't showing the profit we expected."

"What you need is a used-car lot," I said pointedly.

The elder man cleared his throat. "Now look, Mr. Shane, suppose we say three months."

"What do you mean--three months?"

"We'll allow you to go ahead for three months. If the business doesn't show a distinct upturn by then--" He raised his eyebrows.

I swallowed hard. So that was it, then.

They even had the date set for the execution, and I knew they intended to go through with it. Only a revolution would change that.

I wanted that job; it was my chance to make a name for myself. If they should close the plant now, I'd have a black eye. You can't go around asking for a job and saying, "But I was making money for them." They'll wonder what else was wrong.

I thought I knew why they were so willing to close the plant; it was part of an estate, and the way things were, it took a lot of their time each month for not too big a fee. But if the estate should be liquidated--well, figure it out yourself. This business was all mixed up between an administratorship and a receivership, and the attorney's fees for liquidation would be a percentage of a hundred-thousand-dollar shop.

It could run to a nice sum. They'd sell out, collect their fee, and forget it. A nice clean deal for them. And no more worry.

That is what I was up against, so perhaps it was inevitable that I should find Dr. Hudson--Lawrence Edward Hudson. That was 1983, really about the beginning of the scientific age in industry, and I dug this idea up out of the back of my head where it had been for some time. Dr.

Hudson was the result. I did not label him efficiency-expert, for printers have always been notoriously allergic to that t.i.tle. I called him production-engineer.

He was a small, thin-faced man with a face that seemed to all flow into a point where his nose should have been, and he started talking things over with me before he got his coat off.

"Printing," he said, "is really _the_ backward industry. There has been no basic advance since the invention of the linecasting machine around 1890, and possibly the development of offset printing."

"That," I said, "is why you are here--to bring out something startling."

"Well," he said, "you've heard the old one about the man who had something to do with each hand, and if you'd give him a broom he could sweep out the shop, too?" He leaned forward, his nose jutting at me, and said impressively, "Mr. Shane, we shall make that come literally true; we'll have men working in two places at once before we're through."

"Okay."

"In the meantime, there are certain old-fashioned fundamental principles on which we shall start. I shall be here at seven-thirty in the morning."

I should have known. Man, being ma.s.s, possesses inertia, mentally as well as physically, and therefore offers a certain amount of resistance to being kicked around. That applies to printers as well as to people.

But at that time I was too worried. I gave Dr. Hudson full authority.

He was there at seven-thirty the next morning, as he had said. At eight, the printers were standing around the time-clock, waiting for it to click the hour. It clicked, but the man nearest it was smoking a cigarette. He punched his card and then stood there, finishing the cigarette.

Dr. Hudson stepped up. "Gentlemen," he said, "it is now four minutes past eight. Starting-time is eight o'clock." He looked at his watch and compared it with the clock. "Please do your visiting and your smoking on your own time," he said coldly.

Well, it bothered me a little. I'd never handled them that way--and anyway, who cared about five minutes? The men would set just so much type, or do so much work. If they lost five minutes in one place, they generally made it up somewhere else. But this was Dr. Hudson's job.

It was nice that there had been no insolence--only a couple of raised eyebrows. Dr. Hudson's gesture had had its effect. They knew now who was boss.

For the next few days they kept their heads up. Production did not improve much, but I personally had not expected it to do that. I think Dr. Hudson had not expected it, either.

It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came in from the Legal Publishing Company--a three-volume, four-thousand-page record for the U. S. circuit court. They could not handle the typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.

It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it down, but Dr. Hudson's eyes glittered when he saw it. "Just what we need," he said.

"That's almost two thousand galleys of type," I reminded him, "besides our regular stuff." I was very dubious.

But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. "We'll make history," he promised.

Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.

As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in time.

So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do the job over--but right. The casterman didn't like it, but he didn't know what to do about it.

There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially when the job, re-set in the correct face--or rather, set in the correct face, because this now was the first time it had been set--was put on the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn't occur to me then that a man could be _too_ ambitious.

That afternoon the chairman came in, and I was ready for him. "We are not," I pointed out, "violating our union contract."

"But you made the casterman set the job twice, and he doesn't get paid for it."

"We pay the casterman two dollars an hour for seven hours a day. When he's here more than seven hours, he'll get time and a half," I said triumphantly.

The chairman frowned, but I didn't relax; I was on top and I knew it.

"He set the job wrong in the first place," I pointed out, "and he got paid for that. Is there any reason why he shouldn't correct his own mistake, if it doesn't take any of his time?"

"It does take time," he insisted.

"No. He's only re-living that four hours and doing the job right instead of wrong; you can't find any fault with that."

And he couldn't. I felt wonderful. I wanted to jump and shout, but I compromised by taking Dr. Hudson down for a gleeful drink and planning our next tactic.

We also settled a point of strategy. We decided to confuse them with a few minor things before springing our next real item--which would be, to put it mildly, revolutionary.