The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  ‘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.

  How ugly their lives were, but they were men. It was easy to think of them as expendable items in a company’s cost structure, yet they were men.

  Why was life so terrible to them? Life was magnificent! All because of the tiny spark that provided the difference between men and the other animals, by which men invent the contents of the cans stacked high in the drink hut and by which they shout defiance at death while they have an arm round the old grey fellow and mock the sharpness of his blade.

  He slowly swallowed several pints, enjoying every drop, savouring the gassy sharpness on the sides of his tongue. He himself was not so far from the closer hug of that grey old chap. He thought of death as a vast sea lapping the shores of the world, larger than the land and largely unregarded by the teeming life on the land.

  He was alone for some time that day and sank into a mood of quiet self-pity. Waiting for the axe to fall. To think a little bastard like the Wandering Jew could pass on commands from the other side of the world and kick him out.

  And once, after many waves of amber had passed over him, he stood in the door of the hut and called out aloud to all of them: ‘You are my children—the extensions of my nerves, my arms, heart, brain, and all my awareness—through you I feel the world. Don’t change—be your own selves.’ But in the quiet of himself he knew they hated each other, competing for the available jobs and the overtime. The company hated having to employ them, but was itself composed of individuals split into stockaded departments which thought of themselves first and the rest second. Neither men nor masters thought of the community, and why would they? At any moment they or the community might dissolve in economic or military disaster. They had no morale or ideology to live by beyond personal survival. Was this all their civilization amounted to? Was this why they desperately ransacked past cultures—trying to find something they’d forgotten? Something to live by.

  Afternoon drifted into the mangroves like a gas.

  GORDIAN KNOT (INTERNAL) The Samurai was thinking moodily to himself. The boobs higher up had offered him a foreman’s job. He was to go up for an interview in a week’s time. He would be on holidays, but there was no point in telling them. The word had spread among the prisoners and instead of finding men ready to oppose him because of his possible defection to the white-shirted enemy, they were lying down in the dust before him and the other prospects like mongrel dogs. He could accept this job, carry on for a month or two, then with the benefit of his new status get a job with the refineries that were rumoured to be putting up their equipment new and not trying to economize by cutting corners on standby plant and less instrumentation. But were they different? This was Australia and now; the country was being developed by foreigners, the natives were no different.

  Or he could leave the whole thing, leave the crowded city and go. Where? There was nowhere to go. Only copies of Puroil.

  Into the control room came the Wandering Jew and several understrappers escorting an extremely tall, white-haired, magnificently suited gentleman. From house journals the Samurai recognized the Australian chairman of directors. The party stopped near some reactor instruments and explanations were eagerly offered by the lowest-ranking engineer. When the Samurai got near them the talk got mysteriously quieter. It stopped.

  ‘Did I hear you say the reactor feed system was OK?’ he asked. They ignored him and went to walk on. He barred the way with his body. Flesh and blood opposed the might of money.

  ‘Your hot and cold feed system is entirely at the mercy of the foremen in another section, and until you get gasoline coolers that’ll work in a warm climate instead of only in Europe, it doesn’t matter what your feed system is. Through-put is being kept down by a cooling system that’s only suited to a cold climate and it’s been that way for five years.’

  He was facing the inhumanly elegant chairman and looked into his eyes. The black pupils of the colourless eyes looked down on him, but instead of seeing a tiny reflection of his own face he saw a moving line of hooks from which hung live sheep travelling towards a slaughterman who slit each throat. So this was an abattoirs. A sheep confronted the chairman of the abbatoirs. What was the point of talking about refining processes? This man didn’t want to know. If the cost figure was too big he’d sacrifice a few sheep to propitiate the seven foreign gods. The eyes looked away and over his head, searching for other eyes on a level similar to their own.

  Why should this make a difference to the Samurai and to his hate for the company? Did he hate the company? Of course, why otherwise would he be still holding down the gasoline make? But was it the company he hated? Was it only a personal grudge?

  Was it the fact that he had only prison to look forward to? Or was it the collective stupidity that still made a mess of what could have been an even smoother production process? Without answering his questions, he solved the problem of what attitude to take.

  He walked outside and pinched in an air line, a slim copper line encased with a dozen others in a metal track, through which air signals travelled to control points. It was so simple to pinch one of them flat with a valve key.

  WE ARE NOT AMUSED The Great White Father walked in
to the cracker control room and hailed the Samurai, but the Sumpsucker, seeing a third person, tackled the Samurai boldly about the notebook he’d just slipped into his pocket. Besides, the Samurai might soon be a foreman and a competitor; he could afford to be on his hammer.

  ‘What’s on all those notes you write?’

  The Samurai looked into his eyes and through them to the landscape in the Sumpsucker’s head, a country teeming with breasts and buttocks, armpits and pubic hair of all colours and the word Yes endlessly repeated, with here and there a Puroil advertising poster for dignity—and announced, ‘A book, Sumpy. I’m writing a book on the company. You’re in it. We’re all in it.’ If he could tell what he had seen.

  ‘They won’t like that. You better be careful. You can’t do what you like with the company.’ The words spewed out in a babble. They laughed at them, but Sumpy saw nothing to laugh at.

  ‘I wonder what your slant is,’ said the Great White Father. ‘You’re not against this’—he waved an arm round at the evidences of progress—‘this rubbish. You’re for it. You try to get it to work better. You’re a company man.’

  ‘I’m an industrial man. And yes, I want the filthy place to work. I want the whole army of industry to work.’

  ‘There you are, then. You’re one of them. Production is your god.’

  ‘You, too. You help them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Taking the mob’s attention from grievances—making them forget. Oblivion. Stupor.’

  ‘A side effect. My way is like religion, which offers Eternal Life and gets its followers to train for it now. I offer Eternal Oblivion and my followers can have it now.’

  The Great White Father announced to his disciples a further refinement to the comforts of the Home Beautiful. The Humdinger had once been a Navy cook in real life but he had also been a telephone technician for three years. He swiped a phone and ran hundreds of yards of wire down to the drink hut.

  ‘We are in communication with reality,’ said the leader. ‘You lift and dial and the world will say hello.’

  23

  MAKING LIFE BEARABLE

  DAYMARE The Samurai on his way home with holiday pay in his pocket pictured Blue Hills’ wife in his room stabbing darts into his photograph—the pathetic black and white snapshot unframed on a landlord’s mantelpiece—and tearing his clothes to shreds. These mental pictures seemed to reach down into him and stir something hot and violent, as violent as his hatred of the inanimate thing that employed him.

  When he got to his room she was there. But not torturing his picture or damaging his clothes.

  THE LEOPARD ‘Why?’ It was hardly a question, more an accusation. ‘Why don’t you want to see me?’ And the inevitable, ‘Don’t you love me?’

  Unwillingly he dragged out words and held them up before his face like shields.

  ‘Sure I liked you. When you were someone else’s wife. Now he’s gone. I’d be more satisfied if I’d killed him, but he went of his own accord. He’s gone; you’ll never belong to me, you were his bedmate too long.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said in a low voice, and when he made no answer, ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I’m not interested in whether you understand,’ he said as calmly and savagely as he could. ‘I was only interested in you when I was taking you from someone. I don’t want anyone for nothing. I can’t get a kick out of it.’ He was pleased, he had put it more brutally than he thought possible.

  He felt a warm sense of power as she quietly cried. Her soft body, even now hinting future flabbiness, was bowed under a great weight. Power was his, he felt it through every limb. This was the way to become one with the gods—assuming the power to destroy.

  No one provokes me with impunity, he repeated to himself. The words had a slightly hollow ring, but not enough to make him pull them back. And the worst thing was he felt she was taking no notice of what he was saying, merely assuming he was using words as she would have used them if she wanted to hurt him. She did not take the words, examine their literal meaning and take it that that was what he meant. To her, words meant nothing; they were merely signals, or sticks to hit with and show anger.

  ‘I won’t go away. I love you and you’ll have to put up with me,’ she wailed in her best accents, making a successful attempt to look dainty. There was a little of steel in her voice, though.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll kill you?’

  ‘You don’t understand. If you don’t want me I’d rather you killed me. If you murdered me it wouldn’t be like murder. I could die with your hands round my throat. And if you shoot me, stand up close and let me look in your eyes as you do it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You enjoy the idea.’

  ‘It will show that you care if you can’t bear to let me live.’ She knew he didn’t understand.

  Words. Killing her would only be necessary if she didn’t go away when he wanted her to and take her place in his past. Not forgotten, but in a spare room in his mind, to be looked at and remembered when he felt like it. Oh yes, he had himself under control.

  ‘Doesn’t it mean anything? I love you, I love you!’ Now she was using love as a club, beating him over the head. ‘I love you, I love you!’ Trying to bludgeon him to his knees. He should have shut her up with kisses, stopped her mouth with something. Instead, he answered her.

  ‘I’m not looking for people to love me! I’m looking for people I can love! I want to lose myself in a great cloud of love, not wait like a woman while others grovel to me.’ He had caught her disease of words, elevating a little sexual pleasure into a philosophy and a way of life.

  ‘When you were in me you said you loved me. It was a lie,’ she said bitterly in a low voice, hoping to get a foot in the door by changing her tactics.

  ‘I told you the truth, but not all the truth. This is the rest of the truth—leaving you behind. It’s finished.’ But it was useless to make a wall with words to hold back her tide. She plunged right on as if his words had no substance, right through them.

  Finally he got away from her. Once outside, he remembered it was his room he’d left.

  A REVOLTING IMAGE He drove about in his car for an hour, hoping she’d be gone when he returned. As he headed for home, he passed Puroil a few hundred yards away. He stopped the car and looked at the scattered piles of steel that were coherent plants with flow schemes and feed-rates and product lines; men were moving about on the ground and on the structures. They were tiny from this distance and moved slowly, laboriously. Aphids perhaps? Insects living on the money plant and being milked by stronger insects?

  No. Maggots. Maggot men moving in the body of the company.

  FUNGOID GROWTHS He drove on further, stopped and looked again at the refinery structures. This time the men were invisible. He held his hand up and the whole complex refinery was hidden by his little finger. A microscope—or rather a telescope—could have made the men visible; but now it wasn’t only that the men impressed him as maggots, but the plants themselves—the mass of silver tanks and tangled columns and vessels and tanks again—were great lumps of grey and silver fungus sprouting from the earth. How small they must be from Alpha Centauri.

  He turned his eyes westward to the hills, the Blue Mountains. Tree-covered. Fungus of a different and more ancient type, but more deeply implanted in his blood than the steel he saw to the east.

  If only he had—owned, clutched to his breast—part of this ancient land. For his own. Possessions were illusory, death was always near, but if he could have a share in this land. Not for eternity, just for life. But no. Possessions were not him. He dismissed ownership.

  A DANGEROUS MAN And what of the men born to be dwarfed by this steel that mushroomed overnight and compelled them to attend it until it was strong and capable and clever enough to do without them? What had he given them? A wire toastrack he formed with his own hands. That was all. What would become of them?

  They could not chalk up to their credit their part in the enor
mous quantities of gasoline made on the plant: no one could. The oil was simply lying underground, waiting to be taken, changed, used, burned. Once the refining plant was assembled, the rest could just as easily be supervised by machines. The plant itself made the gasoline; humans were plant accessories.

  And yet, when he was dispensed with, and others like him, how was society to cope? They must be kept off the streets. He had never been on a bread line and did not know despair. No residual shackle scars itched his ankles. And precisely this sort of man was most dangerous: more likely to take violent action over a few petty inconveniences, a few slights. Men had been beaten to their knees before without effective retaliation, but they had been men to whom this servile position was familiar: men like the Samurai and a whole generation after him would be fighting guerrilla warfare in the streets long before they considered sinking to their knees.

  POLICY SPEECHES Something had to be done to wake them out of this torpor. Through whom could it be done? Not through the toilers: they were a pitiful lot. They needed the pain and discipline of control, they invited control of their lives down to the smallest detail. By themselves they were capable of nothing. No leader in the world could get them together.

  Only through those who moved the world would unity come to the prisoners. A new wave of oppression would bottle up the working people—their ranks growing as more and more felt the lash of privation and realized they were what they were: chattels at the disposal of others—and the resultant pressure under this repressive lid would blow the pot sky-high. With new nations growing strong around her, Australia was dreaming off to death. Repression, poverty, even terror: that was the recipe.

  The whole kettle would blow up. These somnolent chattels would be forced to become political beings. They would begin to be alive—in hate, it is true—but alive nevertheless.

  This internal pressure and hate would strengthen the country’s arms. It would begin to save itself, as a drowner makes superhuman efforts, hitting out at anything in his way.