The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (16 page)

 

STONE WALLS Far off, a sound of singing. Some clear voice lifted itself from its prison floor and overcame all barriers to dance out on the moveless air of the control room. High and tremulous were its top notes, full-throated its descent into the lower registers. It was a moment of beauty. Even the few working stopped to listen.

‘Hullo,' remarked the Sumpsucker. ‘Humdinger's singing. He must be on the throne.'

‘Let's wish him a long reign,' murmured the Great White Father loyally, and brushed dust from the Puroil 1852 poster fixed to the wall with Puroil resin. Each time someone took it down another appeared. The resin was so good the concrete had to be chipped away to get the notice off. Luckily it was diluted by the paint makers who used it. It was so tough that undiluted it would have lasted a thousand years. No paint maker wanted that.

Our friend the moon, with no blood staining her image yet, rode high in the daytime sky. Men looked up and wondered at her white laughter.

 

VIEW FROM THE TOP Unfortunately for this pleasant group of prisoners the start-up work was proceeding and the Sumpsucker wanted to get near his control panel and had to screw up courage to ask them to move away. Naturally they refused. He went away and came back with Stillsons, who pleaded with them to hold their conference somewhere else. He had no other or higher members of the hierarchy to back him up, so they grabbed him and locked him in his office.

When the Humdinger came back he said, ‘Want to see my flower arrangements?' and disappeared behind the control panel. Presently, from a round hole left vacant by an instrument scrapped before it could be used, came a large stalk. Loosehead was mystified, but grabbed it and pulled.

‘Let go!' yelled a voice urgently.

‘I can't understand it,' said Loosehead to an appreciative audience. ‘It's wilting, yet there's still sap in it.'

‘You boys have the wind in your tails today,' said the Great White Father approvingly, but their get-together was spoiled by a crowd of visitors stumbling through the door. Loosehead let go. A roar of disappointment came from the tea-drenched throats of the prisoners, who stood round gaping at the neatly dressed prisoners out on a holiday from other detention centres. They couldn't resist glancing in at the men peeing up against the stainless steel. The lavatory was on view to all who came in the door. The Spotted Trout led them in, they trotted along behind him as he waved casually at the few hundred instruments on the control panel, then took them along to look at the one-way radio system no one used. Since the man on the job couldn't send a message back, no one knew if he received the call or not. For the operators it was quite satisfactory, unless they were being warned something was about to blow up. The visitors gaped and laughed when the Trout brought out his usual joke.

‘We have this sort of communication system so we can tell the operators what to do and they can't answer back.'

‘That's why we scrapped it, son!' called the Great White Father. The Spotted Trout had no answer. No one told him the radio didn't work: the Section Heads made noises of agreement when he referred to it. It was the only thing he understood about the plant.

The visitors didn't even snigger at the discomfiture of the Trout. Since they were in their suits and ties and best shoes, and the working prisoners in overalls, they had that glorious holiday feeling of freedom so rare in the life of an industrial detainee, though they wore that insignificant look men get when they're dressed alike. As soon as they had looked at the defunct radio and perhaps at the television screen showing the condition of the gas flare they would go out to the main reactor structure and ascend two hundred feet in the lift cage, get out on the swaying landings and be pleasantly giddy looking at the view from the top.

It wasn't to be. A cloud of hydrogen-sulphide gas blew from the gas-treating plant; the Congo Kid was draining a tank and had opened a valve wide; he had the wind behind him and was quite safe. In concentrations of over a thousand parts a million this gas was odourless and fatal almost immediately, but luckily the concentration was much less and the rotten-egg smell much greater and thirty-five visitors and one guide were sick on the gravel outside the control room. All the operators had tossed their stew at one time or another, they had no sympathy for the visitors. Some even laughed. The Trout bundled them on to the company bus as soon as he pulled himself together, and got them out of there, apologizing. As they left, Stillsons was awkwardly emerging from one of the metal-framed windows, covered in greasy dust from desk tops and sills. Despite their collective sickness, the visitors stared from the bus windows, fascinated. They were even more fascinated later when they looked at the money in their pockets. The gas was so penetrating it tarnished all their silver brown.

 

CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE Bomber Command, waving books of tickets, entered from the southern end, making a noise some distance away as you do with animals to let them get used to your approach. But they saw the tickets and were enraged.

‘Men, I've come to liberate you!'

‘Toss the bugger out!'

‘Beat it!' His familiarity made them contemptuous.

‘What's he selling?'

‘What're you selling?'

‘For the price of a few cents a week, we can all have a ticket in hope. There's money to be won, one chance in twenty and the extra chance of a jackpot. Dob in, men! Liberate yourselves from the hopelessness of working for a living. Buy a ticket in sunshine and sport and twelve months holiday a year.'

‘He's selling freedom. I'll take one.'

But not all the men parted with their cents. Many of these gallant prisoners, detained as soon as they were freed from school-prisons and conscious always of the tremendous debt they owed the country of their birth, kept their heads and did not go about wasting their substance in riotous living in a spirit of despair or irresponsible hope. Some, indeed, had never spent a penny in anger.

 

THE HOLLOW MAN ‘Hey, Far Away! You got a job?' The Glass Canoe had gone out on the job for once and now was back in the control room, covered with the golden stains of slurry oil. The pump seals were bad, there were leaks everywhere, waxy oil was inches deep on the concrete. The palms of his hands were black with grease. Whoever was on the cleaning roster wasn't game to chip him about the stains he trod into the floor.

‘Yes, over on the reactor. Won't be long.'

‘That's all right, don't hurry back.'

‘Won't be long.' Eager to get away.

‘Don't hurry back: hurry both ways!' roared the Glass Canoe for the benefit of the bystanders who sniggered uneasily, putting themselves on side with the bigger man.

‘You bastards tell me if he pisses in there with us. I don't want the jack.'

Far Away shot out the door, propelled by the venom in the voice of the Glass Canoe, whose arms hung down, slightly bowed, from his great shoulders. His brain teemed with the echoing, strident voices of the men he imagined himself to be. He glanced round the mob faces confidently, not seeing them. He didn't know what he would do next.

The sheen was bright on his forehead, the skin tight on his face. He grinned. There was no health in him.

 

A FIRST INJECTION ‘This little talk is designed to assist you at the present stage of your training.'

Luxaflex had called up the Sumpsucker for a first shot of Puroil serum. A foreman at last.

‘Your progress depends on many things.' The word progress was meat and drink to the Sumpsucker, though once he was a foreman where could he go? The next level called for degree men. ‘Among which is the ability to get things done. To do this you need, among other things: Knowledge, Energy, the Right Attitude! To help you gain number one, you have to rely on yourself in on-the-job training. Learn as much as you can, it's no weight to carry. Numbers two and three, I recommend the Basics of Supervision, paragraphs 1011 to 1271 and 14001 to 14090, and the Staff Guide, and put into daily practice the advice and instructions you find there.'

Suddenly Luxaflex broke off. ‘I didn't employ you, did I?'

‘I don't know what you mean.' The Sumpsucker was lost. Was this a threat? Did he know about the widow? Or his penial disability?

‘I mean when you first came here to the Refinery.'

‘No, sir.'

Luxaflex was relieved. The man's singlets, peeping out brownly under the V of his open-necked shirt, bothered him. I wouldn't have employed a man like this, he told himself. He felt powerful, niched in his personnel job. You didn't have to be an accounting expert; you didn't have to have technical knowledge, yet you had a say in who went into what jobs, if you said yes or no when you were told to. He would just last out till sixty; young graduates were yapping at his heels, but he'd hold them off for the six years with his excellent grasp of the complicated ins and outs of Puroil procedure, a grasp it had taken him thirty years to acquire. They couldn't possibly do it in six.

‘Remember, when you're handling men, be consistently courteous and businesslike. If you can make the bodies who come under your control feel the job they are doing is important and appreciated by you, you will be well on the way to getting the best out of them.'

He was proud of that sentence. It gave him a feeling of fulfilment. Like seeing his function listed half-way up the genealogy chart above his head. The trunk of the tree started below his line; he was just above ground. Below him the tree put its roots down into the soil. Beneath the bottom line, unmentioned, was the dense subsoil of operators, clerks, fitters, drivers, draughtsmen, storemen, machine operators, cleaners. He never allowed himself to dwell on the feeling that assailed him when he was off-guard: of being a helpless minor executive in a tiny branch of a vast company more powerful than governments; caught between the vicious, wanton, ungrateful pressure upward of labour, and the grinding pressure downward of the juggernaut called shareholders and capital and successive boards of directors reaching upwards and beyond in an Everest perspective to the ultimate World Board of seven.

He was proud of his methods of selection of job applicants. A good man is so in tune with company policy that he can rely on a sort of instinct. But he couldn't guarantee Sumpy's success. It was up to the individual to learn how to get in the queue to pass the buck and keep his mouth shut, waiting for others to make mistakes.

‘Another thing,' he went on with no sense of transition, ‘you must be a bastard! I remember when I first had my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.' It was now on the second, miles of ladder towered above his head, though he was on an eminence Sumpy could never reach. ‘We had some high brass coming to visit. The men in my section were good, they did their work perfectly. The OIC of my department came round to inspect and I didn't bawl the men out for anything, so he bawled me out. “You're too soft!” he said. “Not fit to command!” “But there's nothing wrong with their work. It's perfect,” I said. “You must be a bastard!” he repeated with great emphasis, and I've never forgotten that lesson. With a little effort you can always find something wrong.'

‘But,' said the Sumpsucker, and got no further. Something didn't fit.

‘I know,' said Luxaflex. ‘You're thinking of the tact and courtesy guff. Never forget even the best horse slackens and the time to find him slacken is when you have a superior officer watching. Nothing else shows them—us—that you're on the ball.'

 

WHITE NEGROES Somehow the forty-million-dollar plant staggered off the ground. The power recovery had been started, the vessels of the reactor and regenerating section were up to temperature, catalyst was circulating and feed in. On the surfaces and in the pores of the silica-alumina catalyst marvellous things happened. Waxy distillate that was once used as furnace oil became high-grade gasoline. Steam supply wasn't sufficient: to help out, Puroil had bought an old boiler from a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbour. If they could get enough steam, and could weather the power dips that tripped the electric pumps, the plant might stay up. Every six hours the air driers serving the pneumatic instruments changed over from cylinder A to cylinder B with a roar that could be heard above the process din. It was hard to get used to: faces still went white when it happened.

Twenty assorted men were gaping at the control instruments or filling out the dozens of sheets of paper recording pressures, flows, temperatures, and the Sumpsucker was darting from place to place, when in walked the biggest brass the men had seen. Instantly the Samurai yelled: ‘Quick! On your knees! They might chuck us a dollar!' Several lowered themselves to this position immediately.

Groaning Dykes, the foreign brass in charge of construction, could get away from Australia now the thing was going. It was officially handed over. Suddenly, without introduction, from the far end of the room, he burst out:

‘This is a great day! I gratulate you all! We've got it going, let us keep it going! And KEEP ON CRACKING!!'

Twenty men gaped in his direction, then he was gone. Back to Europe, or Brazil or the Sahara. Anywhere but here.

‘Whaddid he say?' asked a few voices.

‘Who was that log?'

‘Groaning Dykes.'

‘Where's he gone?'

‘Went for a crap and a sniper got him.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He said the thing might go.'

‘Yes, but who is he?'

The Wandering Jew came in next, with a great retinue of Suction Heads, engineers, process superintendents, manufacturing managers, planning engineers, design draughtsmen and a full team of Senior, Advising and Junior technologists. All clad in white raiment. The effect was spectacular. They outnumbered the gaping prisoners ten to one.

‘We have a good team,' announced the Wandering Jew.