‘Phone for Ambrose.’
‘Ambrose!’
‘Where’s the poor silly bastard gone?’
‘Here I am.’
This phone was one of several on the interphone circuit, but also with an outside number, so it could be rung from outside without going through the switchboard. The Spotted Trout on the other end said, ‘This is the Python. I want you to shut off steam to the ethylene plant. This is an emergency. Right away.’
Ambrose said nothing, waiting to see if the Python had finished with him.
‘Do you know where the valve is? Out in the pipetrack at the south battery limit. Right away!’
The Trout hung up his phone at the Servicemen’s Club and went back to his whisky. Curse the company! The PR job would have suited him till he retired. Now he would be selling wine and spirits or machine parts again. Each ethylene plant crash cost Puroil several thousand dollars and worsening relations with the polythene manufacturers on the other end of the product line.
But what about the cracker? He had been so hasty he had overlooked the obvious plant to attack. Tomorrow, that was the ticket. One call a day. He enjoyed his whisky. He felt bigger, more of a man than he had felt for years now he was hitting back. He’d taken it for too long. Just a matter of picking a different nong each time. There were plenty.
Ambrose trotted happily out, saying nothing to the others. They rubbished him every chance they got, why should he always go back for more? He forgot his safety hat, of course, and came back for it, but he got to the steam valve and shut it. It was stiff, and when he finished and stood up, he saw the ethylene flare shoot up flames a hundred feet high burning to black smoke the jettisoned ethylene from the crashed plant. He didn’t know that, he was trying to think what he should do about his wife. Perhaps he should keep quiet, not worry her. Women had a lot to suffer. Everyone said so.
ONE THING AT A TIME The Corpse made a habit of whipping tank valves shut at the product tanks and opening them again, denying that he’d touched anything; hoping to cause a steady number of untraceable troubles. Today he performed his few little shut-offs against the cracker, back-pressuring the final gasoline-treating section, not causing much trouble. Getting back from day work to shift hours with its extra money wasn’t enough to blunt the edge of his resentment.
The trouble came when he had shut off once and looked round to hear the first rumbles from the slurry storage tank. This was such an urgent matter that he left the gasoline tank shut off. As he got near the slurry tank he could see the heat vapours rising from the unlagged sections of the line. He ran towards it.
TAKING STEPS ‘We’re back-pressured from the treating unit.’
‘Get someone to get the gasoline away.’
‘Stretch is here. You know what to do, Stretch?’
‘Sure.’ Off he went with great fearful strides, glad to be away from that end of the plant.
‘If only,’ wailed the Humdinger, ‘if only I had closed-circuit TV monitors here instead of operators, to show me the position outside on key valves! Eyes don’t have to walk outside.’
THE VICE OF CONFIDENCE After a short time of gaping at the plant and trying to follow process diagrams, SK had diagnosed one difficulty no one else had seen. His theory was that the pressure differential over the feed nozzles was too low. This was the cause of all the trouble. Fix that and you fix the lot.
He tried to interest others in this idea, but no one took any notice. He would fix it.
SKlation had no idea what he was doing, but he was not aware of this fact. He had the idea that any man who could drive a car, find his way to work and sign for his pay was equal to anything. He’d risen to foreman, hadn’t he? He looked round to see if anyone was watching, and began opening valves. All you need is confidence.
LIVING BY RULES Stretch loped in.
‘Can’t get it away. Our pump’s going but it’s just not getting away.’
‘Get on to the pumpers in the tank farm.’
Stretch went looking for a phone, came back.
‘Can’t get on to the Corpse. His offsider says he’s outside but as far as he knows everything’s all right.’
‘That’s no good. Get him out there to see what’s wrong. Then you better go back to your unit and try and do something about all that gasoline.’
Stretch went away.
‘You sure he knows what to do?’ a voice asked.
‘He’s been on it three years. He ought to.’
‘The Corpse’s offsider won’t go out.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’ve been told one of ’em has to stay by the phone all the time. The Python rang up Friday and couldn’t get an answer for an hour, so he brings in a new rule.’
‘How will they get all their tank dips—and do their blends and product movements?’
‘Easy. Make a new rule.’
A SURE FOOTING The Boardrider picked his way expertly over oil-covered metal gratings and green slurried concrete. Over at the base of the reactor he saw SKlation working on feed valves.
Feed valves? Automatically he walked towards the reactor. Admittedly it was out in the open and there was no guard on it, but safety at this spot was so vital that surely no one would mess round without proper knowledge and definite orders. Still, SK was a foreman now. Plant knowledge accompanied promotion automatically.
He changed direction and headed back to the control room. His section was OK; this mob didn’t pay you for doing more than your job, nor would they accept less than their own price for a gallon of juice. They gave nothing away, neither would he. Bugger SK. He turned his thoughts back where they belonged, to his dream of the Wave—the Wave gathering and curling for ever, never breaking, on an ocean without shore.
THE STORM BIRD The hot spot bubbled out. The bubble, though, was not quite ready to burst. What it needed was a sudden increase of pressure in the regenerator. Inside that bubble the regenerating fire blazed, burning coke from catalyst, to make it active again; productivity, prosperity, riches were in that fire. There was also hate. Unconfined, that fire could burn, maim, destroy the delicate humans tending it.
On the other end of the plant, Stretch lay on the ground. Congo Kid’s gas had got him.
The air bleed from the instrument standing under the skirt of the regenerator was whistling. Rustle of Spring was having a Sunday indoors and the high-pitched whistle sounded very like the call of a storm-cock indefinitely prolonged. It pierced right through to a very special Sunday nerve until he decided not to put up with it.
He fiddled with the instrument, the piercing noise died down. What he did, although he did not know this—the tiny knobs looked so innocent, so remote, so unlikely to be important—what he did was raise the setting on the instrument. It was a low-flow cut-in on the regenerator air. When the air flow (which was not now registered anywhere because of a three-month temporary breakdown of control-room instruments) fell to a point set on this outside instrument, an air signal was sent automatically to a steam cut-in valve, and steam poured into the regenerator to keep the catalyst in that vessel aerated.
The instrument setting was low, for safety, because the total air flow was not known, but Rustle of Spring soon moved the setting high enough.
ACUPUNCTURE Stillsons, in the shelter of his mother’s house in a nearby suburb turning slowly into a slum, watched from his bedroom window, waiting for it to be time to go to work again. He noticed the flares were big. The ethylene flare was huge.
‘Plant down,’ he judged aloud. He lay back, relaxed for a while. He couldn’t resist the pull of the plant, though, and sat up to look at the thick orange flame turning into billows of blue-black smoke.
He checked the time. Only seven hours twenty to go, and he’d be back there, safe inside the blue gates. He hoped the cracker would go down, too, now they’d shunted him off it. Humans are ferocious beasts; no one gets the kindness he deserves. He took a pin from his reactor cork—in his little model cracker—and jabbed it into the top seam o
f the fat regenerator cork. This was the champagne cork he’d found in the street: it had a nice round bulbous top, just like the regenerator.
THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE In his shooting days, One Eye used to head out for Nyngan and points west to hunt the harmless kangaroo. The skins had a little value for making toy koala bears.
In his more vicious moments he’d often wished a man could take a rifle to the footie and pot off players that dropped passes and missed tackles and stood around flat-footed. A man lost money on that sort of play. And referees, too, they needed a boot up the ginger. What was more to the point, his dry-cleaning business that he’d set his heart on for so long had failed. That was how he put it to himself; not that he had failed.
This fine Sunday, after the home team had been beaten again, he did take the rifle with him when he decided to roam round and look at Puroil again. All a man could see from outside the fence was the big plants, like the fearsome-looking cracker, high as a stack. He had never been down to that part of the works—a man couldn’t leave his own section—and he knew nothing about it, although his daily job required close co-operation with it. The good old days had only finally vanished when that damn heap of crap had been built.
He fitted the silencer his son had made at Technical College and aimed at the guy wire holding the battleship boiler stack. He didn’t hit it with any of his shots. What he hit was several hundred yards beyond—the high-pressure tapping line on the regenerator pressure controller.
On the way home on Highway One he thought he saw the Kraut. Funny. He was supposed to be in Brisbane.
SUFFICIENT REASON Since the high-pressure tapping was gone, the automatic instrument registered low and shut itself to keep the pressure up to the setting the Humdinger had on his panel instrument. But the actual pressure wasn’t low—shutting the valve simply gave the pressure nowhere to go. It was a slow-acting valve. The pressure rose.
Just as silica-alumina was the catalyst in the company’s industrial production process, so hate was the catalyst in the company’s industrial relations process. With a grateful pout, the regenerator bubble burst and the hatred of years boiled over. A bellowing column of sound followed, and catalyst at over 600 Centigrade spewed in a stream of fire out into the courtyard and, carried on the wind, towards the mangroves.
The Great White Father, drunk on the doorstep of the drink hut, hardly noticed the darkened sky before he was covered in grey catalyst. He was only on the edge of the column of dust, and didn’t get burned.
But this wasn’t enough to reduce the pressure. The cunning vessel decided to ease itself in a more direct way. Just below the bubble was the southern seam; this bulged and opened. The top valve was now shut. The regenerator seemed to blow apart then. It swelled with its internal pressure even as it spewed white-hot catalyst. A long minute, then it collapsed in on itself. The great round sides fell inwards.
THE POSTURE OF DEVOTION Land of Smiles wasn’t moving. The mouth was open in its broadest grin; the wide-spaced teeth, etched neatly in nicotine, dry from long exposure. He could breathe in and out shallowly, but the legs had left him.
He had been examining the eight-page lab results sheets, and not seeing them, when the crisis commenced. Now they were in long foolscap shreds. Between his continually moving fingers the shreds were twined and twisted; some hung, split and ripped between odd fingers, others waggled back towards his stomach, improperly severed. He seemed smaller, somehow. It had not occurred to him yet to get up from his kneeling position.
Even when the Congo Kid’s liquid gas leaks travelled up the drains into the open trenches under the control-panel consoles and caught fire from the catalyst, Land of Smiles was unable to move.
The Humdinger didn’t know about the fire inside the hollow console until he rested his hand on the metal while opening pressure valves. Gunga Din came good under fire. He could do nothing for his own plant but let it die a natural death. He brought bucket after bucket of water and drenched the Humdinger’s panel, to keep it cool enough for him to touch.
AN ITEMIZED LIST The ethylene plant crashed on steam failure.
Neighbouring factories stopped all steam-driven processes.
The regenerator collapsed and the process stopped. The Glass Canoe’s dog perished.
The Humdinger threw the feed cut-out and put steam into all high-temperature processes.
Heat from the open regenerator lit a fire in the reactor bed, where the nozzles were loose and hot oil was escaping. Loosehead was killed by the heat before his body was charred.
The slurry tank blew up and flashed. The Corpse was knocked flat for a while.
Slurry rundown was stopped and allowed to set solid in the lines and the fractionator column rather than feed the fire.
The turbo-expanders tripped, and the high-pressure steam turbine. The gas flow stopped and there was nothing for the compressor end to compress.
The high-pressure steam had nowhere to go—the let-down valve was jammed shut by the collar the Loch Ness Monster had spun down. Every safety valve blew, but this was not sufficient relief and the Humdinger brought the boilers down. The rest of the refinery plants followed, they depended on cracker steam.
There was no ladder to use to get the let-down valve open.
There were no blanks to spade off gas lines and other dangerous flows. Fuel gas was isolated on block valves and control valves that always had let by: blanks were vital to plant safety.
The process flows that had to be let go to drains went straight into the river, together with oil from the drains and interceptor and the black crude that couldn’t be accommodated at the crashed distillation plants.
The white-hot catalyst lit the gas from the opened butane drain.
The Rustle of Spring, though not touched by catalyst, was cooked in his bed by the great wall of catalyst all round him, heaped up high round the concrete regenerator skirt.
The Humdinger bribed two men to go the long way round and rig up hoses to play saltwater jets on the fuel gas tank.
The Humdinger got Far Away Places to turn on the cold-water jets inside the reactor skirt. This put out the fire there and cracked the red-hot riser.
The northern part of the control hut was wrecked: amenities, foremen’s office, locker-room. The Humdinger worked in great heat, despite Gunga Din’s water, and was too busy to put his fingers under noses. Catalyst was banked against the north walls and had come in the locker-room windows.
The fire in the console was knocking out the instruments one by one. Gunga Din started sloshing water over the Humdinger, to keep him cool.
No other men could be found—all had gone to the windward side of the catalyst to potter on their plants so they couldn’t get any orders that might take them into danger. The Humdinger shut down everything he could from his panel. He got Land of Smiles out of sight, dragging him behind the sixty-foot panel. When most of the noises had stopped or steadied out and the streams he couldn’t send to storage were dropped out to drains, the Slug came back ready to give orders. Men still slipped where he trod. Then the cars appeared from the direction of the residences. The Puroil fire wagon was at the blazing tank. Inside half an hour there were white shirts everywhere with lists and company-issue pens to catalogue the bulk dead. There were twenty separate adverse reports on the water on the panel-room floor. Nothing could be done, except to play saltwater on the banks of catalyst and wait for it to cool, and concentrate on the blazing tank. Three operators and eleven white shirts were overcome by H2S fumes, but none died. The oil on the river didn’t catch fire, though traffic on the bay was coated for weeks and seagulls drowned in thousands. The firemen contained the blaze of the tank. The fire could have been a lot worse.
All in all, Sydney was lucky. Without the wind blowing flames and hot catalyst away from the main refinery area, the big tanks would have gone up and half Sydney with them.
The Gypsy Fiddler, out of sight, was coming back gingerly from his hideaway to windward of the danger
area, into the strange quiet of the cracker area. The air compressor was still running on the last of the seventeen-kilo steam pressure and just as he got near it, the air-driers changed over. They were on six-hour cycle, drying and regenerating. They changed with a roar that was usually heard above the crashing roar of the cracker on normal operation, but in a surrounding silence it was like the crack of doom. The sound of bombs and shocks of war hadn’t toughened him, they’d left him weak and scared. The Fiddler dropped dead. There was not a mark on him and when his skull and body were cut up in the post-mortem insisted on by the company’s insurers, there was no evidence of carbon-monoxide poisoning from the regenerator catalyst or any other injury. No compensation.
The Maltese Falcon gave up hope of getting his brand-new aluminium ladder, but three days later when the fuss had died down he came by the fence and there it was, still in the trench. He said a little prayer of gratitude. He hadn’t sunk so far as to lose his early religious training.
SKlation had let so much feed into the reactor that it coked up the riser and reactor bed. It would need to be drilled out. He hadn’t learned a thing. His confident ignorance was another hazard built-in to Puroil’s future.
The Corpse was dismissed because of the tank shut-off. It was discovered by his offsider and a tank-farm foreman on their way to the burning slurry tank. He was defiant and swore they’d never sack him, but when Luxaflex had a talk with him mentioning the Enforcer, he went quietly.
They took Land of Smiles away to a Reception House. He was never seen again.
The Humdinger performed one more valuable service. Somehow the computer boys got in on the act, accompanying the technologists to the disaster. They’d never been down to the dirty end before. After looking at the mess they trooped in covered in catalyst and oil and went up to the Humdinger in the most natural way imaginable and wiped their shoes on his overalls. The systems analyst grabbed the loose cloth on his right leg, the programmer his left, and they wiped away. The technician waited his turn. Before they finished, a party of junior engineers came in, talking excitedly of what they’d seen. When they saw the new shoe-cleaning arrangements they looked at one another.
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Page 45