The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (41 page)

 

TECHNIQUES OF CONTROL Gradually the lines of decision-making and control became more numerous, more tangled. Competition between departments, out of place in this type of refinery where marketing was handled by a different company, raged fiercely. Those responsible for planning the refinery's structure thought their problems solved by administrative innovations, pruning here, expansion there, alteration everywhere; arms, voices, memos flailing uselessly at disorder, without supplying on-the-spot control at the point where the crude oil and later streams were refined; without emphasizing the prime importance of the basic operations for which the refinery was built. They cut the cracker complex in half and doubled supervision: this worked one half against the other nicely. All this was very like the steam system over the refinery which was so complicated only three or four people understood it. Lines, valves, loops crossed and backtracked. A nightmare to work on.

Each supervisor had his own remedies for plant conditions; little points which, if observed, would keep the gasoline flowing in spite of the uninformed efforts of all the rest. One would surreptitiously change the pressure controller on the gas-absorber column from automatic to manual; another would open a bypass on the fractionater bottom level; one liked to run with a carbon reading of 0.3 per cent on the catalyst; another liked 0.55 per cent, just on the edge of a coke condition. There were as many panaceas as there were foremen, supervisors and controllers and they all fiddled with a good conscience and usually to opposite effect.

When nasty things happened, as always they did, the Education Officer—traditionally a spare-time post for a not too well-entrenched body in Personnel—went round with the official company reasons for failure and the excuses for the inevitable tightening-up. This tightening-up worked in the same way on the prisoners as it did on the immense valves on the process gas lines. Something that showed a dangerous leak under a temperature of 600 centigrade would be shut down and tightened cold. When it was hot again, no half dozen men could move it because of the tightening-up.

One of the new men, a cracker-expert from another country, had been on deck six months when he pulled up the Samurai over a certain arrangement of the reactor recycle flows. He had no authority—this was the refuge of such men, who gave opinions and directives no one really had to obey—but the Samurai wouldn't have obeyed. However, he gave no reasons for refusing to take the man's advice. The Boy Wonder saw this from a distance and knowing both of them, waited till the engineer stamped off red-faced. He whispered to his staff colleague.

‘This is a two-stage reactor.' That was what the Samurai expected the chemical engineer to know. It made all the difference to recycle flows.

‘Is it?' Six months and he didn't know. How did they spend their time? Were there so many pieces of paper to attend to, so many schedules and returns, so much in-fighting necessary to keep their jobs, that they had no time to look at the plant in detail? What was the dreadful penalty for asking questions?

15
THE GLASS CANOE SAVAGED BY WORDS

A PERSISTENT GLEAM OF SANITY There is no me. There are only memories of parts I've played in this stupid production called existence. There are only the characters I've made up on the spur of the moment, in an emergency, when people demanded I be something definite. I know there is no me. I'd still like to do everything, even the things that occur to me at odd times that at first I think are mad. I remember coming out of the twenty-four-hour sleep they gave me at hospital after the shocks. I said to myself—or someone that just got born said inside me—‘Why don't you try breathing with your forehead? Thinking with your stomach lining? Singing with your eyes?'

I came out of it yelling and screaming this and they nearly put me under again, but I realized in time and quietened down. You have to keep your wits about you in case you have a sudden flash of clear-in-the-head, there's no sense making things more painful if you can help it. When you're in the middle of it and raving, you don't care. They can do what they like, it wouldn't matter if they killed you—snuffed you out in disgust.

Breathing with your forehead, thinking with your diaphragm, singing with your eyebrows. Wrong again. If you don't watch it, the right words tail off into something else and before you know where you are you're saying something different; only a little different at first, but if you don't get back to the right words immediately, after a few changes you're right off the track. And the funny thing is it is words that cause all the trouble; they dictate what I think, they dictate what happens to me, they dictate what I make happen to other people. If I could get rid of words I might get better. I might feel more comfortable. Breathe forehead, think stomach, sing eyes. For weeks I couldn't get those words out of my head. And yet they were no use to me. They made nothing happen. They might just as well have been a set of words that said anything or nothing at all. They were all over me, those words, I couldn't shake them; crawling up my arms, running through the hairy forests of my legs, popping out of my hand when I made a fist. I wish I could—or I wish the part of me that's responsible for this could—but all of me is responsible: I can't separate any of me off and say that without it I'm the same: I wish I could have expanded enough to say real things like love, fidelity, jealousy, adultery, incest, murder, theft, betrayal, pride, honour, courage, seduction, elopement, horror, rape. And yet they're not real: they're emotions that might make me feel real. No, they're not even that, they're just words like the others. But let me follow this…If I can say the word, I can do the word. Rape: I could rape someone. Murder: I could do it. When you know something the word stands for, you can do it.

I could even have a secret language with myself, so that honour meant murder, and saying honour I could kill someone, because the power of knowing the word gives me the power to do the word. What I mean is my own private meaning could be different. And no one need know…I'd better get off this line of talk. Let's get on to something harmless. You've got to keep thinking of something: you can't just stop yourself like that.

The thought I had this morning when I was about to switch off the gas when the toast was done—all the things that are
un.
Yes, that's harmless enough. Puroil's unofficial army, unanswered phones, unopened letters, unlit cigarettes—think of the millions of unlit cigarettes resting at this moment in closed packets or cartons or crates or warehouses all over the world—all the untasted tea and coffee and alcohol, all the unraped women, all the unburgled houses, all the unattacked enemies, the books standing closed on shelves unread with the words flattened like springs waiting to leap out at you (words give you so many alternatives, you either do everything or slacken off and do nothing), the unmuzzled dogs, unmasked villains, unaccountable foreign companies, unaggressive Beautiful Twinkling Stars, all the millions of un-American people in the world, the unpolitical Australians, undetected perverts, the undistinguished leaders of the country, unattainable wealth, unavoidable death, the unborn millions in every man's seed, the uncertified lunatics.

Everything in the world can be un.

 

THE AGE OF ANXIETY I don't know who sent it round, but I have a copy of the form they say is issued to everyone they want to raise up to the staff. You have to answer all the questions, but they give you no clues about what sort of answers they want. It isn't like an exam at school where they teach you the stuff first. You have to dig in your own head and come up with something.

WHO DO YOU BLAME FOR YOUR PRESENT PREDICAMENT?
What does that mean? The predicament of promotion? Or my wife dead? Funny how I don't even miss her.

DO YOU THINK IT'S TOO LATE TO CHANGE?

DO YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HAPPINESS?

DO YOU LIKE THE PUROIL UNIFORM?

WOULD YOU BE HAPPIER IF YOU WERE TALLER OR HAD BLUE EYES?

HAVE YOU FINALLY HARDENED YOUR HEART AGAINST US?
What sort of question is that? They try to sound like God talking.

WHO IS THE FATHER OF YOUR WIFE'S CHILDREN?
They've got no right to demand answers. Maybe if you don't want to answer you can just leave a blank.

WOULD YOU RATHER BE YOURSELF AND DIE OR CHANGE A LITTLE AND LIVE?

DO YOU REPROACH YOURSELF FOR YOUR MISTAKES?

DO YOU PRIDE YOURSELF ON BEING A STRONG CHARACTER?
Talking about strong characters, the Sump is still bad with heights; last Saturday when the movies were on at Jerriton drive-in the whole shift was up the structure, not a soul below the first landing, and there he was down below, singing out for us to come down, but no one heard. He must have no guts at all, he's always saying he's a coward, maybe he is. I couldn't say it even if I knew it was true.

DO YOU THINK OUR POWER IS GODLIKE?

DO YOU THINK DISCUSSION OF OUR DIFFERENCES WILL PRODUCE AGREEMENT?

COULD YOU HAVE SAVED THE PLANT IN THE LAST CRASH?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND US?

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HUNGRY?

DO YOU FEEL YOU KEEP GOOD TRACK OF TIME?

CAN ONE MAN SAVE THE WORLD?
It beats me; I don't know what they're getting at. Maybe it's not a proper Puroil question sheet; someone might have just made it up. An experiment. I wonder if it was one of the young technologists? No, more likely the Two Pot Screamer, he's very sarcastic at times. When the company was trying to tell us that hydrofluoric acid was just a weak acid—Doctor Death said that for them—he made jokes about going for a swim in carb-soda in the bath they keep over there if you get any on you. He even drew little cartoons and stuck them on the ceilings where they couldn't be taken down till the cleaners got in. I wish I hadn't put my foot through the ceiling; I was lying on top of the console and pretending to raise the roof with my legs, but the ceiling gave way.

HAVE YOU EARNED THE RIGHT TO STAY WITH THE COMPANY?

ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE MANAGER?

DO YOU THINK THE WORLD IS SICK?

WILL YOU EVER TAKE YOUR SAFETY FOR GRANTED IN THE FUTURE?

ARE YOU SURPRISED THAT WE USE NO FORCE ON YOU?

NAME SOMETHING THAT IS REAL.

ARE YOU HAPPY?
These questions remind me of the hospital. Examining everything. Carting you off doped, leaving the medical fossickers happy with your nuggets.

NAME SOMETHING IMPORTANT.

This really has me wet. There can't be anything in it. There's no reason why I shouldn't let someone else be tricked by it too. Let some other silly bastard worry about it. Old Far Away. I'll stick it in his bag. Pity old Blue Hills isn't here, I'd worry him sick.

He didn't see the eye watching him from an inch hole in the steel panel. A man stood back there, only six feet away, boots braced on green-painted air mains that branched upwards into ever smaller lines, the arteries reticulating life-giving air to the hundreds of control points all over the complex of plants.

This man smiled and watched and fiddled with himself under his overalls as the Glass Canoe pulled himself to his feet, clutching the paper, and made for the locker-room, adjusting his symptom list, swallowing a calming pill and checking that his lower parts were covered.

16
A GREAT DAY FOR FIRST THINGS

FIVE HUNDRED PAIRS OF HORNS The tea was warm and the Beautiful Twinkling Star sucked in a mouthful. There was no warning, no flicker. The electric power failed. Everything. No lights, no pumps, no electricity. After a second the emergency generator cut in and restored lights on the panel alarms, the red, amber and white sixteen-volt bulbs. It wasn't enough to see by. When in the darkness men touched each other they sprang back in fear. The rest was uproar.

To move more quickly the Star spat out the tea—it went down his overalls—and raced for the door. The power failure lasted half an hour and in that time the plant crashed again. If the stand-by boiler feedwater pumps had been assembled they might have saved the boilers. The electric pump was silent. No water. The Humdinger cut the fires by the light of a torch. The great compressor stopped without high-pressure steam, it was no use making gasoline vapours to be compressed. The whole complex was down.

When he got back inside, the Western Salesman, one of the urgers who had bludged during the emergency by looking for nonexistent work down at the opposite end, noticed the wet on the Twinkler's overalls, saved his breath till he had a good audience, then let go. ‘Look who got a fright and pissed hisself!' Pointing to the wet stain.

The Beautiful Twinkling Star had never had this reaction before; never, that is, long enough for it to remain unsuppressed. Perhaps it was the aches and pains of the flu or the accumulation of the feeling that because he did his work he missed all the lurks and perks others enjoyed. Whatever it was, he lashed out.

The Twinkler had lived a clean life and worked hard and yet he was very strong. His right fist flashed at the man's middle and seemed to go through to his back-bone. ‘You bludging mongrel,' he said in his polite voice. For a long time those who liked the Twinkler, and they were many, called him the Beautiful Twinkling Right, or Beautiful Twinkling Knuckles. Perhaps one of the Salesman's buttons was undone, but the Twinkler scraped his knuckles enough to draw blood. He went to his locker for the bottle of red dye. Empty. He went out to the control-room stationery cabinet and filled his unlabelled bottle from the red ink supply for the instrument charts. Unselfconsciously he dabbed his cuts with red ink. The Samurai was the only witness. If the others had seen, his credit would have been gone forever. He looked back squarely at the Samurai as if the bottle contained an expensive antibiotic.