10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [90]
He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.
“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”
“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.
“I’m not going to,” Samson said.
“Then don’t print the paper.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.
I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash ... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building ... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.
“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.
“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.
“No ... sabotage ... he can destroy ... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper—newsprint, the raw material of newspapers—and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men tending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the Hoopwestern Gazette, the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.
The presses were humming quietly when I reached them. There were eight in a row with a tower in the center. From each end of four, the presses put first a banner in color—red, green, blue—on the sheets that would be the front and back pages, and then came the closely edited black-and-white pages set onto rollers in an age-old, but still perfectly functional, offset litho process.
I learned afterwards how the machines technically worked. On that fraught Sunday I saw only wide white paper looping from press to press and in and out of inked rollers as it collected the news page by page on its journey to the central tower, from where it went up in single sheets and came down folded into a publish-able newspaper, cut and counted into bundles of fifty.
There were two men tending the presses, adjusting the ink flow and slowly increasing the speed of the paper over the rollers and through the mechanism. Warning bells were ringing. Noise was building.
When I ran into the long thundering area, Usher Rudd was shouting at one of the men to turn everything off. The technician blinked at him and paid no attention.
His colleague activated another alarm bell and switched the presses to a full floor-trembling roar. Monday’s edition of the Hoopwestern Gazette, twenty thousand copies of it, flowed from press to press and up the tower and down at a speed that reduced each separate page to a blur.
Samson Frazer, catching up with me as I watched with awe, shouted in my ear, “Don’t go near the presses while they’re running. If you get your little finger caught in any of the rollers it would pull your whole arm in—it would wrench your arm right out of your body. We can’t stop the presses fast enough to save an arm. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
Usher Rudd was screaming at the technician.
Samson Frazer’s warning was essential.
There was a space of three or four feet between each machine where one was wholly exposed to the revolving accelerating rollers. When the presses were at rest the printers—the technicians—walked with safety into these spaces to fit the master sheets onto the cylinders and to check the state of the inking rollers. When the presses, switched on, ran even at minimum inch-by-inch speed, the danger began. An arm could be torn out, not in one jerking terror but worse, inch by excruciatingly inevitable inch.
I asked later why no guarding