The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Charged with hope, he zipped from stack to stack. He didn’t flinch under the speed-up whisper as some workers did. That girl with the trembling lips, for instance.

  A curious tragedy befell her at the mid-afternoon calisthenics period. She didn’t hear the signal to go back to work; instead, her calisthenics went into a crazed dance and she refused to stop until a doctor arrived to take her away. The pitiful picture hung in Ben’s mind.

  However, a tragedy of his own was in store. It came with the day’s final spurt. Although the wall-scaling mechanisms were replete with safety devices, Ben, in a burst of energy following his exercise, found the weak link. Sliding into his desk car, he jammed at a lever, snapped it off clean. With a whiz he rocketed up toward the lofty ceiling too fast, flew the vertical tracks, and plummeted to the floor, car and all.

  The crash might easily have been fatal.

  Fortunately, as he later learned in the hospital, he got off with cuts and bruises.

  Between his painful injuries and the no less caustic jibes of newspapers, Ben

  Gleed spent a miserable week. Editors from Maine to California wisecracked him, and some dubious friend gathered their venom into a scrapbook for him to convalesce upon. He spent his waking hours inventing profanity.

  Lucille came to see him once. That was the only bright spot in the whole affair, and he was too stubborn to tell her so. He warmed up to only one theme: his determination to get back to work and show them!

  However, after he removed his last sticky bandage, rolled up his sleeves, and went back for more high pressure jobs—and flunked three in a row—flat!—the world turned very dark for the King of Speed.

  CHAPTER IV

  “He Can’t Take If!”

  His father counselled, Lucille pleaded, the newscasters roared. The employees of Efficio, Incorporated opened their eyes. If that human machine couldn’t take it, why should they? Some began to let down; some quit outright and were deported. Supervisors wobbled on policies. A few defied the speed-up program; many whipped their faithful workers into faster action. Production suffered, inevitably, and the directors went into a psychological panic.

  Ben Gleed held to his one mad theme: he wanted work; he was still determined to prove his speed.

  “Why don’t you forget it?” Blasco advised. “You’re an executive, not a workman. No executive gains by competing out of his field.”

  “Give me another job!” said Ben.

  “The directors are talking of deporting you—”

  “They can’t deport me until I’ve gone through ten positions. That’s the rule.

  Give me a job!”

  “All right, all right,” said Blasco. “We need a new spy-and-spur man for Foundry D. It’s a tough spot and you know it, but—”

  Ben knew. As city manager he had watched the tank makers and radiator men grow callous to the booming speedup voice. He had instituted the conveyor belts and the spy-and-spur system as remedies.

  Now he reported to Robone, the hard bitten little supervisor, who gave him the keys to the spy-and-spur tower.

  “The devils are always laggin’, Gleed,” said Robone. “They need that personal kick in the pants, and plenty of it.”

  Ben closed out the rhythmic batter of the machines and set to work. Touching each switch in order, he brought one row of workers after another into view in the rectangular screen before him, studied each individual, made note of the slow ones. At the lunch hour he summoned his chosen ones through the speakers, ordered them into the “oven.” Here his face appeared before them on a screen. He looked them in the eyes individually as he roasted them for their faults. Under this arrangement no one could talk back.

  Not audibly, that is. But their lips could move. By the second day he lip-read their defiance. They knew him, and everyone of them snarled back something—he couldn’t get it all at first. The shorter retorts, such as “Go to hell!” were understandable enough, but it took him another day to catch that longer expression so many of them gave him: “Yeah? You can dish it out but you can’t take it!”

  Ten days later he took it! Other jobs had slipped through his hands in the meantime, and now—his next-to-the-last chance—he himself stood on the dreaded conveyor line, a tank maker.

  The clang of metal was deafening. The overtones of the machines had stepped up in pitch during his absence.

  Seven strokes of the fists on the rivet lever. The eighth beat was a rest while the tanks shifted. It was almost completely a machine job, but that extra human urge was demanded—with almost trip-hammer rapidity.

  “Use both hands, or you’ll wear out sure!” the big fellow next to him warned for the third time.

  Right! Left! Right! Left! Right! Left! Right! Breathe—! Over again! Again! Again! . . .

  “Hit ’em hard!” Every light blow was a lost rivet, a faulty tank, a bawling out.

  The big guy was a pal. Several times he reached over to save Ben’s final stroke that went too light. His arms were long and swift. His face, hard and twisted with tension. Where had Ben seen that face before?

  Near the rest pause Ben had staggered, feared he would faint off. The big fellow had to come to the rescue too often. It was a crime to let him do double duty that way. Ben didn’t have to be called into the oven to be told that.

  In the next few days he was called in so often he grew sick of the spy-and-spur’s ugly face. And Robone, the supervisor, how he hated that little tyrant!

  He finally remembered who this big fellow was that worked beside him, vividly recalled his words: “I’d like to see you run that machine that I run!”

  The big fellow grinned at the mention of their former meeting. “I was deported, all right,” he said, “but they found I had some work merits they’d overlooked, so they let me come back.

  . . . I never s’posed I’d see you here.

  . . . I gotta hand it to you, you’re puttin’up a scrap. You can take it!”

  Those were the last words the big fellow spoke. Lunch over, the machine bombardment cut loose again, with overtones a shade higher. The big boy was a goer. Bad for a fellow with a weak heart like his to hang on so doggedly.

  When he suddenly toppled, Ben dropped to his side, tore his collar open. The man’s final gasp was inaudible against the clangor.

  Robone rushed up, showing an angry face. “Back to your machines till we cut ’em off!”

  Ben never moved or heard.

  “Back! What the hell’s the matter with you? He ain’t the first guy that’s ever died in the harness.”

  Ben seized the little supervisor by the belt and hurled him across the floor without realizing he so much as touched him.

  Before the King of Speed returned to Blasco, he paused before a mirror to stare defeat in the face. What a mess. And yet, in spite of all that had happened, he still wanted to believe there were no limits to the work a man could do.

  Here was Super City—he’d put years of thought into it, given it all the finest scientific improvements. It ought to work. It had to work! It would work if it could have men who were up to it! The machines could go faster; why couldn’t the men? But what of himself?

  He eyed himself more closely, half aware of the blind spot his wishful thinking slid over. Here he was, rested, fresh, glowing with energy. His resilient nature made him akin to the prize fighter who forgot every knockout and still believed he could whip the world’s best in the prize ring.

  Had a doctor attempted to diagnose the maniacal gleam in Ben Gleed’s eye as he donned work clothes for his last chance, the verdict might have been, “Anything can happen.”

  John Gleed and Lucille saw it happen.

  It was Lucille’s half day off and the elderly man met her downtown for a mid-afternoon lunch. Across the table in one corner of a low, sunny roof garden they discussed Ben’s tragic fall. There was no ray of hope. The whole bitter affair was a boomerang. The proud young executive had figuratively slain himself.

  The coarse singing voices of a work gang
across the street below them demanded their attention. A noisy gang of bricklayers building a wall, singing a rhythmic ditty to punctuate their motions. Whenever their voices died down the supervisor shouted at them. A machine set the tempo—a brick hoist.

  It was a tractor-like affair, carrying a hopper full of bricks, sending them up the elevator, one by one, as it crept along the foot of the wall The supervisor was at the wheel. One of the men on the scaffold back of the growing wall was Ben Gleed.

  Lucille caught her breath. John couldn’t believe his eyes until he wiped his spectacles. Sure enough, that armored figure catching the bricks off the hoist was his son.

  Two stressed motions—catch with one hand, pass on to the next man with the other. Rhythmic as a pendulum.

  “It’s dangerous the way those bricks leap at him!”

  “That’s why he’s wearing the armor,” John Gleed observed.

  The brick hoist reached the corner, whirled about, and started back, the scaffold gang with it.

  “Gracious! Don’t they ever stop for breath?” Lucille gasped.

  “I dunno. I’ve been hearin’ that buzz-wagon for the last hour and a half. Bennie’s handled many a brick in that time.”

  At length a rest pause came. The brick hoist idled softly and the men moped about. Ben rubbed his sore arms, cocked his ears as the Efficio clock from the intersection called to him in his own voice, “Get busy! Get busy! It’s three-thirty! Don’t loaf your time away.”

  At five-thirty the spectators still watched, hypnotized.

  “There! Another one hit him!” Lucille cried. “Why don’t they slow down? Look out!”

  She wasted her scream against the brick hoist’s rumble.

  “They’re slipping through his hands!” John Gleed muttered. “Ouch! I heard that one clang! That’s too damned fast! Why the devil—”

  The stream of bricks stopped and the supervisor waved his hand.

  “Quitting?” Lucille asked hopefully.

  “Not yet. A final rest period,” John Gleed observed. “That means they’ve got the spurt yet to go.”

  The clock over the intersection spoke in an urgent tone. Ben Gleed mocked Ben Gleed—at a time like this! It was too much. A dangerous moment—and on top of it the supervisor, finished with his drink of water, lit in on Ben for all his errors. The final straw. The armored figure leaped clear of the wall and landed all over the man.

  A jerk of the armored shoulders and the amazed supervisor scudded into the street. Then the brick hoist went berserk with the King of Speed at the wheel. The gang looked on, open-mouthed.

  Bricks jumped like fleas. The vehicle sputtered around, dashed into the intersection, circled. The whizzing missies found their mark: the Efficio clock cracked, jumped, and let go a hail of springs and wheels.

  Down the street the mad barrage roared, battered buildings, crashed glass, sent pedestrians to cover. Sirens joined the chase and traffic cleared to make way for the fountain of bricks.

  CHAPTER V

  The Lid Blows Off

  “Why don’t they stop him!” Lucille shrieked. She and the flabbergasted elder Gleed scampered to an elevated walk where they could see farther down the street.

  “Stop him? By gollies, they’re joinin’ him!” John roared. Far down the line the mad chase whipped around a square, started back. “Look at ’em come! A whole streetful! What the hell—?”

  John clutched Lucille’s hand, they zipped along on a moving sidewalk toward the lofty structure known as the Center, arched over an octagonal park at the midpoint of the city; they chased up the nearest ramp to get a better view. The distant clang and clatter echoed closer.

  The structure which dominated the Super City Center resembled the base of the Eiffel Tower without the tower, its feet resting on four building tops that carried elevated streets. The four great ramps of the Center arched upward and converged to support a dome-like building, headquarters of the city. The Floating Dome, as it was popularly called, hovered two hundred feet above the octagonal park, gave the city officials a commanding site from which to govern the domain of Efficio.

  At present the directors, assembled in their lofty sanctum, were too busy to notice that several excited citizens scurried up the ramps to the floating plaza outside their windows, crowded one of the rails, pointed and shouted wildly.

  The directors were in a sullen deadlock over a crisis. The Great Key lay on the table before them, a three-foot bar of chromium brilliance, symbol of city leadership. Since the ousting of Ben Gleed they had been unable to force that key upon anyone. They had combed the nation for a new city manager, but every shrewd applicant who saw the situation gave them the same answer: “The job is too dangerous. You’re heading for a revolt.”

  President Birch writhed before he brought himself to admit that the workers would dare try such a thing. As he now faced the facts every director before him betrayed fright. They sat on the lid of a volcano. If the city should go on a rampage it might mean one of the most rapid and devastating labor outbreaks in history.

  “When you consider the terrific physical stamina of our men,” President Birch panted, his open hand quivering as he gestured, “not to mention their flexible abilities to leap into any situation—when you consider the high-powered machines that they might turn into instruments of destruction—”

  An alarm bell cut him off. Bells clanged throughout the building and the four great ramps to the roof streets. The sergeant-at-arms bellowed a warning. The directors sprang to the windows, dashed out on the plaza, heard a great pandemonium from somewhere below, saw a solid block of marchers mingled with all manner of vehicles and wheeled machines storming toward the heart of the city. Revolt!

  From the nerve center of the city, officers flashed commands to supervisors, police, utility operators. Many key positions were deserted, however, and telephone service began to go haywire. Uniformed men turned deaf to orders. A wire for state troops went dead at the telegraph key.

  What had happened? Who had uncorked the brewing rebellion? The frenzied directors stared over the railings, watched the rioters flood through the octagonal park two hundred feet beneath them, gathering momentum with every pace. Birch singled out the leader, an athletic figure mounted like a circus rider high on the elevator of a brick hoist, giving cues to his driver, shouting at his mob, shelling off his brickman’s armor, hurling it at Efficio signs—no other than Ben Gleed!

  Birch and his directors were stunned. A revolt they could understand. But a revolt against Ben Gleed’s speed, led by Ben Gleed—this was too much! It involved a sudden psychological flip-flop, a strange quirk in mob behavior that might have caught any professional psychologist below the belt.

  Still they came—men in aprons, mechanics brandishing tools, bakers beating on bread pans, typists shrieking through speed-up horns wrenched out of their machines, painters showering their paint guns over building fronts. The lid was off!

  Pent up from weeks of maddening speed, wrung to the breaking point, scorching under the pressure of the day’s final spurt, thousands kicked out of the traces the instant they saw the Speed King and his mob hail into view.

  Ben Gleed! A new Ben Gleed! The Gleed who faced the same high-speed hell they faced, who fought side-by-side with them, even though he was razzed from coast to coast. A sports-manly instinct in them suddenly rallied to him.

  Subconsciously their feelings toward him had already undergone a profound change. Those newspaper stories . . . Gleed had a father living with him. There was a sweetheart, it was rumored. Perhaps there was a streak of human sentiment in his make-up after all. It was he who had ministered to the dying worker in the tank factory, defied the supervisor for a buddy.

  These flashes burst upon them, impelled them to act. Ben Gleed has made the break! Follow him! Smash the time clocks! Smash the production charts! Tramp over the supervisors! Smash everything!

  The huddle of Efficio officers and chance citizens who gaped from the Dome plaza shuddered to watch the destruct
ion that followed, turned sick to see the berserk thousands move up the inclines, one level after another, toward the roof streets.

  The destructive crashes subsided, throaty voices filled the air to weld the mob’s demand. A death blow to Efficio! The slogan thundered down the streets, down to the multitudes who gathered on the park below.

  Electric lights flashed over the roaring thousands as darkness fell upon the city. The terror-filled spectators at the Dome saw the lights of countless cars coming in by roof streets to converge back of the mob, press it ahead.

  But as yet no mobster forced his way up a ramp toward the Dome. Not because President Birch cried warnings through the loud speaker. Not because strong gates closed the entrance to each ramp. But because within those gates were machine guns, planted in the railings for protection, electrically operated. They turned the lower end of each ramp into a gridiron spray of bullets that fanned across the path to bury themselves in the opposite railing. The mob was stymied.

  Daring deeds are cheap in mobs. Although Ben Gleed clung to the top of the gate and fought to hold his followers back, two fools leaped past him to take their chances with the screen of bullets No one could have stopped them. But their fate stopped the others. The hoarse roar fell to an appalled murmur.

  Gradually the roar came back as a fire truck edged toward the head of the mob, extended a long ladder horizontally into space, swung the end to the underside of the arched ramp. Somewhere within the structure of the arch were hidden electric wires that controlled the machine guns.

  Two men equipped with flashlight and ax clambered out over space, cheered by the mass of humanity that waited on them. Finally overhead lights blinked off, the guns silenced, one of the ladder heroes scurried back, the other made a dim shadow of descent through two hundred vertical feet.

  The grimness of the mob redoubled. Death blow to Efficio!

  The ramp gate went down under the impact of machines.

  “Steady! Steady!” Ben Gleed called. Car lights shot on him, showed the steel of his eyes, the shirt torn off his back, the high-lighted muscles of his shoulders and arms. Mob or no mob, he had a purpose ahead.