Free The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald Page B

oils were whipped away by the wide-mouthed suck of the air-conditioning system. Women in trim and functional coveralls, in varying shades to denote department and function, tended the semiautomatic equipment, pushed the glittering, roller-bearing racks, fed the conveyors, took the samplings for the statistical control of inspection, fed the hoppers, yelled for stock, screeched for setup, briskly busy with only the automatic half of their minds on the job at hand. Above and around and below the shimmering roar they traded bawdy gossip, formed cliques, bedeviled the weaker ones, all with a continual hip-rolling, oblique-eyed, arrogant awareness of men. All men. The foremen and the visitors and the specialists on the catwalk and the engineers and the stock boys and the factory reps and the repair specialists.
    Down on the floor the setup men changed the bite and timing and tolerances of the waiting machines, and other men threaded the automation tapes into the completely automatic equipment.
    Behind the catwalk were the glass doors that opened into the rooms where it was all controlled, where girls key-punched the multi-colored cards, where the sorters shuffled and clicked, where the alphabetical and numerical tabulators rattled out the essential lists, where the panel boards clicked and the lights blinked. The tabulation equipment and electronic controls made all of the little decisions. Time to order more of this, and time to stop the run on that, and better make an eight percent overrun on this because the tolerance is close, and time to cut three turret lathes on the A line over to order 66-81-F rather than pile up dead time.
    In these rooms the floor noise was slightly muted so that the shrillnesses were taken out, and the sounds seemed deeper, a chuckling and mumbling.
    Carl Garrett liked to leave the main offices and walk over to one of the production areas and climb to the catwalk and lean on the rail and look down at the acres of movement and activity, and amuse himself with insane conjecturings. Would it not be nice if, parallel to this building there was another building where the neat shipping cartons were unpacked and the clever fabrications went then through uninspection, disassembly—were torn back down and reformed into the basic rods and sheets and coils and blocks which were then sent back to be run through again? Of course the personnel in this building would know nothing of what transpired in the neighboring building. It would be a closed circuit, endlessly efficient. Or, on the other hand, let them know what was being done. A few, a very few, might wonder what the hell it was all about, but the rest of them would shrug and go ahead with the job and draw their pay and bitch to the shop steward about coffee breaks and work standards and seniority and how come I got moved over onto the damn grinder and they give that Rayzek bitch my place on the bench and when are they going to do something about that John that’s running over so it’s like a lake in there anyhow?
    He would look down and look at the Chinese red of the moving parts, and the sea-gray of the housings and hearty buttocks in azure blue, and bleached hair tied in a green bandanna, and come to believe that this was the whole world,that nothing existed from sea to sea but these fluorescent interiors held at a rigid seventy-one degrees, standing jowl to jowl while the forgotten sun shines down on all the blank roofs.
    Maybe it was all part of a monstrous conspiracy. Maybe the electronic controls were lying, and there was utterly no use for the gleaming and intricate and clever products of the production lines. So that, day after day, barges carried the taped and labeled cartons to sea and dumped them beyond the continental shelf.
    And would shake his head and go back to his own office and his own staff and wonder which was more unreal, the production areas or his own function.
    His function was easy. Find out what it costs, per unit, and down to the