The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Hayes, who had been dimly aware of the experiment (and the stress between the many internal factions both for and against it), was perhaps one of the few people in McNaughton who understood how this would seem in the wake of the murders. He sensed immediately that the city would feel that the sky was falling; that McNaughton had somehow pushed the limits, and the world would soon cave in; that the technological foundation upon which it had built the city was unsteady, and would soon crumble; and that the Age of Wonders that the company had ushered in across the globe was failing, and perhaps the threat of war that had come not so long ago had never really left. Maybe this, the city would say, was the end. After the union murders, it could only be more fuel on the fire.

  But Hayes did not mention any of this to Brightly before he and a few other Security chiefs went north to assist. He simply sat and smoked and watched the northern skyline for a few minutes on New Year’s eve, the sun slowly disappearing behind the Kulahee Bridge and the staggered columns of Construct, and then, alone, returned to work.

  And in the morning when the sun dawned 1920 dawned with it, an inauspicious birth for a dreaded year.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Let’s do something in the Southern District today,” Hayes said one morning as he sat in Samantha’s office, draped across one of her chairs.

  “What?” she said.

  “Southern District. Let’s do something there. Some interview.”

  “We have our interviews laid out for us,” she said. “Preplanned.”

  “Oh, I know. But let’s find some excuse to go out there and babble. I’m sure there’s got to be one.”

  “Why?”

  Hayes did not answer. His face was hidden below the lapel of his coat and he might have been sleeping again.

  They went to the Southern on the tenuous lead that one interview subject, Ramirez, who had been out previously due to the recent death of his father, was now available. But Ramirez knew nothing and was confused as to why they had even chosen to speak with him. His father had died before the trolley murders and he had been away in California for the funeral when they took place. Hayes nodded and agreed and after two hours of it they went to lunch. An hour later Samantha and Ramirez returned to continue their discussion, but Hayes instead chose to walk the three blocks down and across to the Tramline production facility.

  Who am I today, he wondered to himself as he crossed the railroad lots and the small service roads. He reached into his pocket and took out six identification cards, each with different names, different titles, different access codes for whatever machine. He found the one for Andrew Staunton and tucked it into his front vest pocket and walked up to the loading dock. Men in greasy jumpers were milling about, backing up trucks and shifting cargo. They looked up and frowned at this little suit who was walking toward them with some official-looking papers in hand. They called to the foreman and he tore his eyes away from his clipboard and advanced on Hayes. Hayes held up his identification like a shield and shouted, “Staunton, Personnel section. Here to see Mr. Martin Andersson.”

  “Andersson?” repeated the foreman, straining to make his voice heard over the clatter. “No Andersson on the dock.”

  “Believe Mr. Andersson works on the spot line.”

  “Spot line? Oh, all right then. You’re nowhere close.” He peered closer at Mr. Staunton’s identification and came away impressed. “That’s way inside and down. Mess up your clothes, you know.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’ll try and grab Collier, that’s the lower deck foreman. He’ll be able to get Andersson. Come on.” He walked over to the cement wall and slapped a button. A horn sounded somewhere and the iron mouth of the loading dock began to draw back. The facility, like all McNaughton sites, was shaped like a bunker. At the ground level it was a huge cement loading dock, with an enormous upper warehouse facility and manufacturing decks below and foundry lines sunk down in the far back. Hayes rarely visited the factories, but he’d handled plans and schematics plenty of times. He’d bought a few of them off the odd cunning bastard and sold others with significant structural integrity problems designed in. But he never remembered the size and scale and scope of the things.

  Inside it was a vast cavern with a roof and walls so far back light could not touch them. Strings of chains and hooks looped down over tracks that wound off through the stations, each one designated by a different-colored light standing on poles at the intersections. Piping sprouted from the cement floor to meet above the loads and trusses, and some dripped scalding water and others dripped a substance that resembled water but was freezing and smoky. Hayes could just see the foundry’s crucible in the far back, enormous and round, the molten metal within its black lip glowing a gleeful unnatural orange that turned the workers at its base into wicked, fiery sprites with black glass eyes.

  The dock foreman found the lower deck foreman, presumably Mr. Collier. Mr. Collier listened to the dock foreman’s shouts and grimaced in dismay and waved Hayes’s identification forward. Hayes handed it up again and it was scrutinized once more and Collier was impressed like the others.

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “This way. You know, this guy meant it when he said you really shouldn’t have dressed so well.”

  “I don’t mind a spot of grease.”

  The foreman laughed and walked to a set of lockers set up against a scuffed cement wall. He reached in and pulled out a mottled brown jumper streaked with ash and reeking of sulfur and tossed it to Hayes. “Not grease,” he said. “I just don’t want to see your clothes catch fire on you.”

  Hayes awkwardly suited up and they both put on immense black goggles, and then they went to one grated stairway and began the descent into the bowels of the factory. Soon orange light filled the charred walls from some unseen source below. The passageway grew immensely hot and moist. Every pipe and hose and rivet glistened. Hayes felt as if they were not in some creation of men but instead in some living machine, wandering its fevered breast as it struggled to push air and metal through its passageways. As they descended a dozen workers staggered up the steps, their faces sooty and their heads half-hidden by the liquid-black lenses of the smelter’s goggles. They watched Hayes and the foreman walk by with blank faces but Hayes was not sure they could make another kind.

  They walked until they came to the elevator and then climbed aboard and went two flights down until they hit a rotunda. Immense gears squalled and churned around them and the entire rotunda swiveled until they were in a different sector of the facility entirely. They walked on.

  Hayes watched as the machinery moved above them, shining with grease and screaming with fatigue in places. How many men had died to make this place, he wondered. This temple of industry, this hidden hall of production. When ancient peoples had knelt before the carven faces of their gods and imagined fabled crypts and castles their thoughts could not have touched what men had made here, hacked into the bones of the earth itself. Hayes watched as one Tramline carriage rolled past on a beltway, its structure fine and smooth like a dragonfly’s skeleton, its half-built engine as delicate as the smallest clock. A goggled worker trundled along, the glassware receptors for the radios packed into a straw crate on his wagon, spindled glass like fine ice. He passed by them as though none of this mattered. Not Hayes or the foremen or the fragile wonders in his care.

  They walked to the spot-welding line and Hayes could tell Andersson by his height. He held a long, sparkling welder in one hand, a sputtering magic wand. He knelt and set his solvent with the mindfulness of a man playing the cello, carefully placing his long, delicate instrument along the strings of the Tramline carriage, then drawing back slowly. The foreman waited until he was done and then waved down Andersson and his team. Andersson stood and frowned at the foreman until his eyes fell upon the little blond-haired, fair-skinned man who was clearly wearing goggles for the first time in his life. Then he laughed and opened his arms and cried, “Mr. Staunton! What are you doing here! What are you doing in
such dangerous place as this!”

  Hayes grinned and said something in Swedish. He wasn’t sure where he had picked it up or what it meant but it made Andersson laugh all the harder.

  They retired to a sailor’s bar, full of tattooed men with thick black coats and raw faces. Andersson and Hayes spoke quietly over fish soup and black ale, and Andersson listened as Hayes gave him the news, describing how the very top was now paranoid of how they appeared to be murdering their own workers.

  “Appeared,” growled Andersson. “Appeared. Idiocy. Nonsense. They did not appear. They did. It was them. They killed those men. How, I do not know, but it was them.”

  “Why would they kill their own people?”

  “Please, Andrew. Do not be telling me that you are such an idiot. I know you. You are a very clever man. You know that those men, the dead, they were the more violent sort. The more passionate sort.”

  “Sort of what? Of union man?”

  “Of Tazzer. Yes. The accidents, yes?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Hayes, suddenly appearing to recall. “The accidents.”

  “Yes. Some say this is the right thing to do. To fight. To kill, if necessary. I do not know. Killing is always bad. It will only lead to trouble. But some say this is what we need to do. To send message,” Andersson confided softly. “To bring attention.”

  “Some say this will rally the lower classes. That the deaths of their own will unite them.”

  “Who says this?”

  “People. As they always do. Some say Tazz did it himself,” Hayes said slyly. “Or a Tazz supporter.”

  “No!” Andersson said, shocked. “That is nonsense!”

  Hayes shrugged. “You just have to pay attention to who’s going to gain the most from this. It seems those men were causing trouble for Tazz. Doing bad things in his name. This way he gets two things, he gets some bad business out of his way and he gets something to rally everyone around. And no one would ever suspect him. Has Tazz denied it?”

  “Yes,” said Andersson angrily.

  “You saw him? Saw him deny it?”

  “Well. No.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  Andersson frowned into his beer mug. “Tazz has said nothing about the trolley murders.”

  “Really? Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” said Andersson.

  “Not even anything about the Red Star?”

  “He is not coming out anymore.”

  “What? Coming out of where?”

  “Union men died, Andrew,” Andersson said softly. “A lot of union men. There is danger, they say. He is in hiding.”

  “Hiding?”

  “Yes. In some place. Safe place. Place where no one knows where he is except only a few. Only his most trusted men. And no one knows who they are. This has become a deadly secret game, Andrew,” said Andersson, shaking his head. “Trust no one. That is the way it now goes for us down here, in the Southern.”

  “That’s how it always goes, I think. Now, tell me, Martin,” said Hayes, “where did he spend his time in the clink?”

  “Clink?” said Andersson, confused.

  “In jail. Tazz was in jail, correct?”

  “Yes. After the docks protest.”

  “Where was that? Savron Hill?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Curiosity. That’s all. Just curiosity.”

  “I see.” Andersson looked away, then asked bashfully, “Andrew, would you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “No.”

  “Even if it is a very silly question?”

  “No. I don’t mind at all.”

  “All right.” He frowned as he considered his words and said, “Andrew, you are not a little man. Well, in some ways, yes, but in business ways, no. In the city, no, in the company, no. And all I hear is of McNaughton’s magic. With its genius-men who think these things up. And I just wonder, eh-”

  “Where McNaughton’s secrets come from? Or what the big secret is?”

  “Yes. Yes, that is what I am wondering.”

  Hayes smiled. He considered telling one of his more fun lies about secret scientists smuggled in from abroad. But he had developed a soft spot for the big man and decided to tell him the simple and boring truth, as far as he had it figured out, which he thought was pretty far.

  “Well, internally they say it’s marketing,” said Hayes.

  Andersson frowned. “Marketing?”

  “Yes. Marketing. Like, the way you pitch something. The way you lie to someone else in the marketplace about what you’re selling. They say it’s not designs, not mechanics, no. The real secret to everything is the McNaughton approach to sales.”

  “It is this? Just a thing of sales? You believe that?”

  “Well, they do,” Hayes said with a smile. “You know what I believe?”

  “You do not believe it’s marketing?”

  “No. I believe it’s all a load of shit.”

  “Shit? What is shit?”

  “Everything. The very idea of it. Horseshit. Poppycock. Tripe. I do think there were, oh, a half-dozen neat things Kulahee came up with long ago. And that was a good start for the business. And then McNaughton just said there were a hundred more things, but they were all secret, and you could buy them but never know where they came from. So, naturally, everyone wants to buy and invest in these wonders. But it’s nothing special. It’s just normal things developed by some well-paid men. That’s what I think.”

  Andersson thought that over, frowning, and settled back in his chair, fingers twined together and resting on his belly.

  “Why do you ask?” said Hayes.

  “Oh, it is just something I have seen over the years,” said Andersson. “Some of the more advanced devices… Some of them seem to have not been made for people at all.”

  “What? Then who? Elves? Imps? Bloody fairies?”

  Andersson stared at him as his internal translator tried to make sense of that. “Oh, no,” he said after a while. “Not like that. It is just that over the years, I have been promoted a few times, assigned manufacturing of some of the more specialized items. And many of those… Well, it seems like the designers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make them used for people. Like they just had to put in levers or consoles or, say, on the airships, walkways and cockpits and passenger cells and such. Like when they were first designed, they did not have people in mind at all. Maybe it is the way Kulahee first thought of them. But why would he design a thing that way? And if you are right, and it is not Kulahee at all but our own people, why are they doing it that way?”

  Hayes was quiet as he considered this. “Then who were they made for, originally?” he asked.

  Andersson just shrugged. The two men drank their black ale in silence for a bit. Then Andersson sat forward, leaning over the table. “Some of the men in Telecommunications,” he said softly, “they say that some of the things they build, they talk to them.”

  “What?” said Hayes. “What talks? The machines?”

  Andersson nodded dourly. “Yes. Talks to them.” He tapped his temple. “In their heads. Whispers to them.”

  “Well… What are they saying?”

  “They cannot tell. They only get the feeling that they are talking. The machines want something from them, they guess. But maybe they are crazy. Who can say?”

  Hayes thought quickly. “These machines… Do they have little crystals? Are they like lamps, that light up blue? Some big, some little?”

  “Lamps?” said Andersson, confused. “No, they did not say they were lamps.”

  “Are you sure? No little lights, nothing like that at all?”

  “No, I’ve never heard of that. They just said the machines whisper to them, if they spend enough time around them.” He drained off the last of his beer. “Perhaps you are right, though,” he said. “Perhaps it is just marketing.”

  “Maybe so,” said Hayes, disturbed, and then he thanked the big Swede for his insight and paid and left.

  When
he returned to the Southern Office the interview room was empty except for a single note on the table that said, YOU COULD HAVE TOLD ME. Hayes smiled and put it in his pocket and found a semi-decent restaurant with a phone station. He put a call through to Garvey and left a message with the number for the station. Then he ordered a drink and downed it and wadded up his coat and used it as a pillow and slept in the booth. A waiter came and asked him to kindly clear the hell out and Hayes shoved a ten-dollar bill into his hand and told him to bring him a sandwich and another drink. As he ate the phone rang and Garvey answered, his voice faint and exhausted.

  “Listen, I have a favor to ask you,” Hayes said.

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Mickey Tazz has gone underground.”

  “What?”

  “Tazz has gone underground. After the murders.”

  There was a pause. “How’d you find that out?”

  “I know a few people.”

  “Huh. Where’d he run to?”

  “No idea. Sort of the point, really. I don’t like it, though. This would be a rallying point, wouldn’t you say? Everyone else is seeing McNaughton’s hand in it, why isn’t Tazz crying it in the streets?”

  “For God’s sake, Hayes, I don’t know anything about this Tazz guy,” said Garvey.

  “I know. But I do, a little. And I’d like to know more. You still have that friend up in Savron?”

  “You mean the guard? Weigel?”

  “Yeah. Yes, I mean Weigel. He still there?”

  “I think so.”

  “Check out Tazz’s record there for me. I understand that was where he was penned up. Did you know that?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. You got that from the guys you interviewed?”

  “That’s the rumor,” said Hayes. He grinned in the booth and tossed his sandwich away. “Garv, my boy, I’m going to give you a positive payload. I’m going to give you the gold. I’ll give you everything I have on Tazz, and then I’m going to go down and identify your canal John Doe for you.”