And in six months the machine was completed. It was housed in a separate brick building at the back of the premises, and now that it was ready for action, no one was allowed near it excepting Mr Bohlen and Adolph Knipe.
It was an exciting moment when the two men – the one, short, plump, breviped – the other tall, thin and toothy – stood in the corridor before the control panel and got ready to run off the first story. All around them were walls dividing up into many small corridors, and the walls were covered with wiring and plugs and switches and huge glass valves. They were both nervous, Mr Bohlen hopping from one foot to the other, quite unable to keep still.
‘Which button?’ Adolph Knipe asked, eyeing a row of small white discs that resembled the keys of a typewriter. ‘You choose, Mr Bohlen. Lots of magazines to pick from – Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal – any one you like.’
‘Goodness me, boy! How do I know?’ He was jumping up and down like a man with hives.
‘Mr Bohlen,’ Adolph Knipe said gravely, ‘do you realize that at this moment, with your little finger alone, you have it in your power to become the most versatile writer on this continent?’
‘Listen Knipe, just get on with it, will you please – and cut out the preliminaries.’
‘Okay, Mr Bohlen. Then we’ll make it… let me see – this one. How’s that?’ He extended one finger and pressed down a button with the name TODAY’S WOMAN printed across it in diminutive black type. There was a sharp click, and when he took his finger away, the button remained down, below the level of the others.
‘So much for the selection,’ he said. ‘Now – here we go!’ He reached up and pulled a switch on the panel. Immediately, the room was filled with a loud humming noise, and a crackling of electric sparks, and the jingle of many, tiny, quickly-moving levers; and almost in the same instant, sheets of quarto paper began sliding out from a slot to the right of the control panel and dropping into a basket below. They came out quick, one sheet a second, and in less than half a minute it was all over. The sheets stopped coming.
‘That’s it!’ Adolph Knipe cried. ‘There’s your story!’
They grabbed the sheets and began to read. The first one they picked up started as follows: ‘Aifkjmbsaoegweztpplnvoqudskigt&, fuhpekanvbertyuiolkjhgfdsazxcvbnm, peruitrehdjkgmvnb, wmsuy…’ They looked at the others. The style was roughly similar in all of them. Mr Bohlen began to shout. The younger man tried to calm him down.
‘It’s all right, sir. Really it is. It only needs a little adjustment. We’ve got a connexion wrong somewhere, that’s all. You must remember, Mr Bohlen, there’s over a million feet of wiring in this room. You can’t expect everything to be right first time.’
‘It’ll never work,’ Mr Bohlen said.
‘Be patient, sir. Be patient.’
Adolph Knipe set out to discover the fault, and in four days’ time he announced that all was ready for the next try.
‘It’ll never work,’ Mr Bohlen said. ‘I know it’ll never work.’
Knipe smiled and pressed the selector button marked Reader’s Digest. Then he pulled the switch, and again the strange, exciting, humming sound filled the room. One page of typescript flew out of the slot into the basket.
‘Where’s the rest?’ Mr Bohlen cried. ‘It’s stopped! It’s gone wrong!’
‘No, sir, it hasn’t. It’s exactly right. It’s for the Digest, don’t you see?’
This time it began: ‘Few people yet know that are volutionary new cure has been discovered which may well bring permanent relief to sufferers of the most dreaded disease of ourtime…’ And so on.
‘It’s gibberish!’ Mr Bohlen shouted.
‘No sir, it’s fine. Can’t you see? It’s simply that she’s not breaking up the words. That’s an easy adjustment. But the story’s there. Look, Mr Bohlen, look! It’s all there except that the words are joined together.’
And indeed it was.
On the next try a few days later, everything was perfect, even the punctuation. The first story they ran off, for a famous women’s magazine, was a solid, plotty story of a boy who wanted to better himself with his rich employer. This boy arranged, so the story went, for a friend to hold up the rich man’s daughter on a dark night when she was driving home. Then the boy himself, happening by, knocked the gun out of his friend’s hand and rescued the girl. The girl was grateful. But the father was suspicious. He questioned the boy sharply. The boy broke down and confessed. Then the father, instead of kicking him out of the house, said that he admired the boy’s resourcefulness. The girl admired his honesty – and his looks. The father promised him to be head of the Accounts Department. The girl married him.
‘It’s tremendous, Mr Bohlen! It’s exactly right!’
‘Seems a bit sloppy to me, my boy.’
‘No sir, it’s a seller, a real seller!’
In his excitement, Adolph Knipe promptly ran off six more stories in as many minutes. All of them – except one, which for some reason came out a trifle lewd – seemed entirely satisfactory.
Mr Bohlen was now mollified. He agreed to set up a literary agency in an office down town, and to put Knipe in charge. In a couple of weeks, this was accomplished. Then Knipe mailed out the first dozen stories. He put his own name to four of them, Mr Bohlen’s to one, and for the others he simply invented names.
Five of these stories were promptly accepted. The one with Mr Bohlen’s name on it was turned down with a letter from the fiction editor saying, ‘This is a skilful job, but in our opinion it doesn’t quite come off. We would like to see more of this writer’s work…’
Adolph Knipe took a cab out to the factory and ran off another story for the same magazine. He again put Mr Bohlen’s name to it, and mailed it immediately. That one they bought.