The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  The pulp writer had to admit that writing advertising copy came much more easily than fiction. And the old man with his unusual ideas paid quite a bit for copy based on a few slogans and vague ideas. The pulp writer was never quite sure what the old man was even trying to sell, but money was money.

  Industrivism deals with the fundamental problem of modern experience. Both the Communist and the Christian agree – the workaday world of the shop-floor and the noisome machine rob us of our essential humanity. Even during our leisure hours, our limbs ache from eight hours of travail, our ears ring with the echoes of the assembly line. Industrivism resolves the contradiction by embracing it. Become the machine, perfected! You’re no longer just a cog, you’re the blueprint, the design, the firing piston of a great diesel—

  It was possible to write this junk all right, but the pulp writer couldn’t imagine that anyone would believe it. But the old man liked wordy paragraphs that were half religious tract, half boosterism, all nonsense. He was a foreigner, obviously, and had little idea what Americans wanted: not just crazy promises, but crazy promises that could be fulfilled without effort and with plenty of riches, revival meeting hooey, and a Sandow physique to boot.

  Nobody wanted to be a factory. Heck, nobody wanted to work in a factory. People just did. Even pulp fiction was a factory of sorts. The pulp writer’s fingers were as mangled as any pieceworker’s thanks to the Underwood’s sticky keys, and there was no International Brotherhood of Fictioneers Local Thirty-Four to help a body when the cramps got bad or the brain seized up.

  Speaking of brain seizures, it was time for a drink. The pulp writer figured that a paragraph’s worth of beers would be fine for the night, and that included the possibility of fronting another patron a round. And down the block at Schmitty’s, the pulp writer’s friend Jake was always ready to drink F&M beer on somebody else’s dime.

  “Oh my, could I use a catnap right about now,” said Jake to the pulp writer with a yawn. “But, up here, it just never stops.” He pointed to his temple. Jake was everything the pulp writer wasn’t. Big, with a huge right hand that wrapped around the beer stein like a towel. And quick too. The pulp writer was small and slow and a woman. Her specialty was scientifiction, but she also did romance pulps, and Jake was heavily involved in the scheme – he delivered the manuscripts to the office downtown, throwing them over the transoms of the editors of Incredible Science Tales and Thrilling-Awe Stories so she wouldn’t be spotted. For the romance pulps, Jake was the model for the dark hero, reformed and repaired over and over again by the power of a woman’s love, twice or three times a month for Love Stanza, True Stories of Love, and Heart Tales. The pulp writer was Lenny Lick, Lurlene St Lovelace, Leonard Carlson – and whomever else it took to get a sale.

  “You could,” the pulp writer said. “You don’t have to think about work at all the second you step through the factory gates and rejoin the rest of us unemployed chumps down here at the bar. What is the old Wobbly demand again? Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, eight hours for what we will?” The pulp writer liked to tease Jake sometimes.

  “No, I can’t,” Jake said. He took a long sip of his beer, and didn’t bother to wipe the suds from his lip. “The Reds don’t sleep. The saboteurs don’t sleep. We’re doing important work, all classified. There will be another war starting soon, in Europe. You’ll see.”

  “It’s been twenty years! You’d think they—”

  “Button your lip,” Jake said.

  “But you were just ta—”

  Jake looked at her. “My mistake.” He burped lightly then muttered, “Wobblies. I can’t believe you’re still talking about the wobblies.”

  They finished their beers in silence. The pulp writer thought about a story she had in her trunk; an unpublished one about a terrible world in which Prohibition had actually been declared and the criminal fraternity had begun working overtime to corner the market on illicit booze. Machine guns and mini-dirigibles and pocket-stills, and . . . nobody wanted it. Who would believe that criminals would employ scientists and engineers, the rejection slips said, and besides the story made it seem like crime paid.

  “Pays better than pulp fiction anyway,” the pulp writer said, and Jake responded, “What?” and she said “Never mind.”

  The pulp writer licked her lips. “Will you be coming up?”

  Jake shook his head. “Nah, I’ll just take the manuscript and go.”

  “Fine,” she said. Nothing was fine. She slid him the envelope that had been resting under her left elbow. “Next Tuesday then?”

  “If not sooner,” Jake said, but the pulp writer didn’t respond, so he took the envelope and left.

  Jake didn’t know if he was strictly allowed to read the commissioned work, but he always helped himself to the first few pages when delivering the manuscripts to the publishing companies, and saw no reason why tonight should be any different. After all, it was Jake who recommended her to the old man in the first place. So he took a look as he walked along St Mark’s Street and into the West Village and read:

  Have You Heard Of

  INDUSTRIVISM??

  – the document was entitled. Industrivism was the idea of “intrapersonal industrial development”, of using “psychological and philosophical methods to improve the self” and become a superior being. In the same way that factories made superior products by assembling them one step at a time, so too could a human being be improved by embracing “psycho-industrial processes” that would refine and eventually perfect both mind and body.

  The very first step was the hardest – admitting that you were a know-it-all, or a wallflower, or a bohemian, or a workaday drudge, a second-hander, or a thug. The list went on at length. Once you had determined your own Essential Flaw, there were a number of exercises one could do to become a True Industrivist, a superior being able to control one’s own fate. The pamphlet only hinted at what these exercises might be, but Jake was intrigued, even as he diagnosed himself as an also-ran.

  He had no idea what the old man was planning, but what else was new? It had been twenty years, Jake thought. Twenty years ago, when Jake was just fifteen, and working on a sewing machine alongside his parents in a ten-story factory. Then when they came for their shift one morning, all the sewing machines were gone. The foreman sent everyone home, and he had plenty of Pinkerton muscle backing him up. They had truncheons, stood in a line like soldiers, and one burly Irishman hefted a repeating rifle. His parents and all their friends could do nothing but mutter in Yiddish and go home and further dilute their cabbage soup. At least the morning papers would have some other job postings, and it would be back to the twelve-hour grind.

  Except for Jake. He got up the next morning, went to the offices of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and offered his services – he was bilingual, knew the neighborhood and all the families, had a quick jab, and hated Reds, and thought the rebbe was a fool. And he found the Pinkerton slogan compelling.

  We Never Sleep.

  They signed him up and a few months later sent him back to the factory, right on the banks of the Hudson, a few blocks south of the Chelsea Piers where all the rich people sail off to England and back. He retrieved the old man from his ship with a four-horse team, and then helped install him in the factory.

  It had taken six days. Jake broke Shabbos for the first time. After that, he practically had to live in the factory as his parents cast him out. Twenty years later, and here he was, still at the same factory he’d be sent home from at gunpoint, but at least he wasn’t bent over a machine, half-blind with bleeding fingers.

  Jake went down to the basement, taking the special pneumatic elevator that looked, from the shop floor, like a broom closet. Jake had the run of the place, you might say. He went where he was needed; his job was to keep the old man happy, if it meant pitching in on the line or dealing with troublemakers and agitators out by the gates.

  Jake knew the factory very well. He could talk to it. And it talked back, in reverberations and
slammed doors and clanking pipes and hideous grinding. And sometimes it spoke through the mouth of the old man in the basement.

  The old man slept, mostly. He needed his rest. Actually, he wasn’t even that old, but he was very sick, and his skin was shriveled and dry like jerky. He lived in a giant iron lung, though the lung was like nothing Jake had ever seen, not in newsreels and not in the pages of Life. More like a giant underwater suit ten feet high, and vertical, up against the wall, limbs spread like in the middle of a jumping jack. And the old man’s head was behind a plate of thick glass. Tubes and piping came in and out of the lung, making it look like the contraption had a dozen smaller limbs in addition to the main four. Jake figured that all the old man’s business was somehow dealt with via the plumbing. He had seen a canteen cook shovel perfectly fine mashed potato and gravy down a drain hole once. Who knew what was coming in, or going out, through the other pipes?

  “Sir,” called Jake as he entered the room. “We have the latest carbons from the writer.” Jake couldn’t help but shout as the basement room was largest room in which he’d ever been. His childhood shul could have fit down there.

  The room growled. Under the basement, there was another factory, with a whole other set of workers pulling the swing shift, manufacturing . . . well, Jake didn’t know. He didn’t even truly know that the old man had them on a staggered shift to keep them segregated from the other workers – it just seemed obvious. The sub-basement line had fired up and was hammering away at something. It felt like the old man was angry, like his heart had started beating like a drum.

  The factory often talked to Jake. The old man rarely did so. But now, he did. There was a click, a crackle, and a tinny voice came from the two great loudspeakers.

  “READ IT. SLOW. ALOUD.”

  Jake wasn’t much for elocution, but he did his best. It was hard not to snicker, but surely the old man wouldn’t be able to hear the laughter catching in Jake’s throat.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

  Jake stood for a long moment, stunned. The old man had never asked for an opinion before. He’d only ever given orders, and in a precise Germanic tone, via his phonograph contraption. Jake didn’t know what to think. He never really had been in a situation where he had to be politic before. What would the pulp writer want him to say . . .

  “Well, uh, sir,” he said, “I think that Industrivism could be the wave of the future.”

  “THE FUTURE.”

  “Yes. They’ll be talking about it all over the nation, like Populism or Prohibition,” Jake said. “Even if everyone doesn’t agree, it’ll be a topic in the newspaper editorial pages. I can see people handing these out like they do copies of the Daily Worker, just to strike up conversations with passers-by.” What Jake kept to himself was that the populists and temperance people were horrid anti-Semites he’d as soon spit on as say “How do you do?” to, and that the Commies were even worse.

  “PUT THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE TUBE.”

  Jake rolled up the carbons, stuck them in a capsule and inserted it into a pneumatic tube. In the morning, who knew what would happen. This was the fifth text Jake had brought over from the pulp writer, and they’d all been sent upstairs, where as far as Jake knew they were being used to wrap fish.

  The pulp writer imagined a lot of things: monsters from the depths, clever young men welding de Laval nozzles to locomotive tank cars and transforming them into high-powered bullet-fast tanks, a former silent picture star discovered begging for change with her career-ruining froggy voice, only to find true love with a film producer turned Pinkerton guard . . . but she never imagined seeing her work in the slicks.

  And yet, in the current Henderson’s Lady Weekly, there it was: Industrivism. A whole article on the cockamamy scheme, breathlessly and enthusiastically written by one Doctor R. D. E. Watts. An obvious pseudonym, was the pulp writer’s first thought. Her second was to wonder how she could get in on such business, given that the slicks sometimes paid one thousand dollars for feature essays. A thousand dollars could get her out of her current accommodations and into an apartment where the bath tub was in the washroom instead of in the middle of the kitchen. An elevator building with a doorman. A zeppelin trip to Frankfurt, or even to Rio de Janeiro.

  The pulp writer caught her mind wandering, and with it her fingers twitching. A zeppelin would be a great setting for a romance tale, or even a spy yarn. Perhaps a zeppelin-shaped starship that generated anti-gravity in its lattice frame, or due to some static charge generated by aircraft dope rubbing against the frame. It wasn’t quite kosher science, but it was close enough for the pulps . . .

  “And that’s why I’m not in the slicks,” she said aloud to herself.

  The Industrivism article was clever, in that to the pulp writer’s trained eye it was obviously an advertisement in the shape of a feature, and had been purposefully placed in the feature well to further obscure its pedigree. The old man Jake worked for must have paid a pretty penny for such placement.

  At Schmitty’s that night, where the pulp writer drank alone and safe from molestation thanks to the protection of the bartender, the word “Industrivism” floated by twice. Perhaps one of the men’s adventure pulps, or even a general interest slick, had been paid to run an article much like the one in Henderson’s.

  It was nearly last call when Jake finally walked in, looking like a wet sheet that had been wrung out but never spread to dry. He took his seat on the stool right next to the pulp writer’s, careful not to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Gosh,” the pulp writer said. “Please let me buy you a round for once. I haven’t seen you in two weeks.”

  “We’ve been busy down at the plant,” Jake said.

  “Wobblies smashing the conveyor belts?”

  “Interviews. We’ve got three full shifts and are still hiring.”

  “There’s a depression on, haven’t you heard?” the pulp writer said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Jake said. “We have a line of workers stretching around the block starting every morning at five a.m. Grown men climbing over the fences – I even had to fire a couple of warning shots at a trio coming in on a row boat.”

  “Cheaper than the Hudson Tubes,” the pulp writer said.

  “What is Industrivism?”

  “How did you know,” the pulp writer asked.

  “I can’t make heads or tails of this Industriv—” Jake started. “Wait, how did I know what?”

  The pulp writer held up her arms and set type on an invisible headline in the air before her. “‘What. Is. Industrivism.’

  “That’s the title of my next piece for your boss. I got a telegram this morning. He’s hot for copy. Wants a new Industrivism piece every week.”

  “I bet,” Jake said. “So what is Industrivism?”

  “Doggoned if I know,” the pulp writer said. “I would have thought you could tell me. The first proposal was vague. The second had a bit more meat to it, but I was just winging it. The third was just the telegram I told you about – no details at all. I suppose it doesn’t really matter what Industrivism is, so long as people hear about it.”

  Jake frowned at that. “How does that even work?”

  The pulp writer shrugged. “It’s like the American Dream. What does that even mean anymore? Or ‘use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake’ – recall that the Dry League claimed that the Bible was recommending that we spill booze all over our bellies rather than drink it. Anything can mean anything.

  “Really – the less clear an idea is, the more likely it is to be popular.”

  The pulp writer peered down at her drink. She didn’t even ask Jake if he were coming up this time, and Jake didn’t hover like a fly, waiting to be asked, as he used to. She had no manuscripts for him to deliver to either his employer or the various pulp publishers about town, and it sounded like he had no time to do any errands anyway.

  Upstairs, the pulp writer pored over a slim volume, The March of Diesel, published and distributed by the Hemphill Die
sel Schools of Long Island City, Boston, Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver. It covered the basics of the technology, and made some breathless predictions for the future-sort of a low-rent version of what she was doing, and oriented toward getting some down-on-their-luck pigeons to pay for a course on diesel mechanics. Then inspiration struck. Her fingers flew over the keys.

  What Is Industrivism?

  Industrivism is the engine of life in America itself during this, the Era of Diesel.

  Like the mighty diesel engines that power our factories and automobiles, Industrivism is a Four-Stroke Process.

  Intake Stroke: The nation itself, home to all the peoples of the world, and every race and creed. E pluribus unum!

  Compression Stroke: The communities – the great cities and towns where we live, work, play, and love.

  Combustion Stroke: The workplace, where we come together with furious energy to build a nation that shall lead the world.

  Exhaust Stroke:

  Well, “exhaust stroke” was a tricky one, the pulp writer had to admit. Exhaust carried connotations of both the polluted and the bone-weary, which she had decided were the very opposite of Industrivism. The deadline was tight and no pulp writer got anywhere by wasting time, and ribbon, in revision. Sometimes thinking was the wrong thing to do. Let the fingers handle it.

  Exhaust Stroke: Rejuvenated and refreshed by a gentle breeze from the oceans that protect this great nation from its jealous enemies, we redouble our efforts.

  The pulp writer’s only remit was to somehow make the diesel engine a metaphor for America itself. The pulp writer was creating a Bible of sorts for other writers to interpret and embellish. She imagined them bent over their own typewriters – Remingtons and Olympias, some portables and others iron monsters from the war era – a thousand literary pianos playing together, or one large and radically redistributed factory, all creating Industrivism for the slicks, for pulps, for religious publications, for the community pages of daily papers in English and Yiddish and Greek and German and Italian. All based on her notes. And like an assembly line, they’d all fall idle without new material. The pulp writer caught a second wind – an exhaust stroke of her own – and wrote till dawn.