Selected Stories (26 page)

Tom perched upon the arm rest of his machine, looking backwards, moved slowly, taking up the slack in the cable. It straightened and grew taut, and as it did it forced the Seven’s blade upward. Peebles waved for slack and put the blade control into “hold.” The cable bellied downward away from the blade.

“Hydraulic system’s O.K., anyhow,” called Peebles, as Tom throttled down. “Move over and take a strain to the right, sharp as you can without fouling the cable on the track. We’ll see if we can walk this track back on.”

Tom backed up, cut sharply right, and drew the cable out almost at right angles to the other machine. Peebles held the right track of the Seven with the brake and released both steering clutches. The left track now could turn free, the right not at all. Tom was running at a quarter throttle in his lowest gear, so that his machine barely crept along, taking the strain. The Seven shook gently and began to pivot on the taut right track, unbelievable foot-pounds of energy coming to bear on the front of the track where it rode high up on the idler wheel. Peebles released the right brake with his foot and applied it again in a series of skilled, deft jerks. The track would move a few inches and stop again, force being applied forward and sideward alternately, urging the track persuasively back in place. Then, a little jolt and she was in, riding true on the five truck rollers, the two track carrier rollers, the driving sprocket and the idler.

Peebles got off and stuck his head in between the sprocket and the rear carrier, squinting down and sideways to see if there were any broken flanges or roller bushes. Tom came over and pulled him out by the seat of his trousers. “Time enough for that when you get her in the shop,” he said, masking his nervousness. “Reckon she’ll roll?”

“She’ll roll. I never saw a track in that condition come back that easy. By gosh, it’s as if she was tryin’ to help!”

“They’ll do it sometimes,” said Tom, stiffly. “You better take the two-tractor, Peeby. I’ll stay with this’n.”

“Anything you say.”

And cautiously they took the steep slope down, Tom barely holding the brakes, giving the other machine a straight pull all the way. And so they brought
Daisy Etta
down to Peebles’ outdoor shop, where they pulled her cylinder head off, took off her starting motor, pulled out a burned clutch facing, had her quite helpless—

And put her together again.

“I tell you it was outright, cold-blooded murder,” said Dennis hotly. “An’ here we are takin’ orders from a guy like that. What are we goin’ to do about it?” They were standing by the cooler—Dennis had run his machine there to waylay Chub.

Chub Horton’s cigar went down and up like a semaphore with a short circuit. “We’ll skip it. The blacktopping crew will be here in another two weeks or so, an’ we can make a report. Besides, I don’t know what happened up there any more than you do. In the meantime we got a runway to build.”

“You don’t know what happened up there? Chub, you’re a smart man. Smart enough to run this job better than Tom Jaeger even if he wasn’t crazy. And you’re surely smart enough not to believe all that cock and bull about the tractor runnin’ out from under that grease-monkey. Listen—” He leaned forward and tapped Chub’s chest. “He said it was the governor. I saw that governor myself an’ heard ol’ Peebles say there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Th’ throttle control rod had slipped off its yoke, yeah—but you know what a tractor will do when the throttle control goes out. It’ll idle or stall. It won’t run away, whatever.”

“Well, maybe so, but—”

“But nothin’! A guy that’ll commit murder ain’t sane. If he did it once, he can do it again and I ain’t fixin’ to let that happen to me.”

Two things crossed Chub’s steady but not too bright mind at this. One was that Dennis, whom he did not like but could not shake, was trying to force him into something that he did not want to do. The other was that under all of his swift talk Dennis was scared spitless.

“What do you want to do—call up the sheriff?”

Dennis ha-ha-ed appreciatively—one of the reasons he was so hard to shake. “I’ll tell you what we can do. As long as we have you here, he isn’t the only man who knows the work. If we stop takin’ orders from him, you can give ’em as good or better. An’ there won’t be anything he can do about it.”

“Doggone it, Dennis,” said Chub, with sudden exasperation. “What do you think you’re doin’—handin’ me over the keys to the kingdom or something? What do you want to see me bossin’ around here for?” He stood up. “Suppose we did what you said? Would it get the field built any quicker? Would it get me any more money in my pay envelope? What do you think I want—glory? I passed up a chance to run for councilman once. You think I’d raise a finger to get a bunch of mugs to do what I say—when they do it anyway?”

“Aw, Chub—I wouldn’t cause trouble just for the fun of it. That’s not what I mean at all. But unless we do something about that guy we ain’t safe. Can’t you get that through your head?”

“Listen, windy. If a man keeps busy enough he can’t get into trouble. That goes for Tom—you might keep that in mind. But it goes for you, too. Get back up on that rig an’ get back to the marl pit.” Dennis, completely taken by surprise, turned to his machine.

“It’s a pity you can’t move earth with your mouth,” said Chub as he walked off. “They could have left you do this job single-handed.”

Chub walked slowly toward the outcropping, switching at beach pebbles with a grade stake and swearing to himself. He was essentially a simple man and believed in the simplest possible approach to everything. He liked a job where he could do everything required and where nothing turned up to complicate things. He had been in the grading business for a long time as an operator and survey party boss, and he was remarkable for one thing—he had always held aloof from the cliques and internecine politics that are the breath of life to most construction men. He was disturbed and troubled at the back-stabbing that went on around him on various jobs. If it was blunt, he was disgusted, and subtlety simply left him floundering and bewildered. He was stupid enough so that his basic honesty manifested itself in his speech and actions, and he had learned that complete honesty in dealing with men above and below him was almost invariably painful to all concerned, but he had not the wit to act otherwise, and did not try to. If he had a bad tooth, he had it pulled out as soon as he could. If he got a raw deal from a superintendent over him, that superintendent would get told exactly what the trouble was, and if he didn’t like it, there were other jobs. And if the pulling and hauling of cliques got in his hair, he had always said so and left. Or he had sounded off and stayed; his completely selfish reaction to things that got in the way of his work had earned him a lot of regard from men he had worked under. And so, in this instance, he had no hesitation about choosing a course of action. Only—how did you go about asking a man if he was a murderer?

He found the foreman with an enormous wrench in his hand, tightening up the new track adjustment bolt they had installed in the Seven.

“Hey, Chub! Glad you turned up. Let’s get a piece of pipe over the end of this thing and really bear down.” Chub went for the pipe, and they fitted it over the handle of the four-foot wrench and hauled until the sweat ran down their backs, Tom checking the track clearance occasionally with a crowbar. He finally called it good enough and they stood there in the sun gasping for breath.

“Tom,” panted Chub, “did you kill that Puerto Rican?”

Tom’s head came up as if someone had burned the back of his neck with a cigarette.

“Because,” said Chub, “if you did you can’t go on runnin’ this job.”

Tom said, “That’s a lousy thing to kid about.”

“You know I ain’t kiddin’. Well, did you?”

“No!” Tom sat down on a keg, wiped his face with a bandanna. “What’s got into you?”

“I just wanted to know. Some of the boys are worried about it.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Some of the boys, huh? I think I get it. Listen to me, Chub. Rivera was killed by that thing there.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the Seven, which was standing ready now, awaiting only the building of a broken cutting corner on the blade. Peebles was winding up the welding machine as he spoke. “If you mean, did I put him up on the machine before he was thrown, the answer is yes. That much I killed him, and don’t think I don’t feel it. I had a hunch something was wrong up there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and I certainly didn’t think anybody was going to get hurt.”

“Well, what was wrong?”

“I still don’t know.” Tom stood up. “I’m tired of beatin’ around the bush, Chub, and I don’t much care any more what anybody thinks. There’s somethin’ wrong with that Seven, something that wasn’t built into her. They don’t make tractors better’n that one, but whatever it was happened up there on the mesa has queered this one. Now go ahead and think what you like, and dream up any story you want to tell the boys. In the meantime you can pass the word—nobody runs that machine but me, understand? Nobody!”

“Tom—”

Tom’s patience broke. “That’s all I’m going to say about it! If anybody else gets hurt, it’s going to be me, understand? What more do you want?”

He strode off, boiling. Chub stared after him, and after a long moment reached up and took the cigar from his lips. Only then did he realize that he had bitten it in two; half the butt was still inside his mouth. He spat and stood there shaking his head.

“How’s she going, Peeby?”

Peebles looked up from the welding machine. “Hi, Chub, have her ready for you in twenty minutes.” He gauged the distance between the welding machine and the big tractor. “I should have forty feet of cable,” he said, looking at the festoons of arc and ground cables that hung from the storage hooks in the back of the welder. “Don’t want to get a tractor over here to move the thing, and don’t feel like cranking up the Seven just to get it close enough.” He separated the arc cable and threw it aside, walked to the tractor, paying the ground cable off his arms. He threw out the last of his slack and grasped the ground clamp when he was eight feet from the machine. Taking it in his left hand, he pulled hard, reaching out with his right to grasp the moldboard of the Seven, trying to get it far enough to clamp on to the machine.

Chub stood there watching him, chewing on the cigar, absent-mindedly diddling with the controls on the arc-welder. He pressed the starter-button, and the six-cylinder motor responded with a purr. He spun the work-selector dials idly, threw the arc generator switch—

A bolt of incredible energy, thin, searing, blue-white, left the rod holder at his feet, stretched itself
fifty feet
across to Peebles, whose fingers had just touched the moldboard of the tractor. Peebles’ head and shoulders were surrounded for a second by a violet nimbus, and then he folded over and dropped. A circuit breaker clacked behind the control board of the welder, but too late. The Seven rolled slowly backward, without firing, on level ground, until it brought up against the road-roller.

Chub’s cigar was gone, and he didn’t notice it. He had the knuckles of his right hand in his mouth, and his teeth sunk into the pudgy flesh. His eyes protruded; he crouched there and quivered, literally frightened out of his mind. For old Peebles was burned almost in two.

They buried him next to Rivera. There wasn’t much talk afterwards; the old man had been a lot closer to all of them than they had realized until now. Harris, for once in his rum-dumb, lightheaded life, was quiet and serious, and Kelly’s walk seemed to lose some of its litheness. Hour after hour Dennis’ flabby mouth worked, and he bit at his lower lip until it was swollen and tender. Al Knowles seemed more or less unaffected, as was to be expected from a man who had something less than the brains of a chicken. Chub Horton had snapped out of it after a couple of hours and was very nearly himself again. And in Tom Jaeger swirled a black, furious anger at this unknowable curse that had struck the camp.

And they kept working. There was nothing else to do. The shovel kept up its rhythmic swing and dig, swing and dump, and the Dumptors screamed back and forth between it and the little that was left of the swamp. The upper end of the runway was grassed off; Chub and Tom set grade stakes and Dennis began the long job of cutting and filling the humpy surface with his pan. Harris manned the other and followed him, a cut behind. The shape of the runway emerged from the land, and then that of the paralleling taxiway; and three days went by. The horror of Peebles’ death wore off enough so that they could talk about it, and very little of the talk helped anybody. Tom took his spells at everything, changing over with Kelly to give him a rest from the shovel, making a few rounds with a pan, putting in hours on a Dumptor. His arm was healing slowly but clean, and he worked grimly in spite of it, taking a perverse sort of pleasure from the pain of it. Every man on the job watched his machine with the solicitude of a mother with her first-born; a serious break-down would have been disastrous without a highly skilled mechanic.

The only concession that Tom allowed himself in regard to Peebles’ death was to corner Kelly one afternoon and ask him about the welding machine. Part of Kelly’s rather patchy past had been spent in a technical college, where he had studied electrical engineering and women. He had learned a little of the former and enough of the latter to get him thrown out on his ear. So, on the off-chance that he might know something about the freak arc, Tom put it to him.

Kelly pulled off his high-gauntlet gloves and batted sandflies with them. “What sort of an arc was that? Boy, you got me there. Did you ever hear of a welding machine doing like that before?”

“I did not. A welding machine just don’t have that sort o’ push. I saw a man get a full jolt from a 400-amp welder once, an’ although it sat him down it didn’t hurt him any.”

“It’s not amperage that kills people,” said Kelly, “it’s voltage. Voltage is the pressure behind a current, you know. Take an amount of water, call it amperage. If I throw it in your face, it won’t hurt you. If I put it through a small hose you’ll feel it. But if I pump it through them tiny holes on a Diesel injector nozzle at about twelve hundred pounds, it’ll draw blood. But a welding arc generator just is not wound to build up that kind of voltage. I can’t see where any short circuit anywhere through the armature or field windings could do such a thing.”