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By Root 684 0

gates kept people away. The machines were old, built before safety standards skyrocketed, Samson Frazer said, but they did indeed now have gates. It was illegal in Britain to operate without them. These gates pulled across like trellises and locked into place, but they were fiddly, and an extra job. People who worked around these presses knew and respected the danger, and sometimes didn’t bother with the gates. He didn’t approve, but he’d had no tragedies. There were computerized programs and printers to be had, but the old technology worked perfectly, as it had for a hundred years, and he couldn’t afford to scrap the old and to install the new, which often went wrong anyway, and one couldn’t guard against maniacs like Usher Rudd. No one had to insure against lunatics.

I could have sold him a policy about that, but on that particular Sunday evening what we needed for Usher Rudd was a straitjacket, not a premium.

He was still swearing at the technician, who looked over Rudd’s shoulder and saw Samson Frazer’s arrival as deliverance.

Stopping the presses, I learned later, meant hitting one particular button on one of the control panels to be found on the end of each press that regulated the overall speed of the printing. The buttons weren’t things the size of doorbells, but scarlet three-inch-diameter flat knobs on springs. Neither the technician nor Samson Frazer pushed the overall stop control, and neither Rudd himself nor I knew which of several scarlet buttons ruled the roost. The presses went on roaring and Bobby Usher Rudd completely lost control.

He knew the terrible danger of the presses. He’d worked for the Hoopwestern Gazette. He’d been in and out of newspapers all his adult life.

He grabbed the technician by his overalls and swung him towards unimaginable agony.

The technician, half in and half out of one of the lethal spaces, screamed.

Samson Frazer screamed at Usher Rudd.

The second technician sprinted for refuge in the smaller print room next door.

I, from instinct, leapt at Usher Rudd and yanked him backwards. He too started screaming. Still clutched by the overalls, the technician stumbled out of the fearsome gap, ingrained awareness keeping his hands close to his body: better to fall on the floor than try to keep his balance by touching the death-dealing machinery.

Usher Rudd let go of the overalls and rerouted his uncontrolled frenzy onto me. He was no longer primarily trying to stop the print run, but to avenge himself for the cataclysms he had brought on himself.

The glare in his eyes was madness. I saw the intention there of pushing me instead of the technician onto the rollers, and had we been alone he might have managed it. But Samson Frazer jumped to grab him while the technician, saved from mutilation, gave a horror-struck final shout as he made his terrified stumbling run for the door, and by unplanned chance barged into Usher Rudd on the way, unbalancing him.

Rudd threw Samson off him like an irrelevance, but it gave me time to get space between me and the nearest press, and although Rudd grasped and lurched in an effort to get me back again into the danger zone, I was fighting more or less for my life and it was amazing how much strength ultimate fear generated.

Samson Frazer, to his supreme credit—and maybe calculating that any death on his premises would ruin him—helped me struggle with the demented kicking and punching and clutching red-haired tornado: and it was Samson who delivered a blow to Rudd’s head with a bunched fist that half dazed his target and knocked him to the ground face downwards. I sat on his squirming back while Samson found some of the wide brown sticky tape used for parcels and, with my active help, circled one of Usher Rudd’s wrists, and then the other, and fastened his arms behind his back in makeshift handcuffs. Samson tethered the wildly kicking legs in the same way and we rolled Rudd onto his back and stood over him, panting.

Then, with each of us looping an arm under Rudd’s armpits, we dragged him into the comparative quiet of the secondary print room next