Free Fixing the Sky by James Rodger Fleming

servants of capitalists and the obedient executioners of both corporate plans and, possibly, humanity. England writes in the foreword: “I believe that, had capitalists been able to bring the seas and the atmosphere under physical control, they would long ago [have done so].”

    The story begins when billionaire businessman Isaac Flint, seeking new and ever more powerful monopolies, asks:
    What is it they all must have, or do, that I can control? ... Breathing! ... Breath is life. Without food and drink and shelter, men can live a while. Even without water, for some days. But without air —they die inevitably and at once. And if I make my own, then I am the master of all life!... Life, air, breath—the very breath of the world in my hands—power absolutely, at last! 14
    His business partner, Maxim “Tiger” Waldron, suggests “The Air Trust—A monopoly on breathing privileges!... Imagine that we might extract oxygen from the air.... [P]eople would come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling over each other to buy!” (23–25).
    The businessmen delegate responsibility for the details and the execution of the plan to the industrial research staff (“That’s what they’re for”) as personified by the chemist Herzog—“a fat rubicund, spectacled man” with a keen mind, two fingers missing (from experimenting with explosives), and “character and stamina close to those of a jelly fish” (29). In the novel, the oxygen extraction plant is located at Niagara Falls and uses hydropower to run the condensers. The book includes sufficient technical details about the extraction process and the scale of the operation to suspend readers’ disbelief while clearly drawing an analogy to the nitrogen fixation process developed about 1909 by the German chemist Fritz Haber and industrialized in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Benefits of commodifying the air include the sale of liquid gas refrigerants, nitrogen for fertilizer and explosives, and even ozone to “freshen and purify” the environment. But by far the most precious commodity is oxygen, the breath of life. As Flint expresses it, “We’ll have the world by the wind pipe; and let the mob howl then , if they dare!” (69).
    The plot turns around the loss of Flint’s notebook, which alerts the socialist hero, Gabriel Armstrong, to the plan. He and his comrades passionately debate the need to destroy the “infernally efficient tyrants” who have taken possession of “all that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make possible.” The capitalists control “military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair and the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!” If the socialists can destroy the Air Trust, “the great revolution will follow” to annihilate capitalism (261–262).
    After working out a strategy of attack, the workers organize and, led by Armstrong, storm the plant. In a scene worthy of a Saturday matinee, they chase Flint
and Waldron into one of the huge empty air tanks, as the chemist Herzog takes his own life with a vial of poison. The final scene is both ghastly and ghoulishly amusing as Waldron notices the odor of ozone and cries out, “ Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in! ” (325) As a huge stream of pure oxygen from a ruptured valve floods the tank, the brains of Flint and Waldron literally began to “combust”:
    â€œ Ha! Ha! Ha! ” rang Waldron’s crazy laughter.... All at once his cigar burst into flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood there swaying [panting, with crimson face], clutching it to hold himself from falling.... “Help! Help!” [Flint] screamed. “Save me—my God—save me—Let me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A