The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (55 page)

‘No. Just knocked out. When they took him up to Calamity Jane, she found needle marks on him.'

‘Needle? What sort of needle?'

‘Hypo. Someone had been at him with a hypo.'

‘Is he a narcotic?'

‘You mean an addict?'

‘Yeah. Hooked.'

‘No. Someone was at him.'

‘Did you get a letter?'

‘No. You?'

‘I got two. Don't know what I'll do now. I'm a bit old to go looking for a job.'

The Samurai listened in silence and thought of Cheddar Cheese and his lost market for blood. In his mental eye he saw Cheddar taking some of his blood back from those he gave it to, filling a stolen hypodermic with his own blood and jabbing massive doses of it into the Python while he was unconscious. He must have wanted to get even before he left. He had been invited to go up for the golden handshake. Leukemia-pity was out of fashion now; since the tobacco companies rode out the lung-cancer scare it was all heart disease and organ transplants.

 

CHEDDAR CHEESE Cheddar heard them, too. Pulling on week-old socks after shaking out catalyst dust. To himself, quietly and reasonably, he said, What none of you ever say is I'm dying. I read in the Puroil house journal how some joker ran round a football field four times in under four minutes and what did he get? Time off to do his Certificate then three years at Cambridge. I'm dying: that's not such a popular achievement. I suppose they reckoned I'd get time off shortly. Now they're making sure of it.

He looked at the envelope on his locker shelf. The letter lay inside it, its typed words ready again to leap out at his throat the moment he opened it.

 

180 DEGREES Night shift and the Twinkler down in the mouth. The Great White Father patted his head. The Twinkler had taught the Western Salesman his own job, so they gave it to the Western Salesman. What made it worse was that they'd taken SK back who knew nothing, and made him a foreman immediately. His first action was to confiscate all newspapers, even those belonging to the other foremen. Several almost told him what to do, but remembered times had changed and kept their mouths shut. He threatened to report any further breaches. SK would go far.

‘Fancy them demoting a good man like you. Poor little Twinkling Star. Being good isn't enough. You have to survive and if you do it right you survive whole. You come through, at the end of your life, with a whole skin.' He laughed uncontrollably. ‘That's the joke. Survive! A whole skin. Die of natural causes.' And in a quieter voice, ‘Die because of death, the Great Defender who never misses a tackle.'

The Beautiful Twinkling Star said sadly, ‘And death shall have no dominion.' He thought he remembered it was Isaiah. One of the prophets, anyway.

‘Not bloody much it won't,' replied the Great White Father harshly. ‘The whole stinking universe'—he shook a fist at the sky and the myriad galaxies not completely masked by the structures of the refinery, ‘is the dominion of death.' He belted the good man between the shoulder blades. ‘That's why we laugh at the whole shebang! And give it the sign!'

He gave the sign with all fingers, viciously, to every part of the night sky.

‘This life is nothing,' said the Star. ‘It's a trial for the life to come.'

‘I believe it! For Oblivion!' he shouted. But there was a look of sneering about him. ‘It was a rotten joke for your Bloke to pull. We should never have been put here,' he snapped angrily, with fierce and unshakeable conviction.

‘God is love,' said the Beautiful Twinkling Star softly, with calm and unshakeable conviction.

 

FUNKHOLES The Brown Snake was supposed by the prisoners to be about to be liquidated by the young graduate Industrial Officer he was showing around. That was the usual pattern; you prepared the rope, constructed the scaffold and placed the noose round your own neck so the hangman's work was easy. Only the lever remained to be pulled and you couldn't do that with your hands tied.

But he slipped away into a safe hole. The Puroil Sales company, a separate entity, had made room for him for the three years he had to go till retirement. He wasn't even faced with the usual reduction in salary which would have forced down his pension rate. He knew a few secrets. Pixie wasn't so lucky. He was dispatched, trembling, to a re-training centre in Victoria. Oliver Twist, lacking a powerful patron, started to worry. He was forty: the company would be looking for reasons to let him go free.

The Garfish, who laid the ground-work for the no-stoppage clause and the pool of operators and had written the stand-down clause into the award, was robbed of the Industrial Relations job. The young graduate walked straight into it. The Garfish shook his hand, smiled, and promised every assistance. Like hell. He regarded the job as his own funkhole. He'd keep trying for it, even if it meant letting things go sour for Puroil so the new boy would get the chop.

They called him Crack Hardy. They meant you might as well crack hardy as put in a sickie. It was a common gambit: you start off hard and ruthless and when you finally smile or become generous you get more credit for it than the man who is sunny all the time. He picked it up in psychology lectures.

 

THE KILLER Why didn't they take their action openly? Revolt, strike, direct action. But it was the money, the time-payment instalments, the mortgage on the house. On the sly, you could get your own back and still get your money. And it was their friends. You couldn't team up with your friends: they would run and tell the boss.

Sabotage hurt them both; it hurt the company and it hurt the men. But that self-inflicted hurt was better than getting no money. Strikes meant you lost the lot, and there were bills; the baker, milk, groceries. You had to eat every day. They had thrown away their right to refuse work with every gadget they bought on time payment.

Usually, they would do their little sly sabotages one at a time. It would be like ordinary things going wrong and there was plenty of it; the company cared no more for the equipment than the men. Carelessness, it looked like. But what if men happened to do all their nasty little acts at the same time? There wouldn't be enough men to go round to keep the lid on.

And the last-minute addition to the previous Agreement just before it went to be printed—the clause agreeing never to leave the plants unmanned; sufficient men to keep them running; that was the killer. It looked so reasonable when you read it. But it meant the men were powerless. If you couldn't threaten strike, you couldn't get your case heard right away—you might wait years to get the thing heard before a court. The meaning of it was starting to seep into the minds of the men.

 

MUCK REPLACES ETERNITY ‘Who is it keeps writing
DNR
everywhere?' asked the Ant. Someone was getting at the men's overalls stencilling the sinister letters on their chests, on their white safety helmets, on their time cards. He watched the lined, smiling face of the Great White Father and tried to hide the admiration he felt. It was hard to imagine he was marked down to go. If he didn't take the lump sum in the fortnight, they would sack him for nothing. Funny how people twelve thousand miles away had so much say.

‘It used to be
ETERNITY
, then it was
MUCK
. Maybe it's the same joker but he's lost his faith,' said the Ant.

‘Could be the same. Maybe he's working out details now—a new do-it-yourself religion. All the way from
ETERNITY
to
MUCK
to
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
.'

Far Away Places, writer of the word
MUCK
, stenciller of
DNR
, was standing on the topmost point of the cracker, looking west. ‘The sunlight loves me,' he said to himself, feeling its blessing on his face. His cough wasn't so bad now. At home he often thought his favourite apple-tree must feel like this in the sun. Cared for. Warm. Loved.

He played sweetly on his piece of trumpet, imagining that the tunes he made floated out over the huddled, cowed houses and broke gently in pieces, falling in blessing on each one. Like the sun. He looked with profound distaste at the columns and plants beneath him. The whole enterprise
was
muck. Not absolutely necessary to life. And the humans. What was the use of them all?

 

FOR SALE ‘The Colonel's in the news.'

‘The slob in the pay office?'

‘Yes—the male whore-house man.'

‘Did he do in the Whispering Baritone?'

‘No. He's a sculptor.'

‘A what?'

‘What are they when they're at home?'

‘Chisellers. You know, big bronzes—'

‘And a big bronze to you.'

‘Up on pedestals. Only he's a welder. You know, bits of this and that and give it a name.'

‘Has he got his welding ticket?'

‘No. That's for welding pipes and joints and patio rails. This man's an artist, you don't need tickets to be an artist.'

‘You mean bits of half-inch plate, a bike chain and welding droppings? That sort of thing?'

‘That's it. He's won a competition. Thousand dollars. For a hundredweight of welding scrap.'

‘What name did he give it?'

‘Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Says here it's symbolic of the intense pressures on modern industrial man and the sense of compression and isolation in a confined space.'

‘Why do they think so much of bits and pieces? They can come here any day of the week and give sculpture prizes to everything in the place—scrap or construction. What's so special?'

‘They never see any of this. This is all strange to them. They live in another world. They'd run round like mad picking up scrap all day if they came here. They see all sorts of things in lumps of metal and rods and steel points nearly touching. The feel of steel gets 'em, too, I think. And how heavy it is. All that. The colour.'

‘Christ.'

‘There's tons of it here.'

‘Where do they live if they never see lumps of steel?'

‘They only go where it's civilized.'

‘Whaddya mean? The whole guts of their civilization's built on lumps of steel. This is where it all starts!'

‘They only see the big buildings and the finished job. Big offices, nice cafés, art galleries, everything nice for 'em.'

‘But we're only a few miles away. Why can't they come and have a look at as much steel as they want, then they won't think there's anything special in it.'

‘I keep telling you—they're in another world!'

‘But a few miles…'

‘Might as well be another planet.'

‘They don't want to see this end of the works.'

‘That's their trouble, all right.'

‘Why should they? The Colonel gets a grand out of making a statue of us. We're the industrial prisoners.'

‘Puroil might give him a scholarship or time off or something.'

‘No chance. They only help athletes. Good, clean amateur sport. Got to watch their image.'

‘It says here they're going to put it in an art gallery.'

‘Good. The Colonel can go and stand alongside it. Some rich bastard might buy both.'

 

THE MOMENTUM OF SMALL BODIES At the Home Beautiful the Great White Father walked outside, stooped right down and put his ear to the ground. The Angry Ant looked puzzled.

‘What are you listening for?'

‘Ants.' He listened for a while. ‘Your friends the ants. I can hear ants down there running about. Feet crunching. Hordes of 'em. Potential warriors.'

‘You touched in the head?'

‘They may be our future enemies. Don't laugh at 'em. A stray mutation. Anything might happen. They're the sort of thing our bosses are trying to make out of us. You ever watched ants?' He didn't wait for an answer.

‘You watch 'em. They're just like us. For every two ants working, there's two hundred running round in circles. You watch 'em. There's plenty of activity all right, but they go nowhere. Up this way, rub noses with someone they know, then back here, round in a circle and talk to someone else, then back again and so on and so forth, just like shinies walking round with bits of paper in their hands.' He straightened up and stretched his long body. ‘I've just thought of it. The way to put right the present imbalance of the forces of nature.'

‘What?' said the Ant. It was hopeless trying to keep up.

‘What?' said the Sorcerer's Apprentice, who had just come out of the bed hut, leaving her guest behind.

‘I know how to fix the world,' he raved. ‘Get the whole three thousand odd million to line up at the same time all over the world and at the signal run fifty yards west. All together. Think of the momentum the world will gain!—from the weight of all our bodies going west. Over 130 million tons of flesh and bone rocking a 6000-trillion-ton planet!'

 

BELOW SPECIFICATIONS He, too, had a private life. Who was he? Who were these unfortunates he had tried to help for so many years? They had to be told again and again they were men and life was living today, not saving for tomorrow. If he could make their present misery easier. But day in, day out, they were seized, cut up into units, incorporated into the bodies of the predators feeding on them, digested, then at last discarded as excreta.

What would become of them when the last of the great sprawling refineries was automated as they were at that moment in America and other parts of the world, and the gates closed on the unskilled workers, the men not so blessed with the will to survive, not so bountifully provided by their Maker with memory, intelligence, powers of expression and concentration? Where would they go? He was not so stupid as to assume that education could lift all men up to survival standard: the general level of intelligence was falling. These men and their mental and spiritual descendants would still be at the bottom of the pyramid. And if their composition was below the standard required to exist and be usable by the state, they were still men. They had families and they had children; some of the children would be unskilled workers and a few might climb higher in social esteem and earning rate, as the Good Shepherd climbed higher. But fewer and fewer. If they were born poor, they would probably stay poor in this lucky country.