Free The Ax by Donald E. Westlake

commute, but a relocation within New York State wouldn’t be complex. He remains a threat.
    I could drive there this Thursday morning. Five or six hours to get there. Stay overnight. See what happens.

12
     
    When I was a boy, I was for a while a science fiction fan. A lot of us were, until Sputnik. I was twelve when Sputnik flew. All the science fiction magazines I’d read before then, and the movies and TV shows I saw, assumed that outer space belonged by natural right to Americans. Explorers and settlers and daredevils of space were all Americans, in story after story. And then, out of nowhere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first space vehicle. The Russians!
    We all stopped reading science fiction, then, and turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows. I don’t know about anybody else, but, as I remember it, I turned my interest after that to the western. In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.
    But before Sputnik turned my whole generation away from science fiction, we had read a lot of stories that talked about something called “automation.” Automation was going to take the place of unintelligent labor, though I don’t think it was ever phrased quite like that. But simple assembly line stuff is what they meant, the kind of dull deadening repetitive labor that everybody agreed was bad for the human brain and paralyzing to the human spirit. All that work would be taken over by machines.
    This automated future was always presented as a good thing, a boon to mankind, but I remember, even as a child, wondering what was supposed to happen to the people who didn’t work at the dull stupefying jobs any more. They’d have to work somewhere, wouldn’t they? Or how would they eat? If the machines took all their jobs, what would they do to support themselves?
    I remember the first time I saw news footage of a robot assembly line in a Japanese auto factory, a machine that looked like the X-ray machine in the dentist’s office, jerking around all by itself, this way and that, welding automobile pieces together. This was automation. It was fast, and although it looked clumsy the announcer said it was much more precise and efficient than any human being.
    So automation did arrive, and it did have a hard effect on the workers. In the fifties and sixties, blue-collar workers were laid off in their thousands, all because of automation. But most of those workers were unionized, and most of the unions had grown strong over the previous thirty years, and so there were great long strikes, in the steel mills, and in the mines, and in the auto factories, and at the end of it all the pain of the transition was somewhat eased.
    Well, that was long ago, and the toll that automation was going to take on the American worker has long since been absorbed. These days, the factory workers are only hit sporadically, when a company moves to Asia or somewhere, looking for cheaper labor and easier environment laws. These days, it’s the child of automation that has risen among us, and the child of automation hits higher in the work force.
    The child of automation is the computer, and the computer is taking the place of the white-collar worker, the manager, the supervisor, just as surely as those assembly line robots took the place of the lunch-bucket crowd. Middle management, that’s what’s being winnowed now. And none of us are unionized.
    In any large company, there are three levels of staff. At the top are the bosses, the executives, the representatives of the stockholders, who count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions. At the bottom are the workers on the line, the people who actually make whatever is being made. And between the two, until now, has been middle management.
    It is middle management’s job to interpret the bosses for the workers and the workers for the bosses. The middle manager passes information: downward, he passes the orders and requirements, while upward he passes the