The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (37 page)

‘What should I do about this man?'

‘If you can't satisfy your wife, she's got to get it somewhere. If you can't, leave her. Get someone you can satisfy and that can satisfy you. That's all I can say. Now beat it.'

Nat's Girl smiled down from her elevated position at this male wisdom.

 

DOUBLE BUNGER In the control room the Samurai heard
WHUMP WHUMP
! and didn't move an inch. Sure enough, as he turned his head, there was the grinning face of the Humdinger peeping round behind the metal panels on the end of the middle console. Soft thumps on those panels produced sounds like the surging and tripping of the banks of turbo-expanders. But others hadn't seen the Humdinger.

There were people everywhere inside ten seconds, milling round in the control room, running for the door. Panic. Those wanting to rush out and do something couldn't get out the door for bods running in. Dutch Treat was nearly trampled to death in the doorway. It revived the Samurai's spirits a little to watch the ignorant and fearful scatter.

Who was it? What was it? Some looked across the yard to where the Sump was supervising the removal of empty polymer catalyst drums so that he could take them out off night shift. Most blamed the Sump. He was easy to pick on. They were still calming themselves by diverting their fear of a plant crash on to hatred of the smelly, dirty and defenceless Sumpsucker, when a hot spot on the flue-gas header blew out with a roar. The turbo-expanders tripped on low flow, the header pressure dropped and the white-hot catalyst was sucked over the top of the boilers with the flue gas, following the drop in pressure out of the hole in the header, and through the turbo-expanders.

In seconds there was catalyst over everything and men running in circles. The Humdinger cursing and swearing, putting the plant down, throwing cut-off levers and emergency steam cut-ins, none too sure that his little mock whumps hadn't caused the whole crash. He had slumped the catalyst bed so the whole six hundred tons wouldn't be lost; now it would have to be vacuum unloaded from the reactor and stripper and from the regenerator down to the air spider level, then the remaining sixty tons below shovelled. Three days for the catalyst to cool, seven days' shovelling. The catalyst was 87 per cent silica and some of it as fine as 15 microns and what it did inside a lung was nobody's business.

The Western Salesman came in, jubilant.

‘Shovels, chaps! Twenty cents an hour!' He wouldn't have understood if you asked him how twenty cents an hour made it all right to breathe the dust.

After all, it was an economy plant.

13
TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN INDUSTRIAL PRISONER

LIFE IS NOW Witnesses heard the Great White Father going to town on several despairing prisoners whose great cry every day for their past dozen years of detention was ‘Seven hours and fifty-nine minutes to go! Come on three o'clock.' Or seven, or eleven; keeping up a running commentary on the time left each day. They wanted time to be past, wanted their lives behind them. At sixty they could be free. Delightful.

‘This is life now,' said the Great White Father. ‘Not tomorrow. Not three o'clock. It's not a practice for something later. Later you won't exist. This is all the life you get today. There's no more. Tomorrow's another world.'

 

DEDICATION A dozen sat in the locker-room to watch their leader polish off a few cans of warm beer. With his air of being a visitor to the place, never involved in work, he restored to them a hint that they might be men, not merely extensions of the nuts and bolts outside. They had this feeling only from contact with him, they were not strong enough to hold it firmly and live by it. Constant exposure to the wiles of ever-present Puroil and its concerns made them lose contact with themselves: they had not only no importance, they had no existence. Completely overshadowed and the life sucked out of them by this world-gripping monster that seemed so often stronger than governments—though owned anonymously—they had to be reminded they were men. Even huddled together in the Union meeting, where their conflicts of self-interest were most evident, they had no such feeling of sharing in the life of individuals as he gave them. They needed him as weak people need drugs.

The boilers were started again after the header was welded, the noise of the newly starting plant coming on loud and strong, when the expansion bellows blew on the same header. Expansion bellows were provided to take up expansion and contraction of the header between two fixed vertical boilers. Bellows metal was thinner, and the carry-over of combustible material that caused the previous hotspot affected the bellows, too. It was right at the place where the men stopped to take their readings on the performance of the turbo-expanders.

Taffy the Welsh, standing in this position, was nearly cut in half by the escaping gases. The roar of the rupture could be heard above the screaming turbo-expanders and the high-pitched whistle of the fuel gas in the lines. Men ran.

They brought Taffy down. He was out to it; the overalls had been burned off him, but the men did not notice that a small patch of flesh on his side was cooked till they got him down to the control room floor where several bits of cooked meat fell away from his body. There were no stretchers. Macabre, the Safety Officer, had earned good marks from Luxaflex for economy by taking them off the plants: they were half a mile away in the fire station which acted as casualty centre. Taffy was laid on the concrete floor with some flattened cartons and sleeping rag under him for insulation.

A call was made to the main gate to order an ambulance.

‘You'll have to ring the fire station,' said the main gate. ‘You must report all accidents to the fire station.'

‘This man's seriously injured!' roared the Samurai into the phone.

‘I've only got your word for that,' said the guard cockily. ‘All accidents must be reported to the fire station, and the fire station will authorize us to ring for an ambulance.'

‘Damn it, I'll ring one myself!' yelled the Good Shepherd, who had grabbed the phone. Parallel to his decent world was still this other world where suspicion and hate were a law of life.

‘You're taking the risk that the ambulance you call will not be allowed in at the gate,' replied the man. The Good Shepherd slammed down the phone and rang the fire station.

‘I'm sorry,' he muttered to the men gathered angrily about him. No one liked Taffy, but his burns could be theirs. The Good Shepherd felt they deserved some sort of apology. Inside him, he felt sick. He knew there had to be regulations. He knew the people who frame them had the responsibility of making regulations that would cope with the worst emergencies that could happen. This particular regulation was designed to cope only with the problem of dealing with malingerers with a scratched finger who demand an ambulance and a roomful of surgeons to fix it.

He went through the channels and fortunately the firemen responded quickly: he was glad the company hadn't had its way and abolished the firemen's jobs. Someone had made an anonymous call to the newspapers, who rang back and checked with the Trout. The idea was dropped.

‘The sooner we get this man to hospital the better,' he observed to the men gathered around.

‘You'll take Taffy to Saint Joe's, won't you?' the Great White Father asked the Good Shepherd. ‘You can't take him to that other place.' He was referring to a hospital of sinister reputation where the nurses acted like sluts off the streets, dying to get out with their boyfriends, not caring a hoot for anyone. ‘It's a terrible place. I know a poor devil—he was shot, I admit—he fell down between the railway lines at Banksia and grazed his arm. A pretty bad graze. They left him four hours in casualty. When they did bother to get someone in, they had to take his arm off.'

‘You're exaggerating,' smiled the Good Shepherd. That sort of thing couldn't happen these days. ‘Medical science—'

‘They left him sitting there and he had gangrene in four hours,' the great man said seriously. ‘I don't know how long he was getting to the hospital. Now he's got this much stump.' He pointed to a spot halfway up the Good Shepherd's upper arm. ‘Another bloke went in, had half his stomach out with cancer and they found he was rattling all over with cancer lumps. Just after they told him about the cancer and that he was a goner, some pig of a doctor waddled in and called out in the ward, “Who's dead and who's not?”'

The Samurai spoke up. ‘You might as well take him to a place staffed by people like us. Just in off the street. You need hospitals where the people don't work just for their wages—where they're dedicated. Like Saint Joe's.'

Just beyond his grasp there was a shining idea; was it the key that could open up this present attempt at civilization so that the whole vast machinery might suddenly get to its feet and work? Instead of slumping, half idle, aimlessly, as it was now.

What was needed? Dedication to what? Not simply the State and not only personal goals. He bit the inside of his lip in the fury of this sudden concentration of thought. If a man could have his personal aims and a reasonable chance of fulfilling them, and beyond them to be caught up in a larger idea. It eluded him. No matter. He knew the idea was there. Perhaps next time he would grasp it and see it face to face.

‘We could work this place, no trouble, if we had people dedicated to Puroil,' said the Good Shepherd, but even as he spoke he knew they had no time for him. They could understand chronic liars, but not the honest man who suddenly lied.

The Great White Father butted in. ‘What nong's going to be dedicated to some bunch of foreign bastards that don't know us except as workers they'd rather do without? No, man. You'll never get dedication in a place like this, I hope. Even you're not dedicated: Christianity made you what you were. And you, Samurai—you're not dedicated. You work because you're too proud to be a bludger like me. Don't bring in dedication: no intelligent man could be dedicated to making gasoline just for putting in the tanks of a few million stupid motorists.' He relaxed. The mood was too serious. ‘Did I tell you about the last time I was in hospital? For the prostate. There I was with this permanent catheter and a big glass bottle suspended over the side of the bed. Every single visitor bumped the blasted thing; there it was swinging on the end of me and everyone that leaned over the bed to sneak me a can or two or a brandy bottle pinched the damn tube. I was in hell, I tell you. Dedicated?'

The Sumpsucker heard it all from the lavatory. There he was, busting for a pee, but every time he took it out it was an erection. Desperately he tried to pee by accident, the only way he ever managed, but it was no good. The thing knew. Tricked him every time. As soon as it peered from his trouser into the open air it shot out straight. He was whimpering. All that going on out there and he was the foreman, he should be there to take charge. Tears came into his eyes. He didn't want to do it in his trousers. Perhaps if he put blinkers on it. He grabbed a handful of rag and surrounded it. Come on, you stupid bastard! And it worked. He'd tricked it. It thought it had clothes on, and relaxed. He peed gratefully into the rags and threw them back in the rag box.

Taffy was still out.

 

THE VERTICAL SPLIT He was out for another ten days. It took quite a bit of sidestepping of the regulations to get some money to his family in time to buy the week's food. Company interpretations of compensation regulations laid down that no money be paid out until the proper claim forms had been completed by the injured person and a report made to the company's medical officer. This, too, was designed for the man with the scratched finger. The company advanced some money from Taffy's sick pay. Even so, there were questions asked up in the Termitary: why couldn't the man have stood to one side when taking these readings? Why didn't he report the injury himself? The auditors picked up the fact that payment had been made when the claim forms hadn't been filled out by the injured person. The men responsible for circumventing the red tape had the ever-present feeling their own jobs were in danger. It was clear to the operations people that Taffy had been in no condition to fulfil the regulations, but there it was—the vertical split. The questioners were in other departments; they had no knowledge of what sort of work Taffy did, what it meant to have some of your flesh cooked off you, what dangers the men faced every day. They had often only the haziest idea where the plant was and what it was supposed to do, although they joined in heartily with shocked displeasure when they heard of yet another breakdown. ‘It's the poor types we get as operators,' they said.

 

SLEDGEHAMMER FINESSE Man is irrepressible. You can't keep him down, especially when his livelihood is in the balance. In the latest crash the great compressor had surged and tripped, its shaft bent. A maker's representative was flown from Hamburg to watch it taken apart. Despite all speculations about whether the plant would go, another start-up was proceeding normally.

The rest of the refinery was served by a brand-new high-pressure boiler capable of eighty tons of steam an hour; a beautiful piece of work except for its instrumentation, which had nothing in common with the instrumentation on the other boilers. None of the operators understood it. The cracker wasn't ready for steam, but just to be able to report to Melbourne that something was going, the vertical boiler was blasting away for a fortnight, as soon as the bellows was patched.

Weeks passed. The deadline was brought forward. Working at night while the expert was asleep in his hotel, fitters aligned the German compressor-turbine on its bed by bashing it with a fourteen-pound sledgehammer. The foreman fitter was told that if the machine wasn't ready by next morning he wouldn't have a job. Tolerances of eight times the maker's specifications were winked at, the machine housing hurriedly replaced in the dark.