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ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of
fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there's more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs
these cars."
"But why build them in the first place if they can't be sold? It seems wasteful."
"It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard
of living?"
"Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market
abroad than they are worth as Scrap."
"What!-and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we'd get everybody
sore at us-Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?"
He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. "You go down to the public library and draw out some books.
You don't have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them."
So I shut up. I didn't tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at U.C.L.A.'s
library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer-to claim that I was now an
engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont's and saying, "Sirrah, I am an aichymiste. Hast
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need of art such as mine?"
I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were
really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or
air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one
that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.
The shift boss just stared at me. "Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don't expect them to put their
best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before
they ever came off the assembly line."
So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for
me.
But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a "job" at all in my book; all the work
was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the
cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed the loads; my job was to stand on a little
platform (I wasn't allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could Stop the whole operation if something
went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in
automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.
Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.
After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I
took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get
a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell
whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around
about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.
Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the
one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I
suppose I was one of them, although I hadn't thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none
of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city-if you can call Great
Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition-had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as
jammed as a lady's purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the `60s a few
people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.
Now apparently nobody left, ever.
The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a
job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering-on
my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash-without going to jail for it, and
(7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch
that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate
history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.
I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my
freshman year in engineering) that if you didn't use priorities, when the music stopped you were left
standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and
probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things
second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting
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for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else. . . when you haven't got them.
After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough,
only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart
and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some
job listed in the early edition.
How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I
stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up-Great Los Angeles winters are
subtropical only if you accent the "sub." I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways . . . and about
two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.
Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.
I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn't even look up from his
newspaper but simply said, "These all first offenders?"
"Yes, your honor."
"Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next."
They started to march US Out but I didn't budge. "Just a minute, Judge." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]