Life isn't that simple, he thought to himself, a very unoriginal idea that he usually brought out at least once a day while sitting at the machine, man figure, business suit, he set on the dial, then hit the draw button. The pen-tipped arm dropped instantly and began to quickly ink in a suited man's figure over the blue direction lines he had put down. He blinked and watched it industriously knocking in a wrinkle pattern that hadn't varied a stroke in fifty years, then a collar and tie and two swift neck lines to connect the neatly inked torso to the rubber-stamped head. The pen leaped out to the cuff end of the just-drawn sleeve and quivered there. A relay buzzed and a dusty red panel flashed instructions please at him. With a savage jab he pushed the button labeled fist. The light went out and the flashing pen drew a neat fist at the end of the arm.
Pachs looked at the neatly drawn panel and sighed. The girl wasn't unhappy enough; he dipped his crow quill into the inkpot and knocked in two tears, one in the corner of each eye. Better. But the background was still pretty empty in spite of the small dictionary in each balloon. balloons, he punched automatically while he thought, and the machine pen darted down and inked the outlines of the balloons that held the lettering, ending each tail the correct distance from the speaker's mouth.
A little background, it needed a touch. He pressed code 473, which he knew from long experience stood for home window with lace curtains. It appeared on the paper quickly, automatically scaled by the machine to be in perspective with the man's figure before it. Pachs picked up the script and read panel two:
Judy falls on couch Robert tries to console her moth «r rushes in angrily wearing apron.
There was a four-line caption in this panel and, after the three balloons had been lettered as well, the total space remaining was just about big enough for a single close-up, a small one. Pachs didn't labor this panel, as he might have, but took the standard way out. He was feeling tired today, very tired. house, small family produced a tiny cottage from which emerged the tails of the three balloons. Let the damn reader figure out who was talking.
The story was finished just before eleven. He stacked the pages neatly, put the script into the file, and cleaned the ink out of the pen in the Mark VIII; it always clogged if he left it to dry.
Then it was eleven and time to see Martin. Pachs fussed a bit, rolling down his sleeves and hanging his green eyeshade from the arm of his dazor lamp; yet the moment could not be avoided. Pulling his shoulders back a bit he went out past Miss Fink, hammering away industriously on the varityper, and walked in through the open door to Martin's voice.
"Come ON, Louis," Martin wheedled into the phone in his most syrupy voice. "If it's a matter of taking the word of some two-bit shoestring salesman in Kansas City, or of taking my word, who you gonna doubt? That's right. okay. right Louis. I'll call you back in the morning. right, you too… my best to Helen." He banged the phone back onto the desk and glared up at Pachs with his hard beebee eyes.
"What do you want?"
"You told me you wanted to see me, Mr. Martin."
"Yeah, yeah," Martin mumbled half to himself. He scratched flakes of dandruff loose from the back of his head with the chewed end of a pencil, rocked from side to side in his chair.
"Business is business, Pachs, you know that, and expenses go up all the time. Paper — you know how much it costs a ton? So we gotta cut corners. "
"If you're thinking of cutting my salary again, Mr. Martin, I don't think I could. well, maybe not much. "
"I'm gonna have to let you go, Pachs. I've bought a Mark Nine to cut expenses and I already hired some kid to run it."
"You don't have to do that, Mr. Martin," Pachs said hurriedly, aware that his words were tumbling one over the other and that he was pleading, but not caring. "I could run the machine I'm sure, just give me a few days to catch on. "
"Outta the question. In the first place I'm paying the kid beans because she's just a kid and that's the starting salary, and in the other place she's been to school about this thing and can really grind the stuff out. You know I'm no bastard, Pachs, but business is business. And I'll tell you what, this is only Tuesday, still I'm gonna pay you for the rest of the week. How's that? And you can take off right now."
"Very generous, particularly after eight years," Pachs said, forcing his voice to be calm.
"That's all right, it's the least I could do." Martin was congenitally immune to sarcasm.
