Death Wish

Cappy Jack ©2002

Felupe came back rested and ready to concentrate. She moved her stool to be sure it wasn’t on the bump that made it teeter. She held the top as she sat down on it and surveyed her worktable. Sixteen armed fuses were staked on her left in bins. The components were on the right and nothing in the works. She had timed her morning perfectly and was well satisfied coming back this afternoon.

            The manufacture of artillery fuses takes place, oddly, in a factory in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A multistoried building built by a department store magnate named Hess. A trademark of his department stores was the use of mirrors. Almost all the vertical surfaces were covered with good quality mirror. Kept clean, too, and Oliver felt queasy at first and learned not to look at them. Still, they were hard to avoid in his peripheral vision and movement, then sudden movement triggered a break in his concentration. He had been asked to solve a problem with the new impact detonator. A design engineer was steering him up to his office on the second floor and trying to converse with him at the same time.

“Thanks for coming right away. I know it will be easier to understand if you see it. The drawings don’t explain the concept.”

“I understand. Forgive me for the moment. I am taking a look around here. That helps me understand the process the tube is to undergo. Looks like you don’t do anything to it?” Oliver asked Raymond in a quizzical tone based on his understanding from their telephone conversation that got him here. He knew they were more interested in the temper properties than on the alloy or dimension. They got to Ray’s office and closed the door behind them.

 

Felupe was in her groove now. Taking the pieces, assembling them and putting in a pinch of copper azide at the end, then adding to her stash. Her lunch buddy, Lorenna, tried to keep up with her pace but Felupe held her lead proudly. This rivalry was new as was Lorenna to the job, three months now. She had come up through the screw machines to make assembler, the highest paid job next to the Jews. Felupe was hired as an assembler when the plant opened up just a few years ago. No one had much training at the beginning and Felupe had endured Ray’s scrutiny so many times she didn’t mind when he got close to her. They almost flirted. Lorenna had to undergo his scrutiny, too, hadn’t liked it. She thought he was a blasphemer after so many times hearing him swear and tell me in front of her that she dealt out death. A smile crossed her lips as she thought about her Mother calling her, ‘Devil’s child’ when she would be arrogant. Both women knew that they cheated death everyday in making artillery fuses armed and dangerous. They had a healthy respect for the church and longed to wear their medals, forbidden in their workplace garb, or mount crosses, even wooden ones, at their workbenches.

            “The specification for this tube includes a minimum for tensile and elongation but doesn’t bracket it with a top value. The spread is too wide. I would expect excellent repeatability with a min and max spec and tighter tolerances on size.”

 Oliver had a respect for the artillery fuse from his own experience in Viet Nam. He walked through sand fields where dud artillery rounds were rigged against him. Trip snares and detonation with no warning had left many a cripple. If he could improve on just this aspect of it he was satisfied. The impact detonator wasn’t the flaw in Nam, at least not all the time. The airburst mechanism was compromised by the different altitudes of the shell leaving the gun and going to the target, this calculation was a guess by the artillery lieutenant. The arming mechanism was a serrated ring at the bottom of the fuse where it screwed into the explosive casing. The artilleryman could twist the detents one notch for every hundred feet. The default was impact, but they made few mistakes like that, even on heavy salvos, even at night under flare glare. The terrain was soft sand and impact detonation was not chosen. They had a little help with the elevation puzzle firing flares. These were set up to burst at five hundred feet or more up to the maximum of seven hundred. The fuse was made for the elevation of the terrain and as such was very specific at least for the air burst part. The impact part was an aluminum construct, kinda like an accordion that was a quarter inch square and an inch or more long. It held the detonating nail from the charge until the force of hitting something compressed it, flowed it out of the way for the nail and detonation. The problem was these things were expensive and required another calibration test. The new design was a common piece of three eights OD, 70/30 brass tube cut a little longer than five eights of an inch; ingenuous because it required the plug (not a nail) to deform the tube along its length as it plunged inside to the detonating charge. The physical min and max were pretty crude. The normal specifications for the tube were boiled down to a one inch thick sheet of ply wood for the minimum (imitating heavy rain) and, well, when it hit at the other end. It just better detonate every time after it pierces the plywood. Random testing ate up ten percent of the production. Soft sand studies made this part of the artillery fuse suspect and that drove this change. Oliver looked at one of two facilities engaged in fuse manufacture. The other was Bulova Watch on Long Island and Oliver hadn’t heard from them at all. It was possible they bought from a worthy competitor and then he wouldn’t know. He didn’t call on them for their business. It was hard enough to keep up with Hamilton, formerly Hamilton watch.

                        While Felupe’s hands did all the work her mind was hectoring her. She was poised to jump into a relationship with Padro but was unsure of her spontaneity. She felt she needed to learn to jump on first impulse, like the time Padro held her around the waist from behind. Down on the river docks, she told herself she should have spun around and kissed him. She liked to think she could muster up the courage to be aggressive. Her church side would dampen the fires she let flare around her here. Closer to wiccen than to Christianity, she didn’t know she had crossed into primitive reaction. Her fuses were mute and unrelenting. Her arms were tired and she paused to wipe her brow with her forearm. The wet smear on her sleeve told her she was hot. The water treat coming at mid afternoon made her mad and she tasted her own juices. ‘The Devil with it’ her only thought now.

            Oliver’s testing had proven that he could control the temper characteristics of the design to an order of magnitude better than the aluminum construct. It was a combination of close tolerance tube drawing two levels deep, which gave a bourdon tube consistency to a property called yield. Bourdon tubes worked within the elastic limits of the metal and this fuse functioned through the plastic deformation equally well. Now his treat was to tour the three most interesting aspects of fuse manufacture. The laboratory was traceable to NTBS which was pretty good, Oliver’s factory was marginally so. The real treat was the calibration of the proximity trigger. Men hunched over in bright light looked through magnification at a very thin wire, tweaking it into perfection. There were row after row of these men, all looked the same and there was only the whir of machines to disturb their concentration. Ray told Oliver to go up to Abraham and ask to see. He did and was offered a look over Abe’s shoulder into a bifocal set for a different width of eyes. He peered one eyed at a thin wire straight as could be attached at only one end.

“So the wire vibrates with a given rotation during flight and triggers on the downside of the parabola?”  Oliver didn’t understand the simplicity. Abraham could have told him but was aware that he made an oath of secrecy. Even if Ray said so, he wouldn’t tell the secret. He wouldn’t reveal that the length of the wire makes the fuse terrain dependant or that the detents choked the wire in small increments to a shorter length, in hundreds of feet.

“I have to get it straight in all quadrants.” The only secret Abe would let him know. It was the heart of the matter and what took him so long to do. So many men were fed by so few woman who assembled their work. They even put the impact detonator together, too and still made more than the men. The men couldn’t hurry and their confidence was unshakable. Still, Oliver only interrupted Abraham’s work, the others didn’t even look up at him. Not one. Their workspace was arrayed around the outside of the room in rows pointing to the assembly bench. By luck of the draw, Oliver was pointed to Felupe by Raymond.

“Walk up and look over her shoulder. Hey! Felupe, company coming. Move death over for a minute.” His shout shocked Felupe and she cross-threaded a final ring. ‘What insult he makes to me’ she thought about her role in creating death. The fuses were mean little things to her and she fought the urge to think of her work as that of the devil. She felt Ray’s remark profusely and bowed her head a little, shame slackening her hands twisting the little ring. It fell an inch to the next and final cap holding the load. This could detonate a fuse and she jumped a bit off her stool moving her head lower but turning it to Oliver approaching her. He looked like Satan smiling in a vicious grim with lips flat against his teeth. Overwhelmed by his sudden intrusion between the blast walls that sheltered her work area in case of misfire, she saw she must act fast. Flipping the lid on the lunch box sized container of copper azide she realized she was breaking a cardinal rule. Take the pinch from the box with no other involvement or distraction. She didn’t reach into the box. She spit in it. She ran the back of her hand across her brow and flicked the sweat drops into the faint blue powder. The water reacted vigorously and gave off a small curl of orange smoke, the most sensitive form of the copper salt and rarely seen.  She could have shouted and sent the material into spontaneous combustion. Instead she looked again at the man whose face she suddenly feared. She knew she must act fast and sure, her hands grasping two casings and stripping off her static clip with the same motion bringing them opposite her shoulders and in line.

“Devil’s work!” She intended to stop it right now. She banged the two pieces of metal together over the bubbling mess in the box igniting all of it at once. The report was sharp and caused the contents of the space to move away at high speed. The lid from the box banged the back blast wall and hit Felupe square in the face driving her backward. Her hands flew off still clutching the metal pieces. One struck Oliver in the stomach but the blast had him moving backwards already. He launched into the aisle old Abraham was in, knocking the inventory over onto the floor and landing on top of it. Ray was next to Abraham and had ducked out of the line of fire when he saw Felupe’s eyes. He knew what to expect and most of the other men weren’t too surprised either. Doing Devil’s work can get you, they knew, their pious form of religion kept them sane. Lorenna was around the escalator enclosure and heard the blast, felt the compression in the air and the smell. She shut down her operation and clasped her hands in prayer.

            Only one other explosion had marred Hamilton’s work record and it was with one of the original woman, a gypsy named Maria. She had been driven mad by Raymond’s devil eyes and his last remark to her was, “Kiss of death.” He survived, burned but not blinded, and shielded the assembly area with more inventory and fewer visits. He didn’t stop remarking to the woman in the lunchroom that they killed time better than he ever did. He never made a live fuse, even in training he used baking powder instead of live load. His fatalism was his reality to their real work and he laughed when he said his insulting remarks to the assemblers. Trying to lighten up the tension, release a little fear of death; he only managed to make them embrace their act of death dealing. The inert ingredients they assembled into being had only a single use and it was death, nothing more. No amount of pay or prestige would stop a normal human from finally feeling evil. No man could do this job as long the women, but even they broke down and left, Felupe held the longest time and she broke like Marie, the worst way. No one visited the assemblers at work again; they kept their fears fractured Devil may care.