‘Year-round temperature of 71.5,’ said Clause 14a. ‘Not less than 40 cu. ft. of pure, fresh, filtered air per worker per minute,’ said Paragraph 9. ‘Lighting to be controlled by individual worker at his discretion,’ said Sub-Section XII.
It was underground, right enough, but it was very nice indeed. Why, they even had trouble, serious trouble, with one worker in ten refusing to go home even to sleep, especially during the hay-fever season.
But that was before automation had set in.
Now things were not nice at all, at least by human standards. Machines might have loved it, but -
Well, the lights, to begin with, were hardly the pleasant, glare-free fluorescents that Local 606 had had in mind. Why should they be? Human eyes relish the visible spectrum, but machines see by photo-electric cells, and photocells see as well by red or even infra-red ... which is cheap to generate and produces a satisfactory length of filament life. Consequently National Electro-Mech was now washed with a hideous ochre gloom.
The air - ah, that was a laugh. Whatever air the departing human workers chanced to leave behind was still there, for machines don’t breathe. And the temperature was whatever it happened to be. In the remote ends of the galleries, it was chilly cold; in the area around the cookers, it was appalling.
And the noise!
Cringing, the three invaders gaped deafenedly around as they rode in on the conveyor belt. Bill Cossett stared through the blood-red gloom at a row of enormous stainless-steel spheres. He wondered what they were, and only glanced away in scant time to fling himself off the conveyor belt and yelclass="underline" ‘Jump!’
The others obeyed just as the lumps of coal they had been travelling with thumped with a roar and suffocating dust into a huge hopper.
Beads of sweat broke out over them all. That coal was ultimately to be polymerized in the huge steel cookers Cossett had been staring at. The factory had not, of course, bothered to sweep away the excess heat with blowers. Why should it? But it wasn’t only the heat that brought out the sweat; they could hear the coal being powdered and whooshed away.
They got out of there, holding hands to keep together, tripping and stumbling in the bloody dusk.
‘Watch it!’ bawled the major in Cossett’s ear, and Cossett ducked one horrifying instant before something huge and glittering swooped by his ear.
This was, after all, an appliance factory, and Cossett couldn’t help thinking that a factory should have certain recognizable features. Aisles, for example, between the machines.
But the cavern factory didn’t need aisles. Most factory traffic is in the changing of the shifts, the to-and-fro traffic of the coffee break, the casual promenade to the powder room or water cooler. None of these phenomena occurred in the manless caverns. Therefore the machine-mind had ended corridors and abolished aisles. It dumped jigs and bobbins where they were most convenient - to a machine, not to a man. The movement of fresh parts and the carting away of finished assemblies was done by overhead trolleys.
As Cossett blinked after the one that had nearly whacked him, he caught glimpse of another shadow out of the corner of his eyes.
‘Watch it!’ he yelled, and grabbed Marlene slipperily by the neck as a pod of toasters swept by.
They all dropped to the littered floor and got up, swearing -except that Marlene didn’t swear. She was much too ladylike; that is, in that way. But she said, ‘We ought to do our job and get out of here.’
They looked at each other, a pathetic trio, smeared with grease and soot. They were lost in a howling, hammering catacomb. They were unarmed and helpless against a smart and powerful factory of machines and weapons.
‘This was a dopy idea from the beginning,’ moaned Cossett ‘We’ll never got out.’
‘Never,’ agreed the major, daunted at last.
‘Never,’ nodded Marlene, and paused, frowning prettily in the gloom. ‘Unless we get thrown up,’ she added.
‘You mean thrown out,’ Cossett corrected.
Marlene shook her head. ‘I mean upchucked,’ she said in a refined manner, ‘like when you have an upset stomach.’
The two men looked at each other.
‘The place does eat, in a way,’ said Cossett.
‘It’s a mistake to be teleological,’ Commaigne objected.
‘But it does eat.’
‘Let’s think it out,’ said Major Commaigne authoritatively, hitting the dirt to avoid a passing coil of extension cords. ‘Suppose,’ he called up to the others, ‘We blow up the conveyor belt and those cookers. This will undoubtedly interfere with the logistics of the command-apparatus, right? It will then certainly try to find out what happened, and will, we must assume, discover that certain alien entities - ourselves, that is - found their way in through the raw-material receptors. Well, then! What is there for the thing to do but close down its receptors? And when it has done so, it will be cut off from the things it needs to continue manufacturing. Consequently, we take as provisionally established, it will be unable - what?’
Bill Cossett, bawling at him from under a parts table where he had taken refuge, repeated: ‘I said, where’s Marlene?’
The Major clambered to his knees. The girl was gone. In the dull, clattering, crashing gloom, strange shapes moved wildly about, but none of them seemed to be Marlene. She was gone and, the major suddenly discovered, something was gone with her - the bag of explosives.
‘Marlene!’ screamed the two men.
And, though it was only chance, she at once appeared. ‘Where have you been?’ the major demanded. ‘What were you doing?’
The girl stood looking down at them for a second.
‘I think we’d better get out of the way,’ she said at last. ‘I took the bombs. I think I’ve given the thing a tummy-ache.’
They had gone less than a dozen yards when the first of the little bombs went off, with a sodium-yellow glare and a firecracker bang; but it knocked a hundred yards of conveyor belt off the track.
And then the fun really began...
Less than an hour later, they were back on the surface, watching plumes of smoke trickle from fifty concealed ventilators scattered across the plain outside Farmingdale.
Jack Tighe was delighted. ‘You clobbered it!’ he gloated. ‘And it let you get out?’
‘Kicked us out,’ exulted the major. ‘We were in the raw-materials area, you know. As far as I can tell, the factory has closed down the raw-materials operation entirely. It swept everything off what was left of the conveyor belt, us included - believe me, we had to step pretty quick to keep from getting hurt! Then it plugged up the belt tunnel, and as we were getting away, I saw a handling machine beginning to put armour-plate over the plug.’
Jack Tighe howled: ‘We’ve licked it! Tell you what,’ he said suddenly, ‘let’s give it a red bellyache. Plant a few more bombs in the coal beds to make sure...’
And they did but, really, it didn’t seem quite necessary; the cavern factory had withdrawn completely within itself. No further attempts were made to get raw materials, then or ever.
In the next few days, while Tighe’s men tried the same tactic on factory after factory, all across the face of the continent - and always with the same success - the armed guards outside National Electro-Mech’s plant had very little to do. The factory wasn’t quite dead, no. Twice the first day, occasionally in the days that followed, a single furtive truck would come dodging out of the exit ramps. But only one truck, where there had been scores; and that one partly loaded, and an easy target for the guards.