Ira Levin - A Kiss Before Dying

The twig vanished under the wing. He waited. He swallowed and his ears popped as the plane soared lower.

The smelter reappeared directly below him, sliding out from under the wing. There were half a dozen rectilinear brown roofs with thick tails of smoke dragging from their centers. They crowded together, huge and shadowless in the overhead sun, beside the glittering chainmail patch of a filled parking lot. Railroad tracks looped and encircled them, merging below into a multi-veined stem, down which a freighttrain crawled, its smudge of smoke dwarfed by the giant black plumes behind it, its chain of cars scintillating with salmon-colored glints.

His head turned slowly, his eyes locked to the smelter that slid towards the tail of the plane. Fields of snow followed it. Scattered houses appeared. The smelter was gone. There were more houses, then roads separating them into blocks. Still more houses, closer now, and stores and signs and creeping cars and dot-like people, a park, the cubist pattern of a housing development...

The plane banked, circling. The ground tilted away, then leveled, swept closer, and finally came slicing up under the wing of the plane. A jolt; the seatbelt's buckle bit his stomach. Then the plane rolled smoothly. He drew the pale blue webbing from the copper clamp.

There was a limousine waiting when they descended from the plane; a custom-built Packard, black and polished. He sat on a jump-seat next to Dettweiler. He leaned forward, looking over the driver's shoulder. He peered down the long perspective of the town's main street to a white hill for away on the horizon, At its summit, from the far side, columns of smoke arose. They were curving and black against the sky, like the cloud-fingers of a genie's hand.

The main street became a two lane highway that speared between fields of snow, and the highway became an asphalt road that embraced the curve of the hill's base, and the asphalt road became a gravel one that jounced over the serried ribs of railroad tracks and turned to the left, rising up the hillside parallel to the tracks. First one slowly climbing train was overtaken, and then another. Sparks of hidden metal winked from ore-heaped gondola cars.

Ahead, the smelter rose up. Brown structures merged into a crude pyramid, their belching smokestacks ranked around the largest one. Nearer, the buildings swelled and clarified; their clifflike walls were streaky brown metal, laced in spots with girdered fretwork and irregularly patched with soot-stained glass; the shapes of the buildings were hard, geometric; they were bound together by chutes and catwalks. Still nearer, the buildings merged again, the sky space between them lost behind projecting angles. They became a single massive form, large hulks buttressing larger ones into an immense smoke-spired industrial cathedral. It loomed up mountainously, and then suddenly swept off to the side as the limousine veered away.

The car pulled up before a low brick building, at the door of which waited a lean, white-haired, unctuously smiling man in a dark gray suit.

He forgot what he was eating, that*s how interested he was in lunch. He pulled his eyes from the window across the room, the window through which could be seen the buildings wherein heaps of gray-brown dirt were purified to gleaming copper, and looked down at his plate. Creamed chicken. He started eating more quickly, hoping the others would follow suit.

The carefully dressed white-haired man had turned out to be a Mr. Otto, the manager of the smelter. Leo having introduced him, Mr. Otto had led them into a conference room and begun apologizing for things. He apologized smilingly for the tablecloth that left bare one end of the long table-"We're not in the New York office, you know"-and he apologized suavely for cool food and warm wine-"I'm afraid we lack the facilities of our big city brethren." Mr. Otto longed transparently for the New York office. Over the soup he spoke of the copper shortage and disparaged the suggestions of the National Production Authority for its mitigation. Occasionally he referred to copper as "the red metal."

"Mr. Corliss." He looked up. Dettweiler was smiling at him across the table. "You'd better be careful," Dettweiler said. "I found a bone in mine."

Bud glanced at his nearly empty plate and smiled back at Dettweiler. "I'm anxious to see the smelter," he said.

"Aren't we all," Dettweiler remarked, still smiling.

"You found a bone in yours?" Mr. Otto inquired. "That woman! I told her to take care. These people can't even cut up a chicken properly."

Now that they had at long last left the brick building and were crossing the asphalt yard to the buildings of the smelter itself, he walked slowly. The others, coatless, hurried ahead, but he drifted behind, savoring the climactic sweetness of the moment. He watched an ore-laden train disappear behind a steel wall at the left of the buildings. At the right, a train was being loaded; cranes swung copper into the cars; great square slabs like solidified flame that must have weighed five or six hundred pounds each, A heart! he thought, gazing up at the monstrous brown form that filled more and more of the sky,-a giant heart of American industry, drawing in bad blood, pumping out good! Standing so close to it, about to enter it, it was impossible not to share the surging of its power!

The others had vanished into a doorway at the base of the towering steel mass. Now Mr. Otto smiled within the doorway, beckoning.

He moved forward less slowly, like a lover going to a long awaited tryst. Success rewarded! Promise fulfulled! There should be a fanfare! he thought. There should be a fanfare!

A whistle screamed.

Thank you. Muchas gracias.

He went into the darkness of the doorway. The door closed after him.

The whistle screamed again, piercingly, like a bird in a jungle.

He stood on a chain-railed catwalk staring fascinatedly at an army of huge cylindrical furnaces ranked before him in diminishing perspective like an ordered forest of giant redwood trunks. At their bases men moved methodically, regulating incomprehensible controls. The air was hot and sulphurous.

"There are six hearths, one above the other, in each furnace," Mr. Otto lectured. "The ore is introduced at the top. It's moved steadily downward from hearth to hearth by rotating arms attached to a central shaft. The roasting removes excess sulphur from the ore."

He listened intently, nodding. He turned to the others to express his awe, but only Marion stood on his right, wooden-faced as she had been all day. Leo and that Dettweiler were gone. "Where'd your father and Dettweiler go?" he asked her.

"I don't know. Dad said he wanted to show him something."

"Oh." He turned back to the furnaces. What would Leo want to show Dettweiler? Well... "How many are there?"

"Furnaces?" Mr. Otto dabbed perspiration from his upper lip with a folded handkerchief. "Fifty-four."

Fifty-four! Jesus! "How much, ore goes through them in a day?" he asked.

It was wonderful! He'd never been so interested in anything in his whole life! He asked a thousand questions and Mr. Otto, visibly reacting to his fascination, answered them in detail, speaking only to him, while Marion trailed unseeingly behind.

In another building there were more furnaces; brick walled, flat, and over a hundred feet long. "The reverberatory furnaces," Mr. Otto said. "The ore that comes from the roasting furnaces is about ten per cent copper. Here it's melted down. The lighter minerals flow off as slag. What's left is iron and copper -we call it 'matte'-forty per cent copper."

"What do you use for fuel?"

"Pulverized coal. The waste heat is used to generate steam for making power."

He shook his head, whistling between his teeth.

Mr. Otto smiled. "Impressed?"

"It's wonderful," Bud said. "Wonderful." He gazed down the endless stretch of furnaces. "It makes you realize what a great country this is."