The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (59 page)

This fine Sunday, after the home team had been beaten again, he did take the rifle with him when he decided to roam round and look at Puroil again. All a man could see from outside the fence was the big plants, like the fearsome-looking cracker, high as a stack. He had never been down to that part of the works—a man couldn't leave his own section—and he knew nothing about it, although his daily job required close co-operation with it. The good old days had only finally vanished when that damn heap of crap had been built.

He fitted the silencer his son had made at Technical College and aimed at the guy wire holding the battleship boiler stack. He didn't hit it with any of his shots. What he hit was several hundred yards beyond—the high-pressure tapping line on the regenerator pressure controller.

On the way home on Highway One he thought he saw the Kraut. Funny. He was supposed to be in Brisbane.

 

SUFFICIENT REASON Since the high-pressure tapping was gone, the automatic instrument registered low and shut itself to keep the pressure up to the setting the Humdinger had on his panel instrument. But the actual pressure wasn't low—shutting the valve simply gave the pressure nowhere to go. It was a slow-acting valve. The pressure rose.

Just as silica-alumina was the catalyst in the company's industrial production process, so hate was the catalyst in the company's industrial relations process. With a grateful pout, the regenerator bubble burst and the hatred of years boiled over. A bellowing column of sound followed, and catalyst at over 600 Centigrade spewed in a stream of fire out into the courtyard and, carried on the wind, towards the mangroves.

The Great White Father, drunk on the doorstep of the drink hut, hardly noticed the darkened sky before he was covered in grey catalyst. He was only on the edge of the column of dust, and didn't get burned.

But this wasn't enough to reduce the pressure. The cunning vessel decided to ease itself in a more direct way. Just below the bubble was the southern seam; this bulged and opened. The top valve was now shut. The regenerator seemed to blow apart then. It swelled with its internal pressure even as it spewed white-hot catalyst. A long minute, then it collapsed in on itself. The great round sides fell inwards.

 

THE POSTURE OF DEVOTION Land of Smiles wasn't moving. The mouth was open in its broadest grin; the wide-spaced teeth, etched neatly in nicotine, dry from long exposure. He could breathe in and out shallowly, but the legs had left him.

He had been examining the eight-page lab results sheets, and not seeing them, when the crisis commenced. Now they were in long foolscap shreds. Between his continually moving fingers the shreds were twined and twisted; some hung, split and ripped between odd fingers, others waggled back towards his stomach, improperly severed. He seemed smaller, somehow. It had not occurred to him yet to get up from his kneeling position.

Even when the Congo Kid's liquid gas leaks travelled up the drains into the open trenches under the control-panel consoles and caught fire from the catalyst, Land of Smiles was unable to move.

The Humdinger didn't know about the fire inside the hollow console until he rested his hand on the metal while opening pressure valves. Gunga Din came good under fire. He could do nothing for his own plant but let it die a natural death. He brought bucket after bucket of water and drenched the Humdinger's panel, to keep it cool enough for him to touch.

 

AN ITEMIZED LIST The ethylene plant crashed on steam failure.

Neighbouring factories stopped all steam-driven processes.

The regenerator collapsed and the process stopped. The Glass Canoe's dog perished.

The Humdinger threw the feed cut-out and put steam into all high-temperature processes.

Heat from the open regenerator lit a fire in the reactor bed, where the nozzles were loose and hot oil was escaping. Loosehead was killed by the heat before his body was charred.

The slurry tank blew up and flashed. The Corpse was knocked flat for a while.

Slurry rundown was stopped and allowed to set solid in the lines and the fractionator column rather than feed the fire.

The turbo-expanders tripped, and the high-pressure steam turbine. The gas flow stopped and there was nothing for the compressor end to compress.

The high-pressure steam had nowhere to go—the let-down valve was jammed shut by the collar the Loch Ness Monster had spun down. Every safety valve blew, but this was not sufficient relief and the Humdinger brought the boilers down. The rest of the refinery plants followed, they depended on cracker steam.

There was no ladder to use to get the let-down valve open.

There were no blanks to spade off gas lines and other dangerous flows. Fuel gas was isolated on block valves and control valves that always had let by: blanks were vital to plant safety.

The process flows that had to be let go to drains went straight into the river, together with oil from the drains and interceptor and the black crude that couldn't be accommodated at the crashed distillation plants.

The white-hot catalyst lit the gas from the opened butane drain.

The Rustle of Spring, though not touched by catalyst, was cooked in his bed by the great wall of catalyst all round him, heaped up high round the concrete regenerator skirt.

The Humdinger bribed two men to go the long way round and rig up hoses to play saltwater jets on the fuel gas tank.

The Humdinger got Far Away Places to turn on the cold-water jets inside the reactor skirt. This put out the fire there and cracked the red-hot riser.

The northern part of the control hut was wrecked: amenities, foremen's office, locker-room. The Humdinger worked in great heat, despite Gunga Din's water, and was too busy to put his fingers under noses. Catalyst was banked against the north walls and had come in the locker-room windows.

The fire in the console was knocking out the instruments one by one. Gunga Din started sloshing water over the Humdinger, to keep him cool.

No other men could be found—all had gone to the windward side of the catalyst to potter on their plants so they couldn't get any orders that might take them into danger. The Humdinger shut down everything he could from his panel. He got Land of Smiles out of sight, dragging him behind the sixty-foot panel. When most of the noises had stopped or steadied out and the streams he couldn't send to storage were dropped out to drains, the Slug came back ready to give orders. Men still slipped where he trod. Then the cars appeared from the direction of the residences. The Puroil fire wagon was at the blazing tank. Inside half an hour there were white shirts everywhere with lists and company-issue pens to catalogue the bulk dead. There were twenty separate adverse reports on the water on the panel-room floor. Nothing could be done, except to play saltwater on the banks of catalyst and wait for it to cool, and concentrate on the blazing tank. Three operators and eleven white shirts were overcome by H
₂
S fumes, but none died. The oil on the river didn't catch fire, though traffic on the bay was coated for weeks and seagulls drowned in thousands. The firemen contained the blaze of the tank. The fire could have been a lot worse.

All in all, Sydney was lucky. Without the wind blowing flames and hot catalyst away from the main refinery area, the big tanks would have gone up and half Sydney with them.

The Gypsy Fiddler, out of sight, was coming back gingerly from his hideaway to windward of the danger area, into the strange quiet of the cracker area. The air compressor was still running on the last of the seventeen-kilo steam pressure and just as he got near it, the air-driers changed over. They were on six-hour cycle, drying and regenerating. They changed with a roar that was usually heard above the crashing roar of the cracker on normal operation, but in a surrounding silence it was like the crack of doom. The sound of bombs and shocks of war hadn't toughened him, they'd left him weak and scared. The Fiddler dropped dead. There was not a mark on him and when his skull and body were cut up in the post-mortem insisted on by the company's insurers, there was no evidence of carbon-monoxide poisoning from the regenerator catalyst or any other injury. No compensation.

The Maltese Falcon gave up hope of getting his brand-new aluminium ladder, but three days later when the fuss had died down he came by the fence and there it was, still in the trench. He said a little prayer of gratitude. He hadn't sunk so far as to lose his early religious training.

SKlation had let so much feed into the reactor that it coked up the riser and reactor bed. It would need to be drilled out. He hadn't learned a thing. His confident ignorance was another hazard built-in to Puroil's future.

The Corpse was dismissed because of the tank shut-off. It was discovered by his offsider and a tank-farm foreman on their way to the burning slurry tank. He was defiant and swore they'd never sack him, but when Luxaflex had a talk with him mentioning the Enforcer, he went quietly.

They took Land of Smiles away to a Reception House. He was never seen again.

The Humdinger performed one more valuable service. Somehow the computer boys got in on the act, accompanying the technologists to the disaster. They'd never been down to the dirty end before. After looking at the mess they trooped in covered in catalyst and oil and went up to the Humdinger in the most natural way imaginable and wiped their shoes on his overalls. The systems analyst grabbed the loose cloth on his right leg, the programmer his left, and they wiped away. The technician waited his turn. Before they finished, a party of junior engineers came in, talking excitedly of what they'd seen. When they saw the new shoe-cleaning arrangements they looked at one another.

‘Care for a shine?' called the Humdinger. ‘It's free. No tipping, by request.'

They took a few steps towards him, then recoiled as he lashed out and flung away from him the neatly suited priests of the new age.

25
SUNRISE IN THE SOUTH

A SAMURAI'S RELIGION (Notes found in the wreckage of a plant locker-room.)

The longing to be dominated and to hate your rulers is essential to the health of society. Control is control is control.

War and conflict have rescued from economic depression, poverty, moral looseness and decay. Strength and vitality, though expressed in strange ideologies, will inherit the earth. War is the only end of a society, the only reality men will allow to unify them. Hatred is necessary.

Life is destruction. Life and destruction stretch before me. The reason is in myself. Everything is in me. The refinery plant is a growth in my belly. No, the plant
is
me.

Just a touch is necessary. Just a touch—to destroy. This knowledge of what I have done is beginning to transform me. Transform? Rather to build on and develop what was always in me. I feel hard and smooth like polished steel. Is there a way to put the word steel into my name?

When I think of the power of one man to change and to destroy, then think of the power of many. Walking in a street. Men and women, faces calm or relaxed in moulds of moderate greed, weak hate, vacillating joy, poverty-stricken ambition or that familiar wantless look of the half-alive. Then—I think with a great flash of light! Imagine each human extended to the full pitch of that energy spent normally on common situations—playing games, arguing with a neighbour, dodging a boss, aiming a kick at an animal—imagine that energy available all at once, channelled in one direction. The power of one man and the power of many.

 

REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE Now he was on holiday he was more than ever bound to the industrial life he lived. He had parked on the hill at Cheapley looking down over the refinery and its industrial neighbours. How could a man hate his employer yet be at a loose end when he had to stay away? It wasn't the money—he wasn't interested in money—he felt useless when he wasn't working. He looked west to the Blue Mountains: they were no help. Rocks and trees. The refinery, for all its idiocies and frustrations, was a product of strength and vitality. It was men wrenching power from an indifferent planet. The Samurai looked away from the mountains and industrial structures, started his car and headed for his room hoping Mrs Blue Hills wasn't there again, before the regenerator bubble burst. No black smoke overtook him.

Why, he thought in that dialogue with himself that was so familiar, why do they need strength over them? Why do they need strength to lean on, to protect them? Because without it and the spurs such strength is provided with they collapse to apathy, laziness. Why redeem them? Why make them face disaster? Ah, that was another matter. The answer existed in him only as a hard lump of unexplained feeling. Perhaps there really was an instinct to survive and he had a greater measure of it on their behalf.

On a rising slope of prosperity, with widening horizons, the range of lives a man could lead becomes too great to ignore. Sudden and severe jolts to this prosperity: this was the Samurai's answer.

Sabotage, destruction, hardship, violence, blood. If there were enough men tramping the street, not all the barbed wire and police forces and national guards in the world could stop the blaze. Yes. He would go about the country, making panics. Either the government acted as a government and took the country in its fist, or repression would lead to an explosion and a government would rush in to be born, a government which would take the country in its strong fist. A firm, protective fist; a strong aggressive fist, eager to do the things fists are made for.

He was convinced nothing comes about by the efforts of the people, the beasts of burden, but by individuals. Martyrs and agitators or, if their activities have some success, agitators and dictators. The temptation to seize power rather than be put against a wall must be irresistible. He was right in not wanting to work through the wantless ones. Perhaps it was an instinct. Intuition. He had stopped thinking—and started to believe in himself and in the dark forces rising from within him.

Would there be others after him who would keep at this work of digging spurs into the softening flanks of the country? For they were needed. Nothing could last, no lessons remembered, but had to be repeated over and over in each generation. The social body had to be lashed and stung, wounded and bled regularly, before it sank back into laziness and ease, obesity and death.