The sound of four Mergenthaler Linotype machines firing at once hit Lin Mei’s eardrums like four automatic rifles hammering inside an iron boiler.
On the raised composing platform, Giles Mercer’s eight articulated stainless-steel hands blurred across the ninety-key layouts of all four machines simultaneously.
Each steel finger struck a black, white, or blue key-cap with terrifying mechanical speed: [clatter-clack-clatter].
“He’s typing across all four banks in parallel!” Lin Mei shouted, pushing her cracked tortoiseshell glasses up her nose with a chalky thumb. “One hundred words per minute per machine--that’s four hundred words per minute!”
Four hundred words per minute, Lin Mei calculated, her mind racing through the syntax tree. Seven lines of solid lead type every ten seconds.
Down the vertical brass magazine channels, hundreds of notched letter-matrices dropped into the assembling sticks, justified by sliding steel spacebands.
Then all four iron casting plungers slammed down into the 550 degrees F crucibles at once: [THUNK-HISS].
Jets of molten lead-antimony alloy injected into the molds, and the first steaming, red-tinted lead slug clattered out into Galley Tray #1: [CLINK].
