The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  MCONAN EFFICIENCY When the high-pressure steam line relieved itself by blowing up, the compressor which relied most heavily on this steam was at a loss to know how to carry on. Its job was to compress gasoline vapours from the top of the fractionating column from one to twenty kilos.

  When the supply of steam dropped, the machine’s speed slid ungracefully down and came to rest unnoticed on the higher of its two critical speeds, between 4800 and 5300 revs. Here it stayed for a few minutes. Next it felt faint and moved on down to the second critical speed, between 2800 and 3100 rpm. The machine knew no better, but when skilled operators were handling it, they contrived to hurry the machine through these two speed ranges, otherwise damage might be done.

  Since most of the men were outside during the emergency, and those in the control room were provided with only two hands per man, some things were not noticed in the panic. The machine surged badly, sucking and blowing and grinding like an otherworldly beast landed on an alien shore and dying hard; unheard because of the greater noise made by the high pressure steam. The rotor was bent. The ordinary operators blamed the total lack of maintenance. The engineering boys, safe behind their dividing wall, blamed the operators for carelessness and inefficiency.

  The Boy Wonder, trying to do himself some good, suggested a spare rotor be drawn from the warehouse. Right away. A group of lowest-grade prisoners heard this suggestion and laughed raucously, derisively, triumphantly.

  ‘Spares!’ roared the Samurai with unfamiliar gusto. ‘Don’t kid an old digger! This mob won’t carry spares.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they might not use them! So what happens when catalyst eats through a valve? Or a pressure drop gets rid of half the catalyst out through the turbo-expander vent valves? You shut down and lose forty thousand dollars a day profit!’

  ‘It can’t be that high,’ said Canada Dry. ‘They told us that was gross.’

  ‘It’s one hundred thousand dollars a day gross. After excise, overhead, cost of production and distribution and so on, it’s forty thousand a day on a one thousand ton a day yield of gasoline out the ass of the debutanizer.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Boy Wonder. ‘But. Take today. Forty thousand dollars, you say. Then there’s wages, cost of machinery, maintenance, advertising, cost of construction, all of which is over forty million dollars. Therefore there’s no profit today. Take tomorrow. You say forty thousand. Take off the forty million and there’s no profit tomorrow. Same the next day. And forever. You can’t argue with figures. They keep the figures, they’ll never let you into their private ledger. They bump up artificially the landed cost of their crude so there is no profit. Every day that forty million has to come off. They only stay in business to keep us in a job. You just don’t realize how good-hearted they are.’

  ‘Why don’t you see someone about the rotor?’ Canada asked the Boy Wonder.

  ‘Who?’ He spread his pink and white palms not yet soiled with work. With reasonable luck they would stay that way all his life.

  ‘Someone high up.’

  ‘There is no one high enough up to make a decision like that. They have to refer everything to AHQ or Europe. And they mustn’t be bothered with details. No one’s responsible.’

  He didn’t believe these men, though he appeared to agree. Their words were the vapourings of the lower orders. Why did they worry, anyway? They were collecting their pay each week. He followed up his own idea and made a personal appearance at the warehouse so he wouldn’t be fouled up by some office Jack on the phone.

  There were no spares. A sixty-dollar clerk in the warehouse determined, on rate of usage, the spares held in stock. None had so far been used, so he ordered none. There were far too many brands and countries of origin and makes of equipment used to make it economical to have spares for everything. The engineers had heard of standardized equipment, but they had no say in the ordering of materials. That was another department. There was no central materials pool that each oil company could go to.

  Several years before this—before such a large addition to the old ramshackle refinery as the catalytic cracking complex had been built—an efficiency team had been through the company. It was imported from the country acknowledged the most powerful in the world for the eight years from 1945 to Sputnik. The McOnan team went round the Puroil world and came up with one important directive which had a great bearing on all subsequent Clearwater disasters. They saw money tied up in materials stored in warehouses and out in paddocks, so they worked out a magnificent simplification of materials policy. First, anything not used in two years had to be scrapped. Second, only essential spares were to be kept.

  The people who had the say on what were essential spares were bodies high up in the Termitary who knew that the working, dirty, grease-covered end of the refinery existed and had even been to visit its more civilized parts once or twice, but this was the extent of their knowledge of the way the refinery actually limped along. A turbine rotor had a life of many years, certainly more than two, so there were no spares. When one was needed for the German machine, it had to come from West Germany and delivery took six months. There was no spare rotor for the air compressor—that took four months to be ordered, made, and delivered from Scotland. No bearings for the German turbine or compressor.

  When one rotor was bent, it was straightened and another ordered, then the straightened rotor used till the new one arrived. It packed up three months before the new one arrived, so the place was down for a major overhaul. The new one came, was bent inside a month, the old bent one re-installed. Then that was bent. Meanwhile, old bearings were continually being put back in this magnificent machine, with predictable results. Only one new set of bearings could be ordered at one time and Materials Division were enjoying a new surge of strength at International Board level, and made it hard for Engineering to draw the new set. After all, it was an economy plant. For some reason it was easier to lose money on production hold-ups than to change a blanket policy on spares.

  SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN Everyone forgives a large organization its mistakes, but forgiveness should not extend indefinitely.

  Instrument fittings for pneumatic instruments last a long time, so there’s not much turnover, but when they do pack up, it’s desirable to have a replacement ready; that is if it’s desirable to keep the process going. Some instruments, however unfortunate this may be, are key instruments. One such part went phut; the stock minimum was eight; since there had been no movement in those parts for two years, the lot had been scrapped according to policy, which at stock control level had the force of regulations. Since this was an emergency—a plant process halted—a part was brought in by special messenger, but materials division objected: there would have to be eight parts bought in addition, to keep the stock requirement up to minimum since there had been movement in the stock. At the end of two more years, these hardy parts had shown no further movement, so the eight parts were scrapped again. Because of the vertical division between materials and operations departments, the stock boys didn’t care a hoot, didn’t even know what the part was for; the operation laddies didn’t know when the two years commenced or whether or if their parts were in danger of scrapping. They had no access to the records or the warehouse. After all, that was a different department. What did they expect, exceptions? Policy must be uniform, or something might get tangled.

  At night the prisoners’ talk turned naturally to these matters of high policy.

  ‘I used to work up in that rathouse,’ said Stretch. He meant the warehouse. He’d had to go because of an earlier redundancy policy when the clerks were easier to manage. ‘I’ll tell you about the turkeys. Did I ever tell you about the turkeys? You know the Spotted Trout—the PR boozer—well he was providoring a tanker and made a blue on his order form, this was before he was promoted to PRO; he got three thousand turkeys for their Christmas dinner. He put thirty on the order form. He meant thirty, but the stock unit was a hundred. They ate turkey for three months at sea, you
should’ve seen the refrigerated trucks arriving at the wharf, there was a line of them half a mile long but it was too late to turn them back. The drivers wouldn’t have gone, anyway. That’s when they sent him up to this heap of old iron.’

  ‘Three thousand turkeys!’ snorted one of the Europeans, opening up a bit while no bosses were about. ‘That’s nothing!’ Then the man, only a fortnight off naturalization, let loose with his conversation stopper.

  ‘I was in a small refinery inland from Buenos Aires and we have to run some lines from the refinery to the new well-head booster station, and with the new lines go the telephone. So. We need thirty thousand telephone poles. You know where they get them? Eh?’

  ‘Tell us, Aussie!’ said the Humdinger. The Two Pot Screamer took out a piece of paper at this point and loosened his pencil in its holster.

  ‘They get them from Sweden!’ bellowed the man. ‘Across the Atlantic Ocean, thirty thousand telephone poles forty foot long, the best pine from Sweden! Then they take these thirty thousand poles out to put them in the earth, but there is no earth. It is ground. Hard as rock. Rock-hard ground! You know what they do then? They get thirty thousand concrete poles forty foot long, and put the concrete poles in. Good! Fine! Beautiful! Then they think what is going to happen if one of the bosses comes out and sees thirty thousand pine poles forty foot long hanging round in a field and nowhere to go. So they take them out and dig a pit and burn them in the pit and cover them over. But one of the materials bosses comes. He looks up the stocks and the stock-code numbers and he can’t find thirty thousand pine telephone poles in stock so he orders thirty thousand more! He didn’t bother to ask and no one was going to chip him or he’d have got them arseholed for insolence and insubordination, so they finish up with another thirty thousand pine telephone poles from Sweden and they’re still there!’

  GO BACK, DAVID The Old Lamplighter took over duty in a blaze of light. The bed hut was inclined to be dark even in the day, so she switched on all lights.

  ‘What I won’t do with the lights on I won’t do at all,’ she said.

  It was a puritan thing, this insistence on seeing what she did and making others see what they were doing. Fortunately for her, she had never been pushed into the excesses of feeling that were explored by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Neither her men nor her own occasional lusts had put her in any danger of self-revulsion. Not even the newly acquired skills of the men who were led by the hand into the magic garden prepared by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and who took to it well. Some did not, of course, and went away scared and ashamed, too bemused to notice her take out the blue notebook and write up her sensations.

  But the usual effect of the light on men who were accustomed to sex in darkness—with wives, maybe, who didn’t want their faces and filled the dark with faces from the movies or the past—was a bracing, tonic one. They felt no need of refinements beyond the stark surroundings of the bed shed. The bareness of the corrugated iron, the one mirror, the Dettol dish, the nail-holes, these made the women’s bodies softer and more lush to prisoners whose hands daily patted the throbbing sides of pump bodies, searching out vibrations that hinted that machinery had been run nearly to destruction, or wrestling in six-man teams with crowbars and levers on hot valves that didn’t want to move.

  She went to the door and yelled. ‘Who’s lucky?’

  ‘Sump’s first!’ a voice came.

  ‘Tell him shake a leg!’ There was a sound of beer cans thrown into the wire crate the Volga Boatman brought home one night. Just standing there empty in the park, he explained. No use to anyone there.

  She turned her back on the light, as if she had company, and cleaned some lettuce from under her top denture. There was something more; she explored, pushed with her tongue, it was not enough. Irritably, she took both dentures out and tongued her gums. Several tomato seeds and half a peanut. She finished the peanut.

  The Sumpsucker. Him again. She had been a model at his old camera club, where most of the members had no cameras and there was a big turnover in models. He was married then. Keep her barefoot and pregnant, was his motto, but his wife got sick of both and left him after only two pregnancies, one of which she aborted. The first pregnancy was at high school now.

  She applied a little gin to her bottom, and spread the jellied poison over her diaphragm which was the largest size. She was a big woman, whichever way you looked.

  There was no knock, but the Sumpsucker was in the room suddenly, undoing buttons and reciting.

  How does the little prostitute

  Improve the shining hour?

  She rinses out her diaphragm

  But never takes a shower!

  His eyes flashed narrowly either side of his long, lumpy nose. He sniffed at the gin.

  She recoiled, in spite of her vast experience. She never liked chirpy customers; she preferred to have them approach diffidently and with scruples, then encourage their good spirits herself. Motherly inclinations.

  ‘You still use that thing? Get with the strength and use the pill!’

  How would he understand? The pill brought on her fits again.

  ‘This is the strength. The pill costs too much.’

  ‘You got the cash, spend some of it!’

  ‘I put on too much weight with it and it turns me off the job.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Put it in! Let’s commit spermicide!’

  ‘I hate gabby men.’

  ‘Do you hate money?’ Crinkling the dollars in his trousers, which he threw on the floor. He was very crude about money.

  ‘I believe the widow’s house is chock-a-block with big black drums.’ She couldn’t resist having a shot at him.

  ‘Only the back and sides. There’s room on the front lawn still.’

  Through the Sumpsucker’s performance she talked incessantly. She always refused to co-operate with him exactly—she said he hadn’t paid enough money for what he wanted—and there was his smell.

  ‘It’s funny when I’m home and I have to tell the kids to wash their hands after they play with the dog. Here I am with you dirty dogs all day and half the time I eat my lunch with no wash.’

  Her words came down from her mouth and through the mind of the Sumpsucker like trains through an empty station.

  ‘Is the Samurai on today?’ she asked, but getting no answer, pulled away from him until he answered.

  ‘Yes. He’s in,’ said the Sump, and fastened on to her again. Why had she said that? she wondered. What did she care for men? Just the same, why didn’t the Samurai come down to the Home Beautiful for the girls?

  Sumpy let her talk.

  ‘It’s funny. The family knows I do this. Remember the cruiser at Bobbin Head?’ She grabbed his ears and shook his head.

  ‘Sure. I remember.’ She was a big woman, six feet tall and very strong. If she had been a man the Sump would have been afraid of her. ‘You don’t still have fits, do you?’

  ‘No. Only a couple a year, now. Do you really remember Bobbin Head?’

  ‘My back remembers it. We were having a tread below decks and your son David comes looking for you. Where’s Mum? he yells and instead of waiting for an answer he jumps down the hatch right in the middle of my back. Hullo, Mum, he says. And you say, Go back, David. Do I remember? Neither of us could get our breath back. “Go back, David!”’ He mimicked her voice.

  She was gratified. Her son had been worried she might go into a fit, but the strange thing was the fits had come less often after he had seen her at it. Strange how you feel your children have a hold on you, forcing you to put on a good front.

  ‘I’ll have to have a shave soon.’ She glanced at her legs, black with stubble. Her armpit patch was long. A woman has so much maintenance. Men were lucky. Just their faces. Forgetting the Sumpsucker was there, she eased up one buttock.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You won’t take the Humdinger’s crown. He can clear a room.’

  Reflectively she picked
her nose with her little finger. The other fingers enlarge your nostrils, her mother told her. You don’t want to look like a native, do you? Mentally, she consulted her calendar. The twelfth. Should be on the twenty-fifth. That meant five days off work. If she could make sure of ten men a day until—that meant she wouldn’t notice the drop in money.

  ‘You finished?’

  ‘I was finished back at Bobbin Head.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something? I could be making a dollar! What do you want for five bucks, bed and breakfast?’ She shook him off like a helpless puppy.

  SITTING PRETTY Cheddar Cheese was dying and it showed. Those who saw him mistook his leukemia colour for shiftworker pallor, but the Brown Snake knew. The man still did his work, which required effort only now and then. He tired quickly. There was no way to sack him that could ensure an escape for Puroil from the most ruinous publicity. Leukemia-pity was the fashion then and newspapers might conceivably have published a story of cruelty to a leukemia-sufferer despite the threat of withdrawal of Puroil advertising from the newspapers and the radio and television stations they owned.

  He tried to have enough energy on hand once a week to visit the girls in the bed hut. This was his turn with the Old Lamplighter. She didn’t know about his blood. The doctors called it leukemia so he would have a word for it, but really it was a rare and extremely interesting disease; like leukemia in that it was terminal. They had been very excited when he took his blood along to the researchers, and enthusiastic when he agreed to sell.

  As soon as he was settled, he said, ‘I’m sitting pretty! I sell my blood to a scientist!’