Der Schockelschtuhl has gone and the Vat itself keeps threatening to take its custom to one of the big offset plants in Philadelphia. You simply paste it up, ads and photos and type, and send it off. Over Verity hangs a future that belongs to cool processes, to photo-offset and beyond that to photocomposition, computerized television that throws thousands of letters a second onto film with never the kiss of metal, beamed by computers programmed even for hyphenation and runarounds; but just an offset press is upwards of thirty thousand dollars and flatbed letterpress remains the easiest way to do tickets and posters. And the Vat might fold up any week. It is certainly a superfluous newspaper.

BREWER FACTORY TOOLS COMPONENT HEADED TOWARD MOON, is this week’s front-page story. Rabbit sets, two-column measure, his white fingers feathering, the used matrices dropping back into their channels above his head like rain onto tin.

When Brewerites this Sunday gaze up at the moon, it may look a little bit different to them.

Why?

Because there’s going to be a little bit of Brewer on

No. Widow. He tries to take it back but the line is too tight to close so he settles for the widow.

it.

Zigzag Electronic Products Inc., of Seventh and Locust Streets, City,

Oops.

Locust Streets, city, revealed to VAT reporters this week that a crucial electronic switching sequence in the on-board guidance and nabifiation computer was the on-board guidance and navigation computer was manufactured by them here, in the plain brick building, once the cite if Gossamer Ho˛irey Co, that thou-ing, once the site of Gossamer Hosiery Co., that thousands of Brewer citizens walk unknowingly by each day.

If the printed circuits of their switches—half the size of a postage stamp and weighing less than a sunflower seed—fail to function, astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collin will drift past the moon and perish in the infinite vacuum of so-called “deep space.”

But there is no danger of that, Zigzag Electronics general manager Leroy “Spin” Lengel assured the

Jump after twenty lines. Switch to single-column lines.

VAT reporter in his highly modern, light-green office.

“It was just another job to us,” he said. “We do a hundred like it every week.

“Naturally all of us at Zigzag are proud as punch,” Lengel added. “We’re sailinggeatoin added. “We’re sailing on a new sea.”

The machine stands tall and warm above him, mothering, muttering, a temperamental thousand-parted survival from the golden age of machinery. The sorts tray is on his right hand; the Star Quadder and the mold disc and slug tray on his left; a green-shaded light bulb at the level of his eyes. Above this sun the machine shoulders into shadow like a thunder-head, its matrix return rod spiralling idly, all these rustling sighing tons of intricately keyed mass waiting for the feather-touch of his intelligence. Behind the mold disc the molten lead waits; sometimes when there is a jam the lead squirts out hot: Harry has been burned. But the machine is a baby; its demands, though inflexible, are few, and once these demands are met obedience automatically follows. There is no problem of fidelity. Do for it, it does for you. And Harry loves the light here. It is cream to his eyes, this even bluish light that nowhere casts a shadow, light so calm and fine you can read glinting letters backwards at a glance. It contrasts to the light in his home, where standing at the kitchen sink he casts a shadow that looks like dirt over the dishes, and sitting in the living room he must squint against the bridge lamp Janice uses to read magazines by, and bulbs keep burning out on the stair landing, and the kid complains except when it’s totally dark about the reflections on the television screen. In the big room of Verity Press, ceilinged with fluorescent tubes, men move around as spirits, without shadows.