The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  While the pulp writer toiled, Jake wondered. There was something special about being foreman and factotum, specifically he didn’t need to know very much about what was actually happening at any given moment. When he was confused, he’d point to a worker and ask what he was doing, and what this process was for, and how it contributed to the final product, and he could then pretend to be satisfied or discomfited with the answers.

  Jake could never bring himself to ask what the final product of all this production was, and not because he was embarrassed not to know, but because he was comforted by the idea that at least the workers on the line knew, and he couldn’t bear to have that illusion shattered.

  But still he wondered, so he took the steps to the first floor where the electroplating vats bubbled away, as the ’platers had time to chat.

  “Fellas,” Jake said, and the three men straightened out and muttered nervous hellos. “What is Industrivism?”

  The three men looked at one another, glancing back and forth as if deciding who would speak. Finally, one of them who Jake had pegged as a snickering wisenheimer type, said, “Sounds like a new radio show.”

  “It’s a kind of foot powder,” said a tall, heavyset man.

  The third fellow kept his eyes on the bubbling vat, as if electrodeposition would cease if he ever stopped staring.

  “You fellows are pretty funny. Tell me even one more joke, and I’ll make sure you have plenty of time to take your act on the road,” Jake said.

  “It’s the heart of a diesel engine,” the staring man said without looking up. “It’s the heart in all of us.”

  “Sounds good to me,” the heavyset man said. The first wisenheimer just looked confused.

  Jake went off without another word. He could always ask the old man, but what would the old man know? He wasn’t even American, which is probably why he depended on the pulp writer for his political ideas.

  The heart of a diesel engine . . . the heart would be where the fuel goes, like blood.

  He tried someone else, just a random fellow leaning over a compressor. “What are you making?”

  “Compressors,” the man said. “Wiring.”

  “For what?”

  The man shrugged. “Frigidaires?”

  “You think . . . we’re manufacturing refrigerators?”

  The man shrugged. “Look son, I just got this job this morning, and I don’t mean to lose it this evening by falling behind.”

  Jake couldn’t fault the man’s attitude. He pursed his lips and tried again. “Sir, in a few words, how would you describe the American Dream?”

  The man looked up, and Jake saw that he was very old. Old enough that he probably wouldn’t have been hired at all under normal circumstances. “I say I’d describe it as getting a job in the morning and starting work some minutes later, and not being laid off by the end of the first shift.”

  It was a taciturn bunch, but of course Jake couldn’t expect men hard at work to wax philosophical. Intellectuals liked writing romantic stories about the proletariat and its struggles, but all in all Jake preferred to read Six-Gun Stories and Mad Detective. Even that put him ahead of the shift workers, who couldn’t be bothered to read the labels on their beer bottles half the time.

  “What’s the heart of a diesel engine?”

  “The cylinder,” the man said.

  “How do you figure?”

  The man just laughed. “It was a guess. Why don’t you just go away?”

  Jake fired him on the spot. Let the compressors pile up for a few minutes; it hardly mattered if nobody even knew what they were manufacturing.

  That night was like every night – Jake slept fitfully, dreaming of a factory. Not the factory for which he worked, but another one, darker and larger, in Europe. Jews marched in when the bell rang and out the back end the factory spit out exhaust and shoes. Jake’s rational core, the bit of himself that woke him up, knew what was going on. He grew up on hair-raising stories of pogroms and riots from his parents and uncles and cousins and family friends, and he felt guilty for throwing it all over for the Pinkerton job. So the back of his brain gnawed away at his spine every night, poisoning his system with visions of an industrial pogrom, a diesel-powered völkisch movement.

  But his parents were fools. Europe was a happy, prosperous place, and even the Germans were doing well thanks to all the imported beer Americans liked to drink. There would never be a pogrom of any sort again. How did the President put it when he stared down the Kaiser at the end of the war? “Send us your tankards, or we’ll send you our tanks to fetch them.” It was a fair and free trade, and everybody was happy now.

  Jake took a slug from his own emergency Thermos-stein and tried to sleep. It worked for once. He even slept through the morning alarm.

  The pulp writer was extremely nervous. The old man had sent another telegram, again circumventing Jake. He wanted to meet, in person, that afternoon, and Jake’s name was absent from the telegram as well. It would likely be a one-on-one luncheon. The old man had no idea the pulp writer was a woman . . . or worse, perhaps Jake had let it slip and that was why she had received such a sudden invite. Romance, crime, horror, all of them were possibilities. Would it be love at first sight, or would some greater intrigue about Industrivism be revealed, or would the old man chase the pulp writer around his great mahogany desk his lips pursed and his hands clenching and unclenching like pincers?

  The pulp writer decided to bring her hatpin, and a brick for her purse as well. But she also applied some rouge, chose a superior hat, and decided to walk rather than take a crosstown bus to both save a dime and keep her clothes from being wrinkled by the crowded carriages.

  Industrivism was in the air – literally. A skywriter had been to work, and the letters “RIOLOGY” had yet to dissolve in the sky. It was a waste anyway, given that in New York only yokels and bumpkins pointing out the skyscrapers and dirigibles to one another ever looked up at all.

  Why did the pulp writer, who was born in Canarsie and had a diploma from Hunter College High School, look up? She had taken a moment to pray. It was a prayer for protection that, when she saw those letters in the sky, transformed into one of gratitude.

  The city was limned with Industrivism, though the pulp writer had to wonder if she was just especially sensitive to the presence of her own ideas and phrases on posted bills, on the back pages of newspapers hawked by children on the street corner, flitting by in overheard conversations. When she crossed Broadway, the pulp writer decided that she would studiously ignore all things Industrivism and instead concentrate on some symbol sure to be ubiquitous: the American flag.

  There were . . . some. A lunch counter offering All-American Pie and Beer. A single legless veteran of the war with a flag draped over her shoulders as she puttered past in a hot-bulb engine wheelchair, begging for change and showing off her stumps. The West Village’s local post office flew one, as did the Jefferson Library.

  And there was one close call – a great flag two stories tall was draped over the side of warehouse just two blocks from the old man’s factory, but where the stars should have been on the blue field instead were crudely stitched white cut-out gears.

  The pulp writer stopped to gape. The passers-by, and in New York the streets were always choked with pedestrians, workers loading and unloading diesel trucks, and tourists, ignored the flag. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes, and then someone grabbed her wrist.

  She jerked away, but the hand held strong. A man in a cloth hat and a shapeless worker’s jumpsuit tugged to him and he asked with quivering lips, “Lady . . . what is Industrivism?”

  The pulp writer pursed her lips and yanked her wrist away. And then she told him, “Oh, hell if I know, fellah! It’s just some gibberish somebody made up to get you to work longer and sell you soap . . . and you could use some soap!” She brought her hand up to her hat and withdrew the pin, but the worker scuttled backward, palms up. “Sorry, ma’am, sorry!” he muttered as he retreated.

  The
pulp writer realized that if she ever became a famous writer, she was going to have to come up with a more politic answer to that question. Her meeting with the old man was certainly going to be longer than he likely anticipated, and she hoped that he had cleared his afternoon schedule. She already had a piece of her mind apportioned out and ready to give him.

  In the factory, Jake stalked the shop floor, looking for someone else to talk to. Maybe it was true that every workaday Joe Lunch Pail-type was just dim. The old man’s factory was unique – no management, just Jake, and occasional instructions from the basement. All decisions were built into the construction and layout of the assembly lines, including redundancies and contingencies. The place was packed with machines and crowded with people, but nobody had more than a couple of words for Jake. Then he had a brainwave and rushed to the loading dock where the hogsheads were delivered daily. He opened a barrel with a crowbar and scooped out some peanuts, then filled his pockets with great handfuls.

  “Hello!” said the pulp writer, waving from the asphalt.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” the pulp writer said, squinting. “Lunch break?”

  “You can make diesel fuel with peanuts . . .” Jake started.

  “One of the many miracles of the diesel era, yes I know,” the pulp writer said. “You can make diesel fuel with pretty much anything. But what are you doing?”

  “What would you say the heart of the diesel engine is?” Jake asked.

  “Why . . . the combustion chamber,” I suppose, the pulp writer asked. “It’s where the fuel goes, and fuel is like blood. But the peanuts—”

  “But wouldn’t it be the crankshaft,” Jake said, his voice rising querulously. “That’s what transmits power to—”

  “Metaphors are never perfect, Jacob. Now why are you stealing peanuts?” the pulp writer said.

  Jake pulled one from his pocket and held it out to her, wiggling it with his thumb and forefinger. “Want one?” She just glared at him.

  “I just want someone to talk to me for more than ten seconds in here,” he said. “I was going to scatter these across the floor, and maybe someone would stoop to pick one up, or even trip and fall. Then I could talk to him, and . . .” Jake realized that he sounded insane. Too many all-nighters. When was the last time he had even been home, in his own bed?

  “You’re a Wobblie after all,” the pulp writer said. She stood up on her toes and wobbled a bit. “Get it?” Jake snorted. “Anyway,” she continued, “it is almost impossible to find one’s way in between shifts, and I have an appointment with your employer. We can talk about your, uh, ‘shenanigans’ later.” She waved the telegram like a tiny flag.

  Jake ate the peanut and led the pulp writer across the shop floor under a cloud of embarrassed silence. The factory was too loud for them to talk much anyway, but Jake was full of questions, for her, and for himself. What had he been thinking, with his little stunt? Why did the old man want to see her in person, and why hadn’t he been informed? Maybe he had been informed, and had forgotten, but what would that mean for his mental health?

  What is Industrivism?

  In the small, secret, lift, he spoke. “I should tell you something about the old man. He lives in an iron lung of sorts.”

  “In the basement of a factory?”

  “Don’t believe me?” Jake said. “You can see for yourself.” And the doors parted and they walked into the huge basement room.

  “That, sir,” the pulp writer said, “is not an iron lung.”

  “Well, it’s at least an iron lung,” Jake said.

  They approached quietly. The pulp writer was reminded of any number of cover paintings – the old man’s head was visible behind a windowed helmet, just as a spaceman or deep-sea adventurers might be on this month’s Captain X’s Space Patrol and others. But he was wrinkled and brown like a pealed apple left out too long in the sun, not an astronaut with a right-angled chin.

  The pulp writer heard something like the arm of a phonograph dropping onto a record, and then the old man spoke.

  “THANK YOU. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”

  Jake stepped forward to introduce her. “This is Lurle—”

  “Doris,” the pulp writer said. “You can call me Doris.” She turned to Jake. “Can he even hear us?”

  It occurred to Jake that he had never had a lengthy conversation with the old man. That is, he obeyed orders, made suggestions, and once or twice tried to engage the old man, but now he realized that nothing that old man had said was really informed by Jake’s actions. It was all “DO THIS” and “DO THAT”.

  “I am not quite clear on that, all of a sudden,” Jake said.

  “MY NAME IS RUDOLPH DIESEL.”

  Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, who had famously committed suicide twenty years prior. The pulp writer, whose name was not Doris either, knew that much. Fortune had turned to failure, idealism to despair, and the man had left his wife the sum of two hundred marks in an attaché case, booked passage to England, and then had thrown himself from his steamship. His waterlogged corpse had been found ten days later by a fishing boat, which had retrieved his effects and thrown the body back into the ocean according to the Code of the Sea.

  Occasionally, the true crime pulps raked over the details and suggested instead that Diesel had been murdered. He’d been going to England to sell the patents to the Queen and thus save his family and thwart the Kaiser, and a Hun assassin had first thwarted him. Not a bad theory, except that British rolling dreadnoughts and American Diesel-Jeeps and Diesel-Leaps and had won the war in six months, so who had actually been thwarted? Another common story played up the Red angle: Diesel was a naïve Utopian who was going to meet with Irish radical James Connolly and break the Dublin Lock-Out by creating a new factory where diesel engines the size of a fist would be manufactured, and the capitalist overlords overthrown.

  The pulp writer had never cared for such speculation in the true crime rags, but her mind was already running like sixty to . . .

  “This is Industrivism, isn’t it!” she suddenly shouted.

  “PLEASE WRITE ABOUT ME.”

  “You hear that, Lur . . . uh, Doris? He doesn’t respond. Not really. He just has a stack of records in there somewhere and when he wants to say something he plays one. But he only has a handful of phrases recorded,” Jake said.

  “I want to know if you somehow survived your suicide attempt, or if it was a murder attempt, or are you the murderer who dumped someone else into the sea to start a new life . . . if you can call this life!”

  “NO.”

  “Don’t ask multiple choice questions,” Jake said.

  “Yes, I know that now!” the pulp writer snapped. Then, loudly, to Diesel. “Were you the victim of some crime?”

  “YES.”

  She was silent for a moment then said, disappointed, “Well, that’s that. Jake, why did you never tell me, or anyone, about this?”

  “Not my job. My job is keeping this place running, no matter what. Anyway, I got a question – What is Industrivism?”

  “THIS IS.”

  Jake often thought he could hear the factory talk to him. This time he felt the whole place take a deep breath. Not in anticipation, but in preparation for release. The pipes gave way with groans and a hiss of steam, and the long limblike projections separated from them and began to swing. Herky-jerky, like a bus-sized toy automaton, Diesel began to move. After three steps, he stopped, and black smoke belched from the exhaust pipes projecting from the contraption’s “shoulders”, as Jake thought of them.

  “WRITE ABOUT ME.”

  “What do you want me to write?”

  “I WISH TO WALK AMONG YOU ALL.”

  “Is that supposed to be what Industrivism is? Just getting people used to the idea of you walking down the street in this, uh . . . tank-suit, tipping a steel hat at the ladies?” Jake said. There was something happening to Jake. He didn’t know whether to be angry or awestruck, or j
ust to take himself out back and punch himself silly out by the loading docks for being such a fool. He had spent too much time just being a cog in the big machine that he hadn’t taken notice, real notice, of anything until the past few days. Past twenty years, maybe.

  “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it,” he said to the pulp writer. “All these changes.”

  “Snuck up on me, and I was the one who came up with the word ‘Industrivism.’ I wanted ‘industraturgy’ at first, but I was worried that people wouldn’t know what the suffix – turgy meant.”

  “INDUSTRIVISM”

  Now it was time for Jake and the pulp writer to both inhale sharply.

  “INDUSTRIVISM IS”

  The pipe on the left shoulder of Diesel’s tank suit blew and the sound reverberated throughout the basement almost as if had been designed with that acoustic effect in mind.

  No, not almost, Jake realized. Exactly.

  Where the tank-suit had once stood there was a door, and now that door opened. It was the swing-shift, the noon till eight crowd. All men, as was typical, and . . . not all men.

  The first was armless, but his limbs had been replaced with a remarkable set of prostheses. He actually had eight hook like fingers at the end of each arm-rod, and then opened and closed like a rose whose petals could snap shut in the blink of an eye. Behind him was a legless man, his waist a corkscrew, legs thin and pointed, but perfectly balanced in their way like a drafter’s compass in expert hands.

  The entire shift, and there weren’t many of them, had some replacement. Jake had never seen any of these men before, not in the factory. Maybe on the streets, one or two begging, or just idling listlessly. The last man seemed to Jake to be whole, and he Jake recognized. It was the man from the electroplating vats upstairs, the utterly normal-appearing man with no defect at all. He walked up to Jake and the pulp writer and undid several buttons of his work jumpsuit, to show off the chest still fresh with a huge incision.