Authors: Jack Livings
The workspace was arranged around a central cluster of fifteen furnaces. Each apparatus consisted of a glass bulb affixed to a pair of reedy glass tubes, one attached to an oxyhydrogen torch, the other to a nozzle that sprayed silicon tetrachloride into the flame burning at two thousand degrees Celsius. Calibrating the mix was tricky, and the torches sputtered and belched blue-orange loops of flame down the tube unless properly tuned. When operating correctly, the furnaces hissed like a den of snakes.
From early days, Task One delivered a steady stream of furnace technicians to the infirmary. The tubing, after an hour of constant use, would begin to glow. Longer, and it became sensitive to minor temperature changes, vibrations, a vortex of air swirling off the arm of a passing worker, a cricket landing somewhere outside the workshop, culminating in an explosion, glass projectiles flying in every direction, those workers lucky enough to have their wits about them ducking as shards smashed against the wall. It was Technician Shou who, after a few weeks, noticed a pre-explosion creaking beneath the hiss, like that of river ice before it fissures, and became skilled at predicting when a tube was about to shatter. She'd throw her hand up and yell, “Cover!” and everyone in the immediate vicinity would drop to the floor.
Another array of furnaces, metal boxes the size of refrigerators, for casting quartz cylinders, was situated next to the glass furnaces. Grinding and polishing units occupied the southwest corner, and in the northwest corner, natural-gas-fueled annealing ovens resembling kettledrums had been lined up in two neat rows. Overlooking them, behind a thick window the size of a blackboard, was the clean room, which housed the mainframe that controlled the annealing temperatures. The mainframe was cooled by a compressor on the roof, and a branch line funneled air into the cramped lab where optical properties and silicon purity were tested. None of the cool air bled into the main workshop, where the ambient temperature was sweltering, rarely falling below thirty degrees Celsius.
By the middle of that first week, the last of the engineers had arrived from Shanghai and Chengdu. There were now sixty-four workers assigned to casting and fabrication, and Zhou divided them into two teams. Team One would experiment with quartz dust produced from silicon tetrachloride, a volatile liquid stored in drums labeled
Cooking Oil
, a security measure. The drums, about a hundred of them, were stacked in steel racks along a wall of the workshop.
Team Two, under the supervision of Gu Yasheng, would work from sacks of sorted crystal chunks delivered by a special train from the Donghai mines. Each 140-kilogram brown hemp bag had the characters for
Sandstone
stenciled in red on its side.
Four days after the first meeting at the Glass Institute, Team One turned on the silicon tetrachloride compressors and lit their furnaces. The compressor nozzles were opened, spraying mist into the tongues of flame, perfectly tuned and burning hotter than jet afterburners. Up and down the line, the blue needle of flame met the spray and small, glowing mounds of silica began to accumulate in the glass bulbs.
The process produced something else: hydrochloric acid vapor. Despite the ventilation fans, it accumulated at head-height and crept like fog across the workshop. The workers' eyes watered, and then they began to cough, almost politely at first but before long giving way to full-throated hacking. At first Zhou gagged and spat and struggled to maintain his composure, just like the rest. But, believing it was his duty as a leader to suffer without complaint, he forced himself to stand up, rigid as a soldier on review, arms at his side, eyes streaming, and suck the evil-smelling stuff through his locked teeth. Gu Yasheng coughed like the rest, but he detected hominess in the acrid atmosphere, almost as comforting as the childhood memory of his mother's cooking. He might have smiled just a bit when the acid hit his throat.
Across the workshop, Team Two dipped shovels into the sacks of quartz crystals and loaded the pulverizer. The machine's engine screamed and bucked, crushing the crystals with percussive pops that gave way to a more sustained grinding. As the screw mashed them to dust, workers added more, the cacophony joining the furnaces' violent hissing to create a storm that buffeted their ears and turned all communication into pantomime. The pulverizer exhaled a thick white dust that mixed with the vapor over the furnaces and expanded to cover the entire shop in a white haze. A layer of fine snow collected on their lab coats and hair. It wasn't long before someone had dubbed the southeastern end of the shop the Yulong, after the mountain in Yunnan Province.
By the end of the week, Office Nine had selected a final design, trapezoidal, bearing a striking resemblance to the shape of naturally occurring quartz crystals, not unlike a military structure, perhaps a pillbox on a beach or the hardened airplane hangars some of the workers would have recognized from their time on bases in the south. Three long panels for the sides and top, and two smaller panels for the ends. These would be the largest single slabs of fused crystal ever cast in the People's Republic. Zhou tried not to betray his worry about the larger slabs, as big as doors, thick as medical texts, unfathomable dimensions. Unachievable. Impossible. He struggled to maintain correct morale. For ten years, his research had focused on lensesâdiscs of crystal the size of the bottom of a drinking glass. Now this. It was not a problem of science but of time. He'd been directed to transform a pile of flour into a baked loaf of bread, and he'd been given two minutes to do it.
Over the coming weeks the teams struggled, and they suffered. They sang revolutionary songs and chewed ginseng root to stay awake. They sucked in the dust and fumes, they sweated, and they failed.
They failed every day in September. The night of October 1, they climbed to the roof of the factory to watch the National Day fireworks over Tiananmen. Did the lights in the sky, “The Internationale” pouring from the factory's loudspeakers, the clear fall air revive their flagging spirits? Perhaps some, but Zhou Yuqing hardly saw or heard any of it. His mind never left the workshop. When the show was over, he followed his comrades down the stairs and got back to work. Later, he confessed to Gu Yasheng that he feared they'd leapt from a plane without their parachutes.
“Perhaps the ground will be soft,” Gu said.
October was a failure. By November, Team One had succeeded in producing only two patties of the required thickness. Their clarity was, at best, 90 percent. Trace amounts of calcium, sodium, magnesium, and iron fouled the mix, and short annealing times created bubbles. Every day brought a new disaster. The silicon tetrachloride furnaces shattered with alarming regularity, releasing clouds of toxic vapor into the workshop that doubled over even the toughest technicians.
There were flash firesâfabric, sheets of notepaper, anything combustible left near the furnaces ignited. Everyone sported burns, from fresh white furrows to late-stage menisci pulling tightly at the skin. Exhausted, they fell asleep at their stations. They all wore bruises and cuts. They smashed their fingers in furnace lids and walked into low-hanging ductwork.
Sleeplessness made them sloppy. Technician Du, changing out an empty hydrogen cylinder, failed to completely close the valve, allowing the remnants of the tank to bleed into the hot workshop air. The combustion cracked like a gunshot. Everyone, by then well conditioned, hit the floor. After a moment, they rose, dusted themselves off, and went back to work. Aftershocks from the Tangshan quake rattled the workshop every day, agitating the barrels of Cooking Oil, setting the furnaces clanging. They carried on.
Failure. Endless failure. If their task had, in fact, been to bake bread, nearly two months after starting they'd still have been trying to figure out how to sift the flour. Zhou paced the workshop at all hours, his hands behind his back, pausing to inspect the various workstations before resuming his loop. He slept no more than an hour at a time. He had the best equipment and the best vitrics squad in the country. They were working at maximum output. He insisted that the failures were a result of his leadership, and he met with the teams weekly to criticize himself. It was a lonesome sight and, for those who'd lost track of time, a dreaded signal that another full week had passed.
Zhou would call an assembly and demand that the workers struggle against him, as though they were back in those dark days of the revolution. They had nothing to say against him. He was working as hard as anyone, and he was always generous with his encouragement. He'd push on, his voice rising, insistent. Eventually he'd call a name. The worker would say, “Secretary Zhou, we believe that you work too hard and could benefit from more sleep,” or, “We notice that you sometimes forget to drink. You must maintain your intake of warm fluids or you'll get sick.”
Their weak criticisms failed to satisfy him, and in frustration he'd turn on himself, sometimes with great violence. “I fail to lead according to the principles of Mao Zedong thought, choosing instead to rely on my own selfish ideas. I lack courage and strength, and my weakness has led to the continued failure of Task One. For the rest of my life I will rise in the morning and think first of my weaknesses and failings as they pertain to my poor leadership of the fabrication and construction teams of Task One. My failures this week are as follows: I failed to adequately explain safety protocols to Comrade Hu Shutou, who was subsequently injured,” and so on. Comrade Hu, in all likelihood, had gone to sleep on his feet and fallen into a furnace. No safety protocol could have helped him, but Zhou would go on like this, enumerating his failures, until he'd listed every mishap from the previous week and taken personal responsibility for them. It felt indecent to watch, but the workers had no choice.
After self-criticism, Comrade Zhou left for his meeting at Office Nine. He could have filed his weekly reports to Office Nine via messenger, but he preferred to appear in person, pedaling his Flying Pigeon an hour across town to Huangchenggen South Street, to a square sand-colored building crowded into the background by the neighboring broad-shouldered ministry buildings. Its relative anonymity, the lack of flags or insignia of any sort outside the front doors, was a sign of the secret work that went on within. From the moment he swung into the courtyard, Zhou felt the eyes of the door guards on him, and even as he ascended to the meeting room, alone in the stairwell, he knew he was being watched.
Once he was in the conference room, Vice Mayor Li Quan set upon him: “Your teams are working at full capacity?”
“Yes,” Zhou said. “They only leave the workshop to attend to injury or matters of personal hygiene.”
“And you have full control of your test teams?”
“I do, comrade. The failure is entirely my fault.”
“I see,” Li said, pouting with that fat lower lip of his. “And the testing continues?”
“Yes, comrade. Testing continues.”
Testing continues. Those words could have been struck in steel and hung over the workshop's door. Heat, fumes, explosions. Time. The intractable nature of time, the casting of quartz slabs, slower than the formation of fossils. The daily tremors that shook the barrels of Cooking Oil, setting the steel shelf frames creaking. The dreamless sleep, waking to nostrils packed with silicon dust. Through it all, testing continued. The workers of Task One would, Zhou assured the cadres of Office Nine, achieve the first goal: a perfect block of crystal eighty centimeters square, eight centimeters thickâthe size of a board game as thick as a dictionary.
“You're receiving adequate supplies?” Li Quan asked.
“Yes, Comrade Vice Mayor. The supply lines are operating without interruption.”
“The test block will be available to view by the end of the month?”
“We will increase our efforts and improve our methods,” Zhou said.
While Zhou catalogued various experimental methodologies his teams had adopted, Vice Mayor Li Quan saw the end of his political career looming in the distance. A failure of this magnitude would guarantee him a post on a provincial revolutionary committee somewhere in Tibet. He had already secretly instructed the Beijing 901 Factory to begin work on a prototype coffin made of K9 optical glass. He had told no one at Office Nine of his plan.
Zhou ended his report as he always did, with his resignation.
As always, Li ignored him. If he could have found someone to replace Zhou, he would have, but who would have taken the job?
“Your report has been received, comrade,” he said.
“Serve the People!” Zhou said.
In October, Zhou's wife had come down with a case of the flu. After she'd been confined to bed for a week, her neighbors tried to convince her to go to the infirmary at the Academy of Sciences, but she insisted she'd be fine until Zhou could visit again. Lan Baiyu had grown up in Shanghai. Her parents were dead, and her few living relatives were too old to travel. She relied on the kindness of an older neighbor, the mother-in-law of a fellow researcher at the academy, who brought her soups and emptied the bucket. The sickness pinned her to the bed like a vise. Fever induced wild dreams. She told herself it was not possible to feel her organs aching, but within was a deep pain she'd never before experienced. She hated most the inability to thinkâshe could only lie in the bed, sweat, and try not to provoke the pain. When she tried to compose a thought about her research she found she could barely muster the correct terms. They would float in her imagination, then fade if she tried to add more. Equations were impossible. Eventually all her efforts went into arranging her body in the least painful position. It was as though she were made of broken glass. Movement was agony, but when the urge became too insistent to ignore, she reached down, pulled the bucket across the concrete floor, positioned her buttocks, and released.
It was that urge, a deep pressure in her bowel, that compelled her from her bed in the middle of the night. Although she had eaten little and hadn't risen in more than a week, in a fever state she rose to make the trip outside their apartment, down the open passageway to the toilets on the other side of the building. Like the high floor, their apartment's location far from the reek of the bathroom had been a reward for scientific and technical service to the people. She wrapped herself in a long PLA winter coat and stepped outside onto the landing. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet, the toilets a day's journey. She'd made it halfway, gripping the chipped metal guardrail for support, when her right leg gave out with an electric jolt that cut through the fever and brought her at once to full consciousness. Her bladder and bowels released. Then she was down, her face on the sooty concrete, her heart slamming, breath shallow and fast. She could smell her mess, and she knew she was hurt badly. Out of shame she tried to drag herself back inside instead of calling for help. She didn't make it far, and a neighbor found her the next morning, her fibula and tibia snapped, shivering, in shock from pain and exposure.