Bus was asleep in the front window on his quilt, three legs tucked under him, when a man of about seventy came in out of the March drizzle with a slide projector in both arms. He had a plastic bag over the top of it against the wet, and he put it on my counter, a Kodak Carousel, the round grey kind, a full tray of slides seated on top and eighty numbered slots running round its rim. He told me it had died three ways at once.
The lamp would not light. The tray had seized with its full load of slides in it and would not turn. And the changer that took the slides down into the light had gone stiff and slow for weeks before it stopped altogether. Every job in the shop gets a ticket, four fields to it, what came in and what the owner says is wrong and what is actually wrong and what it took to put right. I wrote his three faults into the second field in the words he gave them, because a complaint is data and my version of it would only be an opinion.
I asked what the hurry was, because he had not taken his coat off and had asked twice how long it might take. "Our anniversary's Saturday," he said. "Forty years. The whole family's coming down, and these are the forty years." He put one hand flat on the top of the tray while he said it, and took it away again.
Dot was behind the counter sorting the morning's mail, which was not her mail and had not been for six years, and she had the anniversary placed before he was off the step. "Forty years Saturday, dear. The two of them still up the valley, and every last soul of the family coming down for it." What she did not have, and could not, was what those eighty slots held.
I took the projector back to the bench. A dead lamp is the first thing to rule out and the quickest. This one had gone with the filament broken off its posts and rattling loose in the glass when I turned the machine over. I fitted a new one of the same three hundred watts, and it came up bright and even behind the gate.
The changer was the older trouble. It sits under the tray and does the whole work of showing, taking each slide down out of its slot into the gate where the lamp burns, holding it there in the light, and lifting it back up into the tray before the tray turns on to the next. Its grease had gone to brown varnish over the years, stiff enough to drag the action slow, and on the last showing one slide had dropped crooked and jammed in the gate, and that was the seizure. I brought that slide up into its slot square, took the changer down off the machine, washed the old varnish out of it, and packed it with fresh grease. After that it dropped and lifted clean, with no drag at the foot of the stroke.
But a repair is not finished when the machine moves again. It is finished when the fix is proved, and a projector is proved on the wall. There is no way round that. You cannot know the changer will take all eighty slides down flat, or that the new lamp lights a whole frame square to its edges, without running the tray and looking hard at what it throws. On any other bench that is the good part of the day. A repair is a private thing more often than not, because people keep their broken property out of sight, as they keep anything they are a little ashamed of, and they bring it to me on that understanding. To prove this one I would have to read a stranger's forty years off my own wall, eighty slides of it, and none of it was the bench's business, and mine least of all. The trouble was in the work and not in me, and naming it that way did not move it an inch.
I could run the tray through and prove the changer against the whole of a man's life, or I could give the projector back with the tray never once turned under the new lamp, mended on my word and not on the bench's. There was no third way to do it. Neither of the two was a repair I would put my name to.
So I ran the lens all the way out of focus first, back to its stop, until the wall showed nothing off the machine but a soft field of light with no picture in it. Then I put the tray on, brought the first slide down into the gate, and turned the lens in until the frame came up sharp, because one slide had to be proved the whole way, down flat into the light and up again, before I could trust the path for the rest. It came up sharp. A young woman on a porch step, her head gone back, caught in the middle of a laugh, in a summer long past. I looked only as long as it took to see the changer had brought the slide down flat and square in the gate, and then I ran the lens back out to its stop. After that I turned the whole tray through with the lens out of focus, and each slide dropped into the gate, threw a soft wash of colour on the wall, and lifted clean away, and I counted the numbers round the rim as they came, one to eighty and round again to one. Not a frame of it came up sharp enough to read, and I did not touch the lens to make it. The machine was proved.
He came on the Friday, the day before. I had the projector back together on the counter with the tray on the top of it, loaded as it had come in. He paid for the lamp and the hour, and then he stood with his hand on the tray again, as he had the first morning.
"Did you look at them?" he asked.
"I turned the tray through to prove the changer, with the lens run out of focus," I said. "I mend the sprockets. I do not read the pictures."
He took the projector up in both arms. The tray sat loaded on the top of it, eighty slides in their slots, the little numbers stamped round the rim turned to face him.