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 title. 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