Willow Locke - Anarchist Detective

Reuven

Reuven Lostch and his team had been working at the new City Hall IRT subway station all day. They were fitting a convoluted pathway of steel pipe for ventilation. Reuven lowered his dark goggles and cracked the valves on his oxygen and acetylene tanks, checking the pressure ratio before sparking the torch. He was welding a four-foot-long section of steel pipe that was two feet in diameter. It connected an elbow section near the floor to the roof vent. All four guys on his team had to perch on ladders to hold the section in place near the ceiling. Although the elbow section was firmly secured and supported the base of the pipe, Reuven knew that any shift of the brutally heavy pipe would mean a broken weld. That meant starting over, and even worse in Reuven's mind, ugly work.

"Keep it steady!" Reuven shouted up to his crew without looking up from the sharp flame. He was feeding filler into the seam and liquefying it. He could always see the moment when the filler merged with the steel. The bead flattened out, and the two pipes were joined. It was as though the pieces desired unity. Molten filler spread through the seam in advance of his work, and Reuven followed the bright inscribed latitude, carefully fusing the metal. He knew it was a perfect joint. Only another pipe fitter would be able to find it.

Reuven had been a pipefitter for five years, but he had just recently earned his promotion. Although his engineering and build quality were always perfect, learning English had been difficult for him. He had only recently attained the fluency necessary to lead a team. He hoped to build enough savings in his new position to move his family out of the tenement for good. He had been definitively promoted when the pipe fitters were commissioned to engineer a complex pneumatic tube transport system for the new post office on 34th street.

The pneumatic system was audacious, it was to have 400 individual points of delivery. With so many points of access the pipe-fitters were having a problem keeping the pressure constant. Reuven made a quick drawing of a system of auxiliary compressors automatically activated by pressure switches. The pressure switch was breathtakingly simple, a glass chamber with a wooden ball. When the pressure was correct, the ball was suspended in the chamber, when it dropped, the ball dropped and its weight activated an auxiliary compressor.
The engineering of pipefitting, though complex, could never compare to the hyper-dense systems of automata. When examining a ventilation system like the one they were building in the subway, Reuven found himself visualizing the entire system before giving any thought at all to the components. He could imagine the entire subway ventilation system in miniature, floating above his scarred work desk in Prague, as though it was the mechanical transfer interlock of one isolated action in one of his automatons.

Reuven's team descended their ladders and he climbed up to weld the joint to the ceiling vent. It only took him a few moments and the final weld was as smooth as glass.

"Ok, Scott, let's turn on the fans." Reuven said. Scott walked over to the panel and keyed it open, then threw the knife switch. The fans powered up with a contented growl and a storm of white noise filled the utility room.

"That's it. Let's go." Said Reuven. Thompson and Scott secured the oxyacetylene tanks and torch to the wheeled dolly with a canvas strap while Jones and Martin packed up the tools. Scott flipped off the light and the pipe-fitters trundled their gear through the black service door into the opulent glow of the new City Hall station.

"Zounds!" Scott exclaimed, "which way to the throne room of King Morpheus?"

The stained glass skylights of the City Hall station fragmented the sunlight into kaleidoscopic color. Reuven looked up and he could see through the skylights to the aspen trees in the garden above. The stained glass rendered the trees in intricate patterns of deep red and bright blue. Broad fields of colored light moved across the cascading domes of the City Hall IRT. The structure derived its strength from a Byzantine interplay of domes—the domes supported each other by slightly overlapping. This meant that the whole system flowed from curve to rebounding curve, and the entire stone structure seemed to float in the air. It was music rendered in brick, ceramic and concrete. Waves of multicolored light rippled across the surface of the ceramic tile. The geometric patterns of the tile shifted and coalesced as the light revealed some details and masked others.

Scott was still looking around when the maintenance train roared into the City Hall IRT. Scott pulled the chain and the wooden gangplank dropped onto the platform. "Let's load up," said Thompson, trundling the tanks over the gangplank. "I heard thunder."