The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (19 page)

‘Sorry.'

‘Why not?'

‘You don't understand. I have to go through channels. I'd like to be able to go up to the Wandering Jew and say, Look, I know how to fix it. But if I go over my superior's head, the Python, I'll get arseholed to some crap job. He'll have the knife in forever after.'

‘Why not tell him, then?'

‘Tell him? I'm not a fool! Any suggestion I give him goes up as his suggestion, he takes the credit and next staff meeting he hauls us over the coals for having no brains. If I get up and say he pinched it I'll get an even worse posting. And the others won't support me or they'll get the same. Besides, they'd be glad to see me downed. We're competitors.'

‘God help us.'

‘Don't tell anyone I said this or I'll deny every word. But it's a relief to get it off my chest.'

‘With no kick coming, too.' The Samurai stared at him in disgust, but the man felt no shame and didn't lower his eyes. His livelihood was at stake, he had to be gutless to survive.

‘I can't even tell these things to my wife. She might spill it to the other wives. They all listen to try and pick up something for their own husbands to use against each other. And the joke is, we have to mix constantly. Anyone who stays outside the circle is suspect. Not only that, he gets behind in the gossip.'

The Samurai laughed. This man had spent six years getting a degree from a qualifications factory and he was on a treadmill as shameful as that trodden by the lowest prisoner. At least they could go home and never have to see their workmates till they came back to work.

‘I won't tell your secrets. You've got enough to worry about.'

Eighteen weeks and three crashdowns later, an eighth of an inch was shaved from the butterfly inside the valve. The Python thought of it himself, he said to the Wandering Jew, and the Good Shepherd squirmed. Silently.

 

THE ANGRY ANT The Angry Ant was practising a few tricks on the Foxboro instruments that controlled the boilers. He was changing the flow instruments from automatic to maximum flow on hand control, to automatic set point control, to manual set point control, then the level instruments to manual. Back again. Level instruments to auto, flow controllers from manual set point to auto set point, to hand control to auto with the over-rider limiting maximum flow.

The plant was wide open to any man who wanted to learn. True, you had to teach yourself, for chemical engineers wouldn't speak with authority on instrument functions, and instrument engineers didn't want to be quoted on plant operation. When new instruments were installed no one higher than prisoners—or Sump—was game to ask how they worked: the installing engineer might mention who had asked. When that happened everyone would jeer at such ignorance, though no one in the jeering group knew either. But no one knew they didn't know. But for the men there was always the Sump. It was a toss-up whether the other foremen despised him more for his steamy morals and his widow stories or because he would tell what he knew of process, instruments, emergency procedures, past failures, suspect valves. Most behaved like transplants from the closed communities of the Old World. Tell 'em nothing. Don't let 'em get your guts. Clam up. Speak Welsh when strangers come in.

The Ant was teaching himself, as the Humdinger had done, with the Samurai's help. These men were exceptions. Back and forth the Ant went, from auto to manual and back to auto; again and again. The Samurai and Humdinger pretended not to look; they were pleased someone was interested. The more men knew all the jobs, the better plant it would be. Of course, Ant wanted to get away from the turbo-expanders, too. Most ran past those machines, just in case.

When he had had long enough at the panel, Humdinger suddenly grabbed Angry from behind and bit his ear passionately. Angry's chemistry was not upset at the time and he responded mildly, wriggling free. Humdinger was playful, bit the other ear, licked his neck, fiddled with his overalls and grappled with him, trying to tickle him into a girlish fit of giggles. He worked his hands round the lips of his pelvis, digging into the pelvic cavity.

‘Beat it, Dinger,' said Angry, but couldn't shake him loose.

‘I'll fix you, Ant!' said the Humdinger, and squeezed out a sound.

‘What was that?' shrieked Angry fearfully, trying to tear free.

‘The mating call of the lost tribes of Israel.'

Slug suddenly appeared through the door and made for the Humdinger. ‘Come on! Today you go to the flare!'

There was such venom in his voice that the Humdinger burst into tears and pretended to wet himself. For a moment young Angry thought the sobs were genuine—until he shoved two fingers of his right hand under the Slug's nose and said, ‘Guess who?' Humdinger was selected because the others couldn't be found. They were out hiding on the structures or on their backs somewhere.

‘What's up you this morning?' Angry Ant walked after Slug. He followed him into the office and bailed him up against the far wall like an Alsatian bailing up a postman.

‘If the Enforcer gets down here and Humdinger's not on his way to the flare, where will we be then?'

‘Where will we be?' asked the Angry Ant.

‘I'll tell you where I'll be!' Slug screamed hysterically. ‘I'll get the kick right up the arse! That's where! It's all right for you blokes, you got the Union to look after you! I got no one! No bastard'll help me. I give up Union protection to take this job and do in six hundred dollars in the first year and what for?—'

‘To wear that dustcoat. You'll sell your mother for a white collar. And if ever you slimed your way into a Shift Super's job you'd think your shit didn't stink!' He walked out. The Ant was small and shiny, sharp and fierce. He knew Slug couldn't be insulted.

Five minutes later Slug was back, handing out notebooks and pens to try to get on side. The notebooks were slightly used, he needed a lot of stationery for his business records and wrote on anything handy. The Ant refused. The Slug's hands were pawing each other, both limp; his head set well down inside his shirt and those bright senseless eyes staring unwinking. He looked as if he might perform his heart attack stunt just for the sympathy of one man. As he shuffled away, he left on the ground a shiny track.

 

M
C
ONAN 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.