There was a hall entrance to the studio and this door was standing open. He was halfway through the door before he realized why — then it was too late to turn back. The Mark VIII that he had nursed along and used for so many years lay on its side in the corner, uprooted and very dusty on the side that had stood against the wall.
Good, he thought to himself, and at the same time knew it was stupid to hate a machine, but still relishing the thought that it was being discarded too. In its place stood a columnar apparatus in a gray-crackle cabinet. It reached almost to the ceiling and appeared as ponderous as a safe.
"It's all hooked up now, Mr. Martin, ready to go with a hundred-percent lifetime guarantee, as you know. But I'll just sort of pre-flight it for you and give you an idea just how versatile this versatile machine is."
The speaker was dressed in gray coveralls of the exact same color as the machine's finish, and was pointing at it with a gleaming screwdriver. Martin watched, frowning, and Miss Fink fluttered in the background. There was someone else there, a thin young girl in a pink sweater who bovinely chewed at a cud of gum.
"Let's give Mark IX here a real assignment, Mr. Martin. A cover for one of your magazines, something I bet you never thought a machine could tackle before, and normal machines can't…"
"Fink!" Martin barked and she rambled over with a sheet of illustration board and a small color sketch.
"We got just one cover in the house to do, Mr. Martin," she said weakly. "You okayed it for Mr. Pachs to do…"
"The hell with all that," Martin growled, pulling it from her hand and looking at it closely. "This is for our best book, do you understand that, and we can't have no hack horsing around with rubber stamps. Not on the cover of Fighting Real War Battle Aces."
"You need not have the slightest worry, I assure you," the man in the overalls said, gently lifting the sketch from Martin's fingers. "I'm going to show you the versatility of the Mark IX, something that you might find it impossible to believe until you see it in action. A trained operator can cut a Mark IX tape from a sketch or a description. And the results are always dramatic to say the least." He seated himself at a console with typewriter keys that projected from the side of the machine, and while he typed a ribbon of punched tape collected in the basket at one side.
"Your new operator knows the machine code and breaks down any art concept into standard symbols, cut on tape. The tape can be examined or corrected, stored or modified and used over again if need be. There — I've recorded the essence of your sketch. Now I have one more question to ask you — in what style would you like it to be done?"
Martin |nade a porcine interrogative sound.
"Startled aren't you, sir — well I thought you would be. The Mark IX contains style tapes of all the great masters of the Golden Age. You can have Kubert or Caniff, Giunta or Barry. For figure work you can use Raymond, for your romances, capture the spirit of Drake."
"How's about Pachs?"
"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know of—"
"A joke. Let's get going. Caniff, that's what I want to see."
Pachs felt himself go warm all over, then suddenly cold. Miss Fink looked over and caught his eyes, and looked down, away. He clenched his fists and shifted his feet to leave, but listened instead. He could not leave, not yet.
"… and the tape is fed into the machine, the illustration board centered on the impression table and the cycle button depressed. So simple, once a tape has been cut, that a child of three could operate it. A press on the button and just stand back. Within this genius of a machine the orders are being analyzed and a picture built up. Inside the memory circuits are bits and pieces of every object that man has ever imagined or seen and drawn for his own edification. These are assembled in the correct manner in the correct proportions and assembled on the collator's screen. When the final picture is complete the all-clear light flashes — there it goes — and we can examine the completed picture on the screen here."
Martin bent over and looked in through the hooded opening.
"Just perfect isn't it? But if for any reason the operator is dissatisfied the image can be changed now in any manner desired by manipulation of the editorial controls. And when satisfied the print button is depressed, the image is printed on a film of reusable plastic sheet, charged electrostatically in order to pick up the powdered ink and then the picture is printed in a single stroke onto the paper below."
A pneumatic groan echoed theatrically from the bowels of the machine as a rectangular box crept down on a shining plunger and pressed against the paper. It hissed and a trickle of vapor oozed out. The machine rose back to position and the man in the coveralls held up the paper, smiling.
"Now isn't that a fine piece of art?"
Martin grunted.
