Four Freedoms by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t hard to do. The coupons themselves were crude things. The Ditto machine in the icehouse office could be adapted to print in red instead of its usual purple. Prosper went with Fred to a warehouse in the city filled with paper, paper in high stacks, newsprint in rolls, discount paper in fallen slides like avalanches. Fred distracted the salesman while Prosper took a sheet of stamps from his pocket and sought for a paper like it. The big investment was in spirit masters for the machine; Prosper spoiled several before he perfected a way to make a sheetful of stamps rather than a single one. As he drew he had to press hard enough to transfer the colored wax on the bottom sheet of the two-ply master to the back of the sheet he was drawing on, like the wrong-way writing that a piece of carbon paper puts on your typed sheet if you insert the carbon backward. Then he separated the two sheets of the master and fastened the top sheet to the drum of the Ditto. As he turned the handle of the drum, a solvent with the intoxicating smell of some sublime liquor was washed over the sheets of paper drawn in to be printed; the solvent would dissolve just enough of the colored wax on the master to transfer the backward image right-way-around to the paper. It worked. Mert said it wouldn’t fool everybody for long but it’d fool anybody long enough.

How to perforate the printed sheets was a different problem, not put to Prosper; Mert knew a guy. Prosper’s problem was that the original could only print fifty copies or so before it grew dim, and he’d have to start a new master.

The C book cover was easier; it was just like making documents for the Sabine Free State. He drew down the lamp over his desk at May and Bea’s and worked with a magnifying glass, reproducing by hand every letter and line of type with his pens and India ink, the red bits in red. Eagle, badge, warning of jail time. He could do two a day, and got three dollars apiece; the money piled up. He had finished his first one of the day, stapled it to the coupons, all ready but the signature, when the doorbell rang.

It was Elaine.

“Here,” she said. She handed him a shapeless lump of brown canvas. “Let’s go.”

It was her idea: he’d said he had no way to carry a suitcase and walk at the same time, and after she’d thought about this for a day she’d said that he could carry a knapsack on his back, like hikers and soldiers, she’d just seen one in a movie and then realized she knew where to get one, the Army and Navy Store just then replete with stuff from previous war eras as useless now as flintlocks and sabers. She’d bring him one. Here it was. It was time.

Last thing, just before he slung the lumpy

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