Robert Bennett - The Company Man

They walked until they came to the elevator and then climbed aboard and went two flights down until they hit a rotunda. Immense gears squalled and churned around them and the entire rotunda swiveled until they were in a different sector of the facility entirely. They walked on.

Hayes watched as the machinery moved above them, shining with grease and screaming with fatigue in places. How many men had died to make this place, he wondered. This temple of industry, this hidden hall of production. When ancient peoples had knelt before the carven faces of their gods and imagined fabled crypts and castles their thoughts could not have touched what men had made here, hacked into the bones of the earth itself. Hayes watched as one Tramline carriage rolled past on a beltway, its structure fine and smooth like a dragonfly’s skeleton, its half-built engine as delicate as the smallest clock. A goggled worker trundled along, the glassware receptors for the radios packed into a straw crate on his wagon, spindled glass like fine ice. He passed by them as though none of this mattered. Not Hayes or the foremen or the fragile wonders in his care.

They walked to the spot-welding line and Hayes could tell Andersson by his height. He held a long, sparkling welder in one hand, a sputtering magic wand. He knelt and set his solvent with the mindfulness of a man playing the cello, carefully placing his long, delicate instrument along the strings of the Tramline carriage, then drawing back slowly. The foreman waited until he was done and then waved down Andersson and his team. Andersson stood and frowned at the foreman until his eyes fell upon the little blond-haired, fair-skinned man who was clearly wearing goggles for the first time in his life. Then he laughed and opened his arms and cried, “Mr. Staunton! What are you doing here! What are you doing in such dangerous place as this!”

Hayes grinned and said something in Swedish. He wasn’t sure where he had picked it up or what it meant but it made Andersson laugh all the harder.

They retired to a sailor’s bar, full of tattooed men with thick black coats and raw faces. Andersson and Hayes spoke quietly over fish soup and black ale, and Andersson listened as Hayes gave him the news, describing how the very top was now paranoid of how they appeared to be murdering their own workers.

“Appeared,” growled Andersson. “Appeared. Idiocy. Nonsense. They did not appear. They did. It was them. They killed those men. How, I do not know, but it was them.”

“Why would they kill their own people?”

“Please, Andrew. Do not be telling me that you are such an idiot. I know you. You are a very clever man. You know that those men, the dead, they were the more violent sort. The more passionate sort.”

“Sort of what? Of union man?”

“Of Tazzer. Yes. The accidents, yes?”

“Ah, yes,” said Hayes, suddenly appearing to recall. “The accidents.”

“Yes. Some say this is the right thing to do. To fight. To kill, if necessary. I do not know. Killing is always bad. It will only lead to trouble. But some say this is what we need to do. To send message,” Andersson confided softly. “To bring attention.”

“Some say this will rally the lower classes. That the deaths of their own will unite them.”

“Who says this?”

“People. As they always do. Some say Tazz did it himself,” Hayes said slyly. “Or a Tazz supporter.”

“No!” Andersson said, shocked. “That is nonsense!”

Hayes shrugged. “You just have to pay attention to who’s going to gain the most from this. It seems those men were causing trouble for Tazz. Doing bad things in his name. This way he gets two things, he gets some bad business out of his way and he gets something to rally everyone around. And no one would ever suspect him. Has Tazz denied it?”

“Yes,” said Andersson angrily.

“You saw him? Saw him deny it?”

“Well. No.”

“You didn’t see him?”

Andersson frowned into his beer mug. “Tazz has said nothing about the trolley murders.”

“Really? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Andersson.

“Not even anything about the Red Star?”

“He is not coming out anymore.”

“What? Coming out of where?”

“Union men died, Andrew,” Andersson said softly. “A lot of union men. There is danger, they say. He is in hiding.”

“Hiding?”

“Yes. In some place. Safe place. Place where no one knows where he is except only a few. Only his most trusted men. And no one knows who they are. This has become a deadly secret game, Andrew,” said Andersson, shaking his head. “Trust no one. That is the way it now goes for us down here, in the Southern.”

“That’s how it always goes, I think. Now, tell me, Martin,” said Hayes, “where did he spend his time in the clink?”

“Clink?” said Andersson, confused.

“In jail. Tazz was in jail, correct?”

“Yes. After the docks protest.”

“Where was that? Savron Hill?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Curiosity. That’s all. Just curiosity.”

“I see.” Andersson looked away, then asked bashfully, “Andrew, would you mind if I ask you a question?”

“No.”

“Even if it is a very silly question?”

“No. I don’t mind at all.”

“All right.” He frowned as he considered his words and said, “Andrew, you are not a little man. Well, in some ways, yes, but in business ways, no. In the city, no, in the company, no. And all I hear is of McNaughton’s magic. With its genius-men who think these things up. And I just wonder, eh-”

“Where McNaughton’s secrets come from? Or what the big secret is?”

“Yes. Yes, that is what I am wondering.”

Hayes smiled. He considered telling one of his more fun lies about secret scientists smuggled in from abroad. But he had developed a soft spot for the big man and decided to tell him the simple and boring truth, as far as he had it figured out, which he thought was pretty far.

“Well, internally they say it’s marketing,” said Hayes.

Andersson frowned. “Marketing?”

“Yes. Marketing. Like, the way you pitch something. The way you lie to someone else in the marketplace about what you’re selling. They say it’s not designs, not mechanics, no. The real secret to everything is the McNaughton approach to sales.”

“It is this? Just a thing of sales? You believe that?”

“Well, they do,” Hayes said with a smile. “You know what I believe?”

“You do not believe it’s marketing?”

“No. I believe it’s all a load of shit.”

“Shit? What is shit?”

“Everything. The very idea of it. Horseshit. Poppycock. Tripe. I do think there were, oh, a half-dozen neat things Kulahee came up with long ago. And that was a good start for the business. And then McNaughton just said there were a hundred more things, but they were all secret, and you could buy them but never know where they came from. So, naturally, everyone wants to buy and invest in these wonders. But it’s nothing special. It’s just normal things developed by some well-paid men. That’s what I think.”

Andersson thought that over, frowning, and settled back in his chair, fingers twined together and resting on his belly.

“Why do you ask?” said Hayes.

“Oh, it is just something I have seen over the years,” said Andersson. “Some of the more advanced devices… Some of them seem to have not been made for people at all.”

“What? Then who? Elves? Imps? Bloody fairies?”

Andersson stared at him as his internal translator tried to make sense of that. “Oh, no,” he said after a while. “Not like that. It is just that over the years, I have been promoted a few times, assigned manufacturing of some of the more specialized items. And many of those… Well, it seems like the designers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make them used for people. Like they just had to put in levers or consoles or, say, on the airships, walkways and cockpits and passenger cells and such. Like when they were first designed, they did not have people in mind at all. Maybe it is the way Kulahee first thought of them. But why would he design a thing that way? And if you are right, and it is not Kulahee at all but our own people, why are they doing it that way?”