The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (24 page)

‘Herman's got something wrong with the bones of his finger.'

‘Did he do it on the job?'

‘Pinched a finger between two pipes.'

‘That's not a disease. Did he notify it?'

‘Herman's a hero. He doesn't notify a little thing like that, the boys would never let him forget it.'

‘Is it serious?'

‘The finger's off.'

‘All of it?'

‘Right up to the hand. Three joints.'

‘Can he do his work?'

‘He can do ten men's work.'

‘But he didn't fill the papers in, eh?'

 

THE BIG BANG THEORY That night, near nine o'clock, the Volga Boatman hid the boat and ran to the Home Beautiful with alarming news.

‘Going to raid us? What sort of raid?' asked the Great White Father mildly. He was sprawled in a chair, his legs taking up the room of half a dozen.

‘It's on now!' said Volga wildly. ‘They're patrolling the river. No one can come in.'

‘But they're not actually attacking us. Is that it?' asked the leader of the revels.

‘No, they don't know where to start.' Calmed by his leader's example.

‘Then they'll have a roll call on the plants shortly. We'll just leave one at a time, those of us on duty. The rest carry on as usual. I've fixed up a ski lift. Our emergency exit.'

No one took him seriously till they got to the river bank. When he pulled on a rope attached underwater to an anchor, he brought to light two strands of cable reaching an anchor point on the other bank, and from behind a mangrove-tree nearby, a windlass and a pair of water skis. All took cover as the security patrol passed in a skiff powered by an outboard motor. When it was gone, they sped across the river one by one, the geared windlass pulled just fast enough to keep them afloat.

The patrol came back to investigate when the skiers' bow waves caught up with them, but with the rope dropped on the river bottom they found nothing.

‘What do you think of it?' asked the Great White Father of the few who remained to keep the Home Beautiful going, and didn't wait for an answer. ‘Let's have another beer,' he suggested. They delicately agreed.

‘Whose turn to be barman?' asked the Volga Boatman aggressively. He was a little ashamed of his earlier panic.

‘There was a young feller in the Nazareth branch of the Carpenters' and Joiners' Union once washed his friends' feet,' said the Great White Father. ‘I think I can pull you jokers a beer. Where's the opener?'

When the beer was doing its good work, he sat back and prophesied.

‘Their blasted operations would go phut! without the relief from boredom that our Home gives us. I've got a good mind to shut down for a few days and see how they like it.'

They protested bitterly.

‘The whole place'd stop if the Home Beautiful stops.'

‘That's what they're trying to do.'

‘What they expect is eight hours a day from us, walking round pumps, watching pressures, doing all sorts of useless things. If only they'd get it in their heads that when we take it easy, things couldn't be better. The other day I saw an ad in a magazine—there was a panel room in a big refinery in some emerging country. The men were allowed to read—there was a bar of books, the operators were alert, they had a radio and a TV in the amenities.'

‘What they need here,' said a worker slumped in a corner, ‘is a real emergency. Something to go bang. Then they'd see which side their bread's buttered.' He was from a plant not likely to have bangs.

‘Not so much of this bang business. I'm on the cracker; it could go bang any time,' said the Humdinger, digging Blue Hills in the ribs. Blue was lonely and had come for a beer. He wouldn't touch the girls. He had a wife at home. He loved her, he said once in front of other prisoners. He was never silly enough to say it again.

‘I'll stay on the wharf,' said the Plover Lover. ‘Safest place. Always go over the side if something happens.'

 

IT'S ONLY BLOOD ‘Don't you worry, my fine boyos!' yelled the Great White Father in great glee. ‘Somewhere in the world there's a big bang with our name on it. Dig as deep as you like, twist and turn like eels or greasy pigs, it'll chase us to earth. Boom. Little clouds of radioactive dust. But don't worry—it's a good clean death if it takes you squarely. You get the package deal—death, cremation and your ashes scattered over Sydney. All in one hit. Whatever life you've had up to now has been on the house. None of you paid to get here. It's only one life you lose. One death. No more. Blood's only blood. The human race doesn't stop 'cause you stop.'

Many there were who feared when they heard this speech and hid themselves. One such was Blue Hills who went home straightaway, refused his wife's offer of solace in bed—this was the way her conscience took her after her imaginary lovers had had their daily helping of love with her: she was lonely for sex, but it had to be more interesting than Blue Hills—and had nightmares all night about huge dragon-shaped missiles flying over thousands of miles of empty Australia to drop at last right on the refinery and Blue Hills. The thought of one dropping on to his own head, the nagging doubt whether he would feel pain before it killed him and if so, how much, these fine conjectures gave him the hot and cold sweats and made his wife wonder if she had been right in not insisting on twin beds, although when she got right down to it and remembered the lusty lover she imagined climbing through her window one fine day and the space he needed to do a proper job on her, she knew a double bed was best. For months after, Blue Hills looked up warily every time he went out into the open air. Daytime was the worst.

‘Look, we're flooded with light from that damn sun and there's no roof on the world. They're up there. They'll get us for sure. They can't miss!' Sometimes he refused to go out.

One of the few who smiled at the threat of bangs was Cheddar Cheese. The Great White Father noticed this smile as it peeped from behind a blue and gold can.

‘Hey, Cheddar, did you get twenty dollars a pint for your blood?'

‘No, man.'

‘Price too stiff?'

‘I got twenty-five. Boy, I can choof out a pint a week sometimes. I've got it made.'

‘Hard way to make a dollar.'

‘Easy. It's only blood.'

‘Only blood! Why can't you get them to fix you? So your blood won't be rotten.'

‘What? And lose twenty-five dollars a throw?'

‘What are they researching?'

‘How to fix my blood.'

‘Hope they find a cure for it, anyway, Cheddar.'

‘You do, do you? What about my twenty-five?'

‘I don't know, Cheddar. All my instincts tell me to get up and address the multitude. But I don't know what to say. Twenty-five dollars or good blood. No. I know what to say all right, but it would hurt your feelings.'

‘I'll go away then and make it easy for you.'

‘If I say it I'll say it to you, not behind your back. No matter what you say, I still hope they fix you up.'

‘Well, that's nice and sentimental. You can give me a big kiss if you like.' Knowing he was going to die gave him the guts to stand up to anyone.

‘Drink your beer, Cheddar.'

‘I will. And I'll take one in later to the Sleeping Princess. She likes a nice little gesture.'

‘She fell asleep on me last time,' said Humdinger. ‘She didn't even notice my little gesture.' It was his turn. He went in. He couldn't make up his mind if he liked to look at her face or her back. He spent his half-hour spinning her round like a top.

 

SOMETHING FOOLISH In bad weather the Volga Boatman still rowed his little skiff across the river Eel, carrying miserable freight to the Home Beautiful for the blessing of the body and the satisfaction of the flesh. The Great White Father was there to receive them as they stumbled wet from rain, river and dripping mangroves.

Ambrose had been snared into painting the door of the bed hut. The Great White Father in his infinite wisdom had decided to give Ambrose some little foolish action to remember his Puroil youth by, and painting the door in the rain was foolish enough.

‘Never forget that the man who puts most into the job gets the most out of it. The man working for a crust should be docile, content with low wages, poverty and a poor education, exhausted every day after hard toil and grateful to his employer. Promotion is the prize for hard work, energy, competence, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice and getting your nose brown up the foreman's arse. The rain's from the south, here's a pot of paint and it's for the good of all. Go to it.'

He settled back with another can while Ambrose, who didn't see anything incongruous in painting in the rain at three in the morning, lurched outside. You would have had to tell Ambrose particularly and carefully that painting in the rain was unusual before he began to think so. Three in the morning…

So Ambrose painted the door in the rain before he took another turn at the warm delights inside. He painted faithfully but not well. The light was understandably bad but he didn't appeal against it. He didn't even ask what those two men were doing standing in the rain outside the bed hut, leaning up against the corrugated-iron wall. The Great White Father knew the force for Ambrose of the feeling that he was doing his bit for the common good, and let him have his head. When his turn came and Never on Sunday was on, he would approach her holding his head erect like a sturdy workman who has done a good job, bent on enjoying her facilities with a good conscience.

He wouldn't have made head or tail of her recital of domestic plans. ‘Another yard of carpet,' she'd say, or linoleum, or new cupboards, or shoes for the kids, or a bedroom suite. Ambrose didn't think about what a married woman was doing at the Home Beautiful. For an extra dollar she'd tell his horoscope by the way it felt.

8
MATES

SHE'LL BE RIGHT, MATE The cracker was up again, with waxy distillate pouring in one end and high-grade gasoline flowing from the other; a seven-hundred-ton inventory of catalyst being circulated to reactor and stripper then regenerated merrily in the regenerator fire and the carbon-monoxide from the regeneration process burned in the twin power-recovery boilers and driving turbo-expanders to provide air for the regenerator and for the boilers. After four hours one of the boiler tubes ruptured, putting water into the fire space. The water expanded to steam, the header pressure rose like a rocket, the turbines had to be manually tripped before they blew to pieces, and the plant crashed. Black catalyst through the system, through the turbines—blades and bearings—on the ground, over the suburbs, everywhere.

They'd had to rush several of the boiler tube tests the week before; the tests seemed to bank up on to Saturday morning, the experts took their weekend off and the only engineer left had to take his wife shopping. The remaining tests were cancelled.

‘She'll be right,' was the controller's answer to the Samurai's questions. ‘They're engineers, we're not. You don't have to worry. Just start her up and collect your pay at the end of the week.'

Three days later the boiler tubes had cooled; two days after that the manways were off and the boiler tube bundles down on the deck. Another two days brought a report from the metallurgists: the wrong metal. The tubes were stacked to one side to wait for the scrap merchant and new tubes ordered.

This was one crash they couldn't pin on the operators.

 

WHERE THE WOMEN SAY YES Dadda was in the control room when the boiler tube ruptured; he was the first to see the header pressure rising and the first to press the cancelling buttons on the high speed alarms of the turbo-expanders. He got out of the way, of course, when the panic started: he had a few other matters to think of.

His wife had been changing her pants at work and Dadda found out. He cursed her and the man who had taken his place in her body, and cursed, too, the silence of all the people at the office where she worked. Surely enough people knew about it for someone to spare a phone call and tip him off months ago. The pain was no less if it was deferred. He only intended to go and talk to both of them, but his wife was very nasty about him finding out and one thing led to another; he found himself on a footpath around five o'clock in a back lane starting to swap a few excited punches with the man—who was bigger than Dadda and better dressed—when his wife stepped in to help the other man and collected Dadda's elbow on the side of the head and went down in a heap. Her head hit the edge of the gutter and that was that.

As the concrete stopped the fall of her body, her pretty dress fell above her waist and the two males stood looking down at the root cause of their differences.

The other man got very worried, he was only along for the ride. I never intended to let it go on so long, he said. I've got my wife to think of and the kids. What about your job, too? asked Dadda, who despised him for not loving her. Yes, my job too, the man said, the company doesn't like anyone to give the place a bad name. Listen, the man said, how about we both shut up and beat it? It wasn't your fault and there's no marks on her. They can ask us both questions, but we were never here. Were we? Dadda was so miserable by this time that he said no, we weren't here. They both left, going different ways and the woman had only stray dogs for company till a milkman found her. By then she had been assaulted by a middle-aged bachelor shy of live girls.

 

Dadda made his way to the Home Beautiful, where the Great White Father was putting down stone paths and garden borders and better drains for the various types of liquid effluent from the huts.

‘I'll give you a hand,' said Dadda.

‘If you feel like it,' said the Great White Father. ‘But don't wear yourself out. We want you for the talent quest up at the pub tonight.'