‘No I can’t !’ he said, suddenly panicky, staring at the phone as though it were an enemy. ‘They’re all in it together, you see, The machines, I mean. I can’t say over the phone -’
‘Bill!’
‘But they are, Essie. We found that out. National Electro-Mech’s got a deep tunnel that goes clear to General Motors way out in Detroit, for trucks and so on. They get their computer parts from Philco in Philadelphia. How do I know the phone isn’t in on it too? No -’ he interrupted her as she was about to demand the truth - ‘please, Essie. Don’t ask me. How are the kids? Chuck?’
‘Skinned knee. But, Bill, you mustn’t -’
‘And Dan?’
‘The doctor says it’s only a little allergy. But I’m not going to-’
‘And Tommy?’
She frowned. ‘I spanked him fifty times yesterday,’ she said, an exaggeration, certainly, but at least she was diverted from asking questions; she gave a concise catalogue of smashed dishes, spilled milk, unhung jackets and lost shoes; and Bill breathed again.
For what he told her had been the truth; he was suddenly deathly afraid that the automatic long-lines dialling apparatus of the phone company might have been infiltrated by its electronic brethren in the factories. There was no sense in telling the enemy what you were about to do!
He managed to hang up without revealing his secret, and walked out of the booth to Major Commaigne’s command post.
Heroes come in many forms, but it had never before occurred to A. Cossett, Authorized Buick Dealer, that a motor-car franchise holder, like a general, must sometimes offer his life in battle.
The command post was busy, but that was natural enough, for this was a project to which the entire resources of the United States of America could well have been devoted.
And the effort was beginning to show results. Bill Cossett came to a scene of excitement. Major Commaigne was listening to an excited Captain Margate, while the rest of the detachment stood by.
Margate, as Bill Cossett had come to know, was Jack Tighe’s personal expert in raw materials and the like. A good man, Cossett thought. And so was Major Commaigne a can-do kind of guy. And this Marlene Groshawk who was tagging along - well, Essie wouldn’t like that. But it was in line of duty. And, you know, kind of fun.
Hastily, Bill Cossett shifted his thoughts back to the problem of getting into National Electro-Mech.
‘Found it!’ Captain Margate was crying, delighted. ‘We really found it! Geologists thought,’ he said, shaking his head in wonder, ‘that there wasn’t any coal under Long Island, but trust the machines. They knew. We found it.’
‘Coal?’ said Major Commaigne, his brows crinkling.
‘Why, yes, Major,’ nodded the captain. ‘Coal. Raw materials, for your disguise.’
‘Disguise?’ repeated Major Commaigne.
‘That’s right, Major.’
‘As lumps of coal?’
The captain shrugged cheerfully. ‘As organic matter,’ he clarified. ‘The machine, after all, won’t mind. Coal is carbon - hydrocarbons - oh, you’re close enough. The machine won’t mind a few little eccentricities. Why,’ he went on, warming up, ‘The machine would still accept you even if you were a lot more impure than any of you really are.’
Marlene Groshawk stamped her pretty foot. ‘Captain!’
‘I mean in a chemical way. Miss Groshawk,’ the captain said humbly, and began to prepare their disguises.
Bill Cossett tugged at his collar. ‘Captain Margate,’ he said, ‘one thing. Suppose the factory catches us.’
‘It will, Mr. Cossett! That’s the whole idea.’
‘I mean suppose it finds out we’re not coal.’
Captain Margate looked up thoughtfully from his pot of lamp-black and cold cream.
‘That,’ he said meditatively, ‘would be embarrassing. I don’t know what would happen exactly, but -’ He shrugged. ‘Still, it’s not the worst thing that could happen,’ he added without worry. ‘It might be a whole lot worse if it never does find out you’re not raw materials.’
‘You mean -’ gasped Marlene. ‘We’d be-’
Captain Margate nodded. ‘You’d be processed. And,’ he added gallantly, ‘you would make a very nice batch of plastic, Miss Groshawk.’
5
It was a most trying time for all of them, you may be very sure. But they were brave enough.
Major Commaigne let himself be smeared a sooty black without a flicker of his steel-grey eye or a quiver of his iron jaw.
Bill Cossett tried desperately to remember how awful things were back in Rantoul - ‘Yes, yes,’ he whispered frantically to himself, ‘even more awful than this.’
Marlene Groshawk - well, you couldn’t tell much from her expression. But she wrote later, in her memoirs, that she was really anxious about only one thing: How she would ever get all that stuff off?
Sappers had tunnelled them a neat little hole into a bed of brownish gassy coal. ‘Ssh!’ hissed Captain Margate, a finger to his lips. ‘Listen.’
In the silence, there was a distant chomp chomp, chomp, like a great far-off inchworm nibbling his way through armour-plate.
‘The factory,’ the captain whispered. ‘We’ll leave you now. Keep very still. Oh, and there are sandwiches and drinking water in that hamper. I don’t know how long you’ll have to wait.’
And the captain and the sappers withdrew up the shaft.
Seconds later, a small explosive blast dumped the ceiling of the tunnel in, blocking it. The captain had warned them he would have to do that - ‘Don’t want to make the factory suspicious, you know!’ - but it was like that first clod of soil falling on the coffin of the living entombed man, all the same.
Time passed.
They ate the sandwiches and drank the water.
Time passed.
They began to get hungry again, but there wasn’t anything to do about it, not any more. They couldn’t even call the whole thing off now, because there wasn’t any way to accomplish it.
The distant chomp, chomp was closer, true, but the darkness was closing in on them; the enforced silence was getting on their nerves; and the sulphury smell of the low-grade coal was giving Bill Cossett a splitting headache...
And then it happened.
Chomp, chomp. And a rattle, bang. And something broke through the coal shell around them with a splash of violet light. Stainless steel teeth, half a yard long, nibbled a neat circle out of the wall, swallowed, hic-coughed and inched forward.
‘Duck,’ whispered Major Commaigne in the girl’s ear and, ‘Out of the way!’ into Cossett’s, though whispering was hardly needful in the metallic clangour around them. They crouched aside and the teeth gnawed past them, a yard a minute, trenching the floor of their little cavern and spewing the crushed coal onto a wide conveyor belt that followed the questing jaws.
‘Jump!’ murmured Commaigne when the teeth were safely by, and the three of them leaped onto the belt, nestled in shaking beds of coal fragments, borne upwards and back towards the factory itself.
They lay quiet, hardly breathing, against what unknown spy-eyes or listening devices the factory might employ. But if there were such, they missed their mark, or the strategy worked. At a steady crawling pace, they were drawn upward and into the growing din of National Electro-Mech’s main plant. It was as easy as that.
Getting in was. But that was, of course, only the beginning.
When National Electro-Mech put its factory under the sod of Farmingdale, the UERMWA, Local 606, had torn up the old contract and employed its best dreamers to invent a new one.