The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS After this unscheduled plant crashdown there were the usual jokes about turning the place into a nightclub, using its reactors and strippers, or selling it as junk to Simsy, the scrap-iron merchant. At each plant upset the future lay before them unknown, at the mercy of metal behaviour as well as human conduct. And myriad random influences: a bird’s dropping, a foot slipping, a valve knocked, a stray curse, an argument, a stupid order; and so on. Supplies of gasoline were imported, to make up production loss.

  The Beautiful Twinkling Star casually picked up the broken piece of metal sundered from the line. In one hand. He thought nothing of it. Several prisoners and guards tried to do the same thing a little later, but the metal fragment weighed about eighty pounds and they needed two hands to lift it. The Star saw this. It was the first time in his life he realized his physical strength was above average. Why had he never noticed it? He began to wonder if he was so riddled with spiritual pride that he couldn’t see others and what they did for his massive concentration on his own doings. Why had he never used this strength to subdue the wrath of fiercer men who overawed him with violent appearances?

  JUSTICE The Dobber took an early look at the break. Most men spat only when he’d gone past. Some spoke to him, feeding him casual words that he might be grateful for. Those who prize chance information find people keep feeding them chance information, and that was all the Dobber got. He would like to have pinned the blame to some person, because persons bleed and he liked blood. All he got was stress and metal fatigue.

  He tried his luck with the Sumpsucker who came on day shift at seven.

  ‘All I know is I heard a bloke say he saw a fitter belting the line with a fourteen-pound hammer one day. Where? Well, near the place it bust, of course.’

  The Sumpsucker’s idea was that there was always a grain of truth in any charge made. Any smear overheard by him was a real smear and by the time he sent it on its way, swollen and loud, it became a reason for arson, lynching, and the burning of wooden crosses. Engineering promptly rapped the fitters over the knuckles by limiting their overtime.

  EFFLUXION OF TIME That afternoon the X-ray technicians should have been busy for four hours round the section of line that burst: instead, it was five days before they were seen.

  It seemed as if everyone wanted to stop the plant. The fitters, in the sulks, went off the job till they got their overtime back. The company floundered about looking for someone to blame. The operators started fishing around for openings on other, softer plants, approaching the Good Shepherd as the softest touch with an almost maiden shyness, the shyness they showed when it came to filling in transfer application forms and showing their ages. Just as women know that their market value as sex prisoners is affected adversely by rising age, so these industrial prisoners were in deathly fear of being led out of their prison without the means of surviving in the cruel world outside as their bodily strength was starting to fail, the frequency of their sick days to increase and their confidence to evaporate.

  PAID TO POTTER Why didn’t Puroil put them off for a few weeks while the plant was down? That was the question the white shirts were asking.

  Their degree of mechanization prevented it. The plants needed very few men to run them, but without these few they couldn’t run at all. If they were put off, those most likely to get another job were the brighter men. If the brighter ones were kept on and the others put off, the others would call them all out, since the brighter ones on the job were rarely prominent in the Union.

  Puroil had to keep them lounging about or run the risk of having no competent men to start the plants. Of course if all the men were on the staff and paid enough to exempt them from trade union coverage, they would need fewer men. And if such men were trained fitters and instrument mechanics, the maintenance problem would be solved. High-salaried experts, no foremen: the future. In Puroil’s English refinery it was the present: unlucky refugees from this system were being taken on at Clearwater. And what would the redundant men do? That was not Puroil’s worry. In the meantime, fourteen men a shift were paid to keep out of the way.

  TRENDSETTER From the back window of the locker-room the Samurai saw the Mercedes of the Wandering Jew stop and decant the great man himself. As he watched he pulled out his notebook.

  The Wandering Jew was hailed by a group of second-level management bodies. Reluctantly he changed course. A dozen alert men were grouped round the spot visited earlier by Stillsons, who had not notified his find. Water was still coming up through the ground, but nothing tangible found. All in the group were bending, putting fingers in water, putting fingers in mouths, tasting and pronouncing. With gravity.

  ‘Brackish.’

  ‘Fresh.’

  ‘Salt.’

  ‘Salt.’

  ‘Fresh.’

  ‘Salt to brackish.’

  ‘Salt contaminated with fresh.’

  ‘Brackish.’

  It was the Wandering Jew’s turn. He tasted. ‘Fresh,’ he said.

  The remaining men took their turn.

  ‘Fresh.’

  ‘Fresh.’

  ‘Fresh.’

  ‘Fresh.’

  THE EXPERIMENT The Boy Wonder, risen from the ranks in the laboratory to be an engineer, buttonholed the Samurai. The Samurai enjoyed his nonsense; he was bright enough not to take Puroil seriously. He often passed on little items of news from the Termitary.

  ‘Did you know the universe is a gigantic lab?’ he said in his casual, unemphatic way, a refined management version of the old convict manner of speaking from the side of the mouth. ‘And our earth is one small wing of the lab for training the Maker’s research students. A viewing station for their sightseeing visitors from other planets. You know what they describe as one of our outstanding characteristics? I’ll tell you: “The subjects perform in the machinery, sometimes, but their most revealing actions are first that they make no concerted effort to destroy the apparatus on which they are forced to perform, and second they accept their prisons as part of nature, surroundings perfectly natural to which they adapt themselves and which become part of them.”’

  The Boy Wonder prudently silenced himself as men of higher status approached, asking for Stillsons. The Samurai grinned at his prudence.

  PRUNING No one ever got up and said, ‘Okay. We’re cutting you down. You’ll do the work with half the men.’ Instead, they let rumours do it, in a refinery complex whose individual plants were in all stages of newness, and whose star plant, the cracker, hadn’t got going beyond a few days.

  The men themselves helped, carrying rumours to their own men, trying to be important with something new to tell, trying to chip little bits off each other. The rumours were never happy, they always hurt.

  On the heels of the pruning of maintenance men and instrument mechanics came rumours of plans to reduce plant manning figures. They were convinced they could earn more money by spending less. And someone thought the rumours would show up the men’s reaction. An experiment on live animals. The Samurai made several phone calls to local Councils, Progress Associations, Ratepayers’ Protection Associations and newspapers, telling of these reduction plans, mentioning the size of the plants and the number of gasoline tanks, and inviting guesses as to the extent of any fires and damage resulting from processes that got out of control because of the lack of a few men in an emergency. The rumours of manning cuts stopped. Nothing more was heard.

  THE CURE The Wild Bull of the Pampas had got thin suddenly and started doing funny things in the lab. He went to a doctor, asking for a sedative. The doctor went to another room and rang the police. They took the Wild Bull away. Now he was back from hospital after three months’ treatment—electrodes, needles, the works. His wary cat-stepping walk was gone, he blundered healthily in to work, yelling cheerfully to people he thought he knew, drugged to the eyeballs and three stone heavier.

  THE JUMP Slackie in a ferocious temper crashed a great three-foot wheel key against the sides of the regen
erator.

  The foreigners had it in for him, did they? Well, he’d never kowtowed to foreign bastards and he wasn’t going to start now. Trouble was, when you got out of the ranks there was no Union to protect you. Granted the Union was weak as piss, but it was some protection. Without it, this rotten mob could do as they liked. Anyone who thought they wouldn’t was crazy. It was night shift and he couldn’t be seen; the process noise drowned the sound of his fury. The plant was getting back up again. He kept up his hitting for a good five minutes. He had used an axe in the bush once and acted now as if he wanted to chop this metal giant down.

  The foreigners said they wanted the Sump in and Slackie out. He couldn’t become an operator again: the company wouldn’t allow it, he might spread things he’d come to know, the way bosses spoke about operators. The men wouldn’t have him back now he’d been on the side of the enemy. Promotion was a one-way ladder. You had to jump off: you couldn’t climb down.

  A few tears of self-pity came into his little screwed-up eyes as he bashed and bashed. He was a big man, but he had no buttocks. His trousers fell away behind him straight down from the small of his back to his heels. Slack-arse, they called him.

  INCENTIVE Two months, and the plant was up again. Day time. From the top vents the usual five tons a day of fine catalyst spread over the suburbs. There was a ring of white shirts up one end of the control room.

  ‘What’s the panic today?’ asked the Samurai, just in from ducking round the redhot glowing catalyst flowpipes.

  ‘Remember the pressure balance valve? And how we told them it was crook while we were shut down?’ reminded the Humdinger. ‘I reported that every shift for three weeks. What’s up now?’

  ‘It’s the fashion now to worry about it jamming.’

  ‘We know it sticks. You can work it from in here while she’s not going, but when the heat gets to it it won’t move.’

  ‘Why don’t you write to the shareholders?’ said the Humdinger sarcastically. The Samurai smiled his smallest smile.

  ‘I wonder who they are.’ No share registers disclosed the names behind the holding trusts or even the trusts themselves.

  These men conveniently forgot Australia was being developed by overseas capital; the country owed its position to the greed of foreigners. But the Samurai couldn’t leave it at that. He advanced on the group of white shirts. These jokers know so much more than I do of the theoretical work behind a catalytic cracking plant, he said to himself, it’d break the heart of anyone who really cared about the total effort here to see things like this happen. What they needed was one man to give his paper work to a stooge, then go out and control the plant. The trouble was, paper was so powerful that paper stooges became bosses. No wonder, in a place that said ‘The memo is the lifeblood of the organization.’ He detached Bomber Command from the ring and asked if the conference was about the pressure valve.

  ‘It is,’ said Bomber cordially. ‘And don’t forget to let us have any suggestions you have. The more we have thinking of these problems the better. You could even make a few dollars out of it if you put your suggestions up to the PRO.’ There was a scheme by which a prisoner might be rewarded with cash if his suggestion was adopted. Trusties and higher were expected to give their suggestions free, so there was often a staff brainwave put on paper by a slave and the reward halved.

  ‘Forget the dough,’ he growled. ‘Why not shave an eighth of an inch off the butterfly, all round, next time we crash?’ He was about to go on when he saw the eyes of his superior officer glaze. He wasn’t listening. Nothing the crap suggested could be good. Stop talking, the Samurai commanded himself. Don’t think. Shut up. Forget it. He walked away.

  A week later, when he got over it, he approached one of the engineers, a little higher up the ladder, with the same suggestion.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You don’t understand. I have to go through channels. I’d like to be able to go up to the Wandering Jew and say, Look, I know how to fix it. But if I go over my superior’s head, the Python, I’ll get arseholed to some crap job. He’ll have the knife in forever after.’

  ‘Why not tell him, then?’

  ‘Tell him? I’m not a fool! Any suggestion I give him goes up as his suggestion, he takes the credit and next staff meeting he hauls us over the coals for having no brains. If I get up and say he pinched it I’ll get an even worse posting. And the others won’t support me or they’ll get the same. Besides, they’d be glad to see me downed. We’re competitors.’

  ‘God help us.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I said this or I’ll deny every word. But it’s a relief to get it off my chest.’

  ‘With no kick coming, too.’ The Samurai stared at him in disgust, but the man felt no shame and didn’t lower his eyes. His livelihood was at stake, he had to be gutless to survive.

  ‘I can’t even tell these things to my wife. She might spill it to the other wives. They all listen to try and pick up something for their own husbands to use against each other. And the joke is, we have to mix constantly. Anyone who stays outside the circle is suspect. Not only that, he gets behind in the gossip.’

  The Samurai laughed. This man had spent six years getting a degree from a qualifications factory and he was on a treadmill as shameful as that trodden by the lowest prisoner. At least they could go home and never have to see their workmates till they came back to work.

  ‘I won’t tell your secrets. You’ve got enough to worry about.’

  Eighteen weeks and three crashdowns later, an eighth of an inch was shaved from the butterfly inside the valve. The Python thought of it himself, he said to the Wandering Jew, and the Good Shepherd squirmed. Silently.

  THE ANGRY ANT The Angry Ant was practising a few tricks on the Foxboro instruments that controlled the boilers. He was changing the flow instruments from automatic to maximum flow on hand control, to automatic set point control, to manual set point control, then the level instruments to manual. Back again. Level instruments to auto, flow controllers from manual set point to auto set point, to hand control to auto with the over-rider limiting maximum flow.

  The plant was wide open to any man who wanted to learn. True, you had to teach yourself, for chemical engineers wouldn’t speak with authority on instrument functions, and instrument engineers didn’t want to be quoted on plant operation. When new instruments were installed no one higher than prisoners—or Sump—was game to ask how they worked: the installing engineer might mention who had asked. When that happened everyone would jeer at such ignorance, though no one in the jeering group knew either. But no one knew they didn’t know. But for the men there was always the Sump. It was a toss-up whether the other foremen despised him more for his steamy morals and his widow stories or because he would tell what he knew of process, instruments, emergency procedures, past failures, suspect valves. Most behaved like transplants from the closed communities of the Old World. Tell ’em nothing. Don’t let ’em get your guts. Clam up. Speak Welsh when strangers come in.

  The Ant was teaching himself, as the Humdinger had done, with the Samurai’s help. These men were exceptions. Back and forth the Ant went, from auto to manual and back to auto; again and again. The Samurai and Humdinger pretended not to look; they were pleased someone was interested. The more men knew all the jobs, the better plant it would be. Of course, Ant wanted to get away from the turbo-expanders, too. Most ran past those machines, just in case.

  When he had had long enough at the panel, Humdinger suddenly grabbed Angry from behind and bit his ear passionately. Angry’s chemistry was not upset at the time and he responded mildly, wriggling free. Humdinger was playful, bit the other ear, licked his neck, fiddled with his overalls and grappled with him, trying to tickle him into a girlish fit of giggles. He worked his hands round the lips of his pelvis, digging into the pelvic cavity.

  ‘Beat it, Dinger,’ said Angry, but couldn’t shake him loose.

  ‘I’ll fix you, Ant!’ said the Humdinger, and s
queezed out a sound.

  ‘What was that?’ shrieked Angry fearfully, trying to tear free.

  ‘The mating call of the lost tribes of Israel.’

  Slug suddenly appeared through the door and made for the Humdinger. ‘Come on! Today you go to the flare!’

  There was such venom in his voice that the Humdinger burst into tears and pretended to wet himself. For a moment young Angry thought the sobs were genuine—until he shoved two fingers of his right hand under the Slug’s nose and said, ‘Guess who?’ Humdinger was selected because the others couldn’t be found. They were out hiding on the structures or on their backs somewhere.

  ‘What’s up you this morning?’ Angry Ant walked after Slug. He followed him into the office and bailed him up against the far wall like an Alsatian bailing up a postman.

  ‘If the Enforcer gets down here and Humdinger’s not on his way to the flare, where will we be then?’

  ‘Where will we be?’ asked the Angry Ant.

  ‘I’ll tell you where I’ll be!’ Slug screamed hysterically. ‘I’ll get the kick right up the arse! That’s where! It’s all right for you blokes, you got the Union to look after you! I got no one! No bastard’ll help me. I give up Union protection to take this job and do in six hundred dollars in the first year and what for?—’

  ‘To wear that dustcoat. You’ll sell your mother for a white collar. And if ever you slimed your way into a Shift Super’s job you’d think your shit didn’t stink!’ He walked out. The Ant was small and shiny, sharp and fierce. He knew Slug couldn’t be insulted.

  Five minutes later Slug was back, handing out notebooks and pens to try to get on side. The notebooks were slightly used, he needed a lot of stationery for his business records and wrote on anything handy. The Ant refused. The Slug’s hands were pawing each other, both limp; his head set well down inside his shirt and those bright senseless eyes staring unwinking. He looked as if he might perform his heart attack stunt just for the sympathy of one man. As he shuffled away, he left on the ground a shiny track.