The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (52 page)

Next day the Great White Father knew it was impossible to live with the Jew on any terms but his own; positions-vacant ads were in the papers and bulldozers started clearing-work at the southern end of the Puroil mangroves.

The holiday roster was reorganized and Canada Dry's holiday trip was off. He had arranged for mid-winter, an unpopular time, so he was given mid-summer because he was single. All the married men with kids who had been sweating on mid-summer were given mid-winter.

20
THE LITTLE THINGS

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, SEEN FROM BENEATH Provided it has continued for some time and is widespread, liberalization will not be easily stopped. Simple repression is not the answer. The men hadn't changed. Their conditions of work were harder, they had lost the right to stop work—agreed to it themselves. The company hadn't changed, either; the company so wasteful of men and materials, content to allow the waste to continue in its system of replacement parts of both items; the company that trusted in numbers and didn't value the valour of its slaves; the company which was so far away.

The Two Pot Screamer watched the Samurai slyly from around corners, wondering how long this man could keep inside himself the fury that was stirred and boiled up fresh each day by the jumble, the tangle, the idiocies, the sneaking out from under, the endless don't-care. Men like him meant their hate, it wasn't just for show; they kept quiet, letting it grow and gain in strength, bottling it up, keeping it in to raise the pressure.

He procured a chit and went to the lavatory, where he proceeded to make copious notes.

The Samurai was still smarting under the indignity of being unpaid for the day he was sick. In his disgust at this and at the wage defeat, his dismay at the wreck of his arm scarred by friends, he was making the company pay for regiments of unpaid sick days. He was convinced that the Brown Snake had marked his sick form ‘More information required' knowing that a man like him wasn't going to crawl along to his office with excuses and beg for the money.

The Samurai wasn't as badly off as the Outside Fisherman, who had three days off with ‘humanoid arthritis in back', as he put it on his sick form. No pay. He hadn't had a day off in two years.

Why did a little thing tip the scales and cause the Samurai to do bad things? Others took more than he did from Puroil. Perhaps when you've always had it good, little things loom large.

The Samurai was varying his vengeance: one day he would depress the gasoline conversion so that the yield on his shift, instead of being a thousand tons a day, was eight hundred; and he would so adjust other plant conditions that it was impossible for those who followed him to do much about it. Other times he would adjust the end point of the gasoline, altering the quality. For now the plant was going well. He heard them come every morning, the white hosts of technologists and project and process engineers, and even the Good Shepherd was heard to say, ‘It's going well and we don't know why.' They were hoping it was permanent.

The gasoline make was down, for the Samurai could play on the control panel like an organist plays his rows of keys and stops. There had been a zero error of two on the feed-flow instrument for twelve months. They were processing seven hundred tons a day less than they thought. Heads fell in accounting and stocks department because of the discrepancy, but no one on the production end knew. The fault was regularly notified, but it didn't have priority. No one bothered any more about the five hundred tons a day of steam at two dollars a ton which exhausted to the stack. Every new man who started suggested installing condensers so that the expensively demineralized water could be recovered and used again, but all suggestions were rubbished.

And every day five tons of catalyst fines—too fine to be trapped by the regenerator cyclones—were released to atmosphere. At a dollar a pound.

 

THE LOST LEADER The Samurai went to sleep thinking of these things. If there were no overseas control, would he sabotage them no matter what they did to him? It would be different, having your own people making money from your efforts. Why was it different? But he had always had this idea that he would rather have a friend hurt him than a stranger, rather an Australian make money from his working life than a foreigner. Was he crazy? Or was he just taking a little further the dim feelings of every Australian? Obstinate, irrational, vengeful. National.

Who would channel the emotions of these people—his politically backward countrymen—who would find a political outlet for their fears and greed? What leader would arise to show them what to want?

Those around him were willing to submit to his leadership, but he had never wanted to make the effort for them. What they demanded was what all the world's inert masses wanted—someone to lean on, someone to do their fighting for them. A mighty leader he was in his dreams—or was he an Admirable Crichton who could rise to the occasion in an emergency, then sink to his place when the battlefield cleared? Or was he no such thing?

Now and then in his life he had a feeling that made his hair crawl and the suspicion of emotional tears spring into his eyes. What was it? Yes. It was that all his life had been a preparation—everything that happened to him was training for a mighty engagement—half waking and half asleep in his lonely bed, he roamed over the remembered fields through which his imagination had taken him for years. How long was it? Ever since he was a boy and had walked out at night to the high back veranda of his home, to the square corner formed by the safety rail, and gripped it with his strong young hands and looked out over the winking houselights and street-lights, way beyond the undulating suburbs to the lights of Sydney, multi-coloured and cold in the night air. Unwinking, steady; for the air was clearer then. But waiting. Those lights, that city; always waiting.

Waiting for his voice.

 

THE TRIAL He drifted off into uneasy sleep. The lights were always kept on, he was a murderer in the condemned cell. Capital punishment had been deleted from the criminal code, but that made no difference to his dream: death as a punishment was still in his head. They had moved the execution apparatus into his room. How could he escape now? Escape? Desperately his mind went over the details of his trial, he began to exercise control over the outcome of the speeches—that was all they were: dead forms of speech read out lifelessly—made by his counsel; the bored, sarcastic interpolations of his judge; constantly going back in time to amend details of his crime itself, until he had tailored the crime, apprehension, imprisonment, verdict, trial, everything to suit his dreaming self. Then he escaped from under the shadow of the gallows and soon was wide awake. No, it was not right yet; he went back to sleep to change the whole dream.

He lay there in a disturbed bed. One man alone in the world. Free as a man is free whom no one claims. What was his future? Would he marry and see himself continue in children? Or be content to influence the children of other men? And was his seed capable of living again? Why hadn't he gone back to that doctor to get the verdict? Why bother about it at all? Plenty of time to discover your seed is dead a few years after marriage. It wasn't right from a woman's point of view—not fair—but who was a woman? His body fidgeted, his mind seethed.

Sleep was gone.

 

FACSIMILE How many men were cursed with this habit of anxiety? If he was a man with dead seed, that was the sort of man he was. Why couldn't he stop caring? Here he was, one man at war with one of the largest corporations in the world. How was it that one man could be allowed to cost such a body thousands of dollars a day in reduced production and no one competent to stop him? No technological audit department to point the finger? No fellow workers with sufficient knowledge of the plant to spot what he was doing, go behind his back and make capital from his downfall? In the pay office a man could lose his head for a ten-cent mistake, but on the production end the plant could be run wastefully for months, everyone knew and no one cared.

All the men needed was unity and a certain strength to be able to beat the constant downward pressure of the agents of the free men who employed them. But why help to beat them? For apathetic, wantless boobies who wouldn't fight. For men who didn't want to be at work anyway.

He was moving towards the place where he was about to say ‘To hell with the prisoners, there's a reward for working, too!' Was all this internal fuss and noise nothing but a prelude to conforming and shutting his mouth like everyone else?

Maybe taking revenge wasn't enough. What did he get from it but satisfaction? Defeat was ahead in a world where every man was for himself. The world wasn't right, something was out of balance.

Hours later, he slept. The day he woke to was a copy of every other day except that, following the laws governing its eventual destruction, it was minutely longer.

 

DIGNITY A deputation approached the Great White Father. Loosehead and some others had worried for days about the conclusion of the great man's speech on the fall of the Glass Canoe.

‘We feel,' he began, then feeling ashamed of hiding behind the plural, said boldly, ‘I reckon you should have said—The Glass Canoe is shattered and sunk.' He stood silent, waiting praise or rebuke.

‘What did I say?'

‘Shattered and gone home.'

‘Shattered and sunk, eh? Sunk? To end a speech? If it was a comedy sketch, yes. But sunk? No, Loosehead, I don't like it.'

‘But wouldn't it be better? Glass—shattered—sunk? It sounds as if that's the end, nice and neat.'

‘It's a good point, Loosehead, and I'm glad you listened, but I like the end of a speech to sort of trail away. Dignity. You know? Sunk is too quick, too sudden. Like pulling out a bung.'

‘But I had a theory.'

‘I don't care what your theories are, Loosehead. The sound has to be the thing that hits you in the belly, not the sense. When the Bible said “Rejoice with me for I have found that which was lost”, the silly bugger should have said, “Rejoice with me, for I have lost that which was found.” Hear it? That's the way to roll words off your tongue. “Our Glass Canoe is shattered and gone home.” Sonorous! Full! Rich! Resounding! Memorable!'

‘You sure?'

‘Dignity, Loosehead.' And he rolled the words out as if they made sense: ‘Abide with me, for I am shattered and gone home.'

‘Dignity. OK. Dignity.' Loosehead went away with his followers, repeating the word like an incantation.

 

EXIT FORMALITIES The Great White Father saw to it that Herman the German was sent off well. He shaved the man himself, combed his hair, and nourished his last day with a little pilsner.

All the girls were there sitting in a half-circle round Herman's bed. He saw their faces dimly as choristers and angels. Never on Sunday held his hand and the Sorcerer's Apprentice his knee. Perhaps a little above the knee. The Humdinger led the prisoners in a few garbled verses of ‘Abide with Me' and Far Away Places assayed an emotional version of ‘God be with you till we meet again' until tears ran down the faces of prostitutes and prisoners. Only Herman was tearless.

His washed face shone. He was back in Bebel-Strasse, Hamburg. Angels in chorus sang:

Hayricks, heavily thatched farmhouses, the joyful, jumping dogs, a holiday once with the family in the Harzberge and everyone warm in thick coats and fur hats. Wonderful days and your chest full of the cold crisp air of the Alps. He felt it now—although it was a warm day—that cold crisp air in his lungs as his body failed him for the first time. Before he could be surprised at this, death eased him.

The Great White Father took the body to his house in his own decaying car and got a doctor to sign the papers. He made out Herman had been bunking there. The doctor asked no questions. Every week among the aged and neglected he saw worse than this: after all, a significant percentage of the population had a standard of living that put them in danger of malnutrition. This man at least had someone who would see that he got a burial.

The hat went round for Herman's funeral, no one knew or bothered about his bank account. Men from the four shifts went to the crematorium, including half the shift on duty that day. Each man put on his absentee report by arrangement, ‘Attending funeral of Herman who was sacked because he lost an arm.' They didn't get paid.

That afternoon and for a few days after that—the Cremmo waited for a pile of corpses before lighting the furnace—whenever a man looked up in the direction of Rookwood and fancied he saw an extra black puff of smoke he would say speculatively, ‘That might be Herman now.'

Herman's son turned up looking for his Dad's bankbook, but his landlady had burned the old papers to keep the room tidy. She'd known him for years and was quite fond of him, but business was business. She let the room the same day, when Herman's rent still had a week and three days to go. She made a profit and the thought of it softened her eyes and relaxed her mind. She spoke quietly to the other boarders and didn't take a headache powder all day.

 

SURPRISE! When the big shutdown was nearly over and the Wandering Jew had his new towbar, patio rail and barbecue equipment—made on the job—the Python organized a night raid, caught several fitters doing foreign orders and sacked them. With their usual ability to recognize an important issue, the operators declared their support. The Sumpsucker heard them talking. ‘Don't forget your Union agreed to the no-stoppage clause.'

What no-stoppage clause? This was a surprise. Righteously they raged in a dozen amenities huts. First a stand-down clause, now a no-stoppage clause. How can the Union itself say they can't go out? It was different with the other trades, most of them had clauses in their awards banning strikes. But their awards were forced on them, they hadn't cut their own throats.