Free The Henderson Equation by Warren Adler Page B

smell heavy in the air. Vaguely
recognized by the workmen who handled the paper, he walked down the long
corridors, like trails through a forest. He hadn't been down here in months. He
wondered why he had come here now, a small figure roaming in the midst of these
oversized cylindrical stumps. Perhaps he had come seeking recall for some
moment of time past, hoping like Proust to find some epiphany in the scent. Was
he looking for Charlie in these groves? When he had traversed the long length
of the area, he found an exit and mounted a metal staircase, his leather soles
clacking on the steps. Opening a door on the next floor, he found himself
confronted with the skeletal massiveness of the press, a vast superstructure
laced with latticed stairwells. There was an awesomeness not only in the
technological puzzle of the devices but in the size of the huge rollers. Even
the sounds of tinkering seemed portentous, tiny signals heralding the cacophony,
as the oiled and inked maws waited for the ingestion of words. He felt humbled
in its presence. Did the captain of a huge ship derive the same humility facing
its complicated entrails, knowing in his heart that despite the dependence on
technology, despite the crew, despite the exigencies of weather and the
unpredictability of the ocean, the ultimate responsibility of all lives
depended on his own fallible judgment?
    In the end, what was all this technical acrobatics in the
face of man's will and spirit? Just another pile of shaped alloys, a junk shop
of potential ruins for future scholars of antiquity. The smell of ink permeated
the huge cement cavern, reassuring somehow, like the paper rolls below, a clue,
perhaps, that man could still perceive the power of it and in that perception
was, therefore, still in control. Could Gutenberg have imagined it back in that
German cellar? The power of the word! Of course Gutenberg knew, beginning
symbolically with the Bible as if to confirm the reverence of his pursuit. A
wrench fell nearby, clattering to the cement floor. He looked up and saw a man,
oddly hatted in the special fold of copy paper, the badge of the pressman. The
man shrugged in apology.
    Nick retreated to the stairwell and moved upward, pausing
briefly on the next level, from which the stacked and folded papers would in a
few hours fan out over the world, bound in wire, loaded into trucks, carrying
the word, a mirror of the world, his world, in that moment of time. His
faltering confidence returned as he moved upward still another floor to where
the words were processed, the shrinking bank of linotypers cranking out their
metal slugs of words, thrashing arrogantly in the last throes of obsolescence.
He walked past the ungainly machines toward the area where the new technology
was encroaching, where the new word-processing equipment was in smooth action,
keyboards clicking out the sentence visible on their electronic consoles. He
was more recognizable here, and he nodded to familiar faces when eyes strayed from
the consoles as he passed. He had fought hard for the installation of the new
equipment, despite the unions and his own impatience with their reluctance,
bucking all the way through the long negotiations that had, toward the end,
interrupted the flow of words. An army of editorial workers sweated over tapes,
the photographed type, the paste-up. Lines of people stood along the proof
racks, fitting together the ads, pasting, reading, proofing--an endless
process. He watched the clock as the hands moved relentlessly toward imposed
deadlines, finite time that controlled the rhythm of his life. The clock was so
embedded in his head, he did not need the graphic view of time to respond. He
ducked quickly through a door and pounded upward toward the editorial rooms,
swinging open the door to the brightly lit center of his life.
    His brief tour had refreshed him, validating once again his
relationship to his work. It was a ritual that Charlie had woven into his own
life in the days