The Door Into Summer

“It’s a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They’re two years old now and they can never be sold, so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can’t run a blast furnace just on 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 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.

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