What Turns the Gears?

BY DR. AGONSON

They called it the machine. It was a factory. Most of the men, coming onto four generations, were employed there, and those who weren’t were at least employed by the company. When they returned from it, they could still hear its mechanisms working through the night, reverberations of its turning wheels rumbling through the streets and homes of the nearby, company built town. The machine took no sabbath, and likewise the bosses saw no reason that men should want some day of the week off. There were no days holier than a workday.

No one knew exactly what the factory produced. One wing was dedicated to screwing in a certain bolt on a product, another to unscrewing it; at the same time workmen took hammers to bust up some crates, other hammers were tinkering away, driving nails in to make new crates; these women were busy filling the crates as they started down the conveyor belt at the end of which other women were busy unloading the same crates. It seemed, to some, that the machine’s primary output was more of itself as the factory seemed always to be expanding, stretching out some new wing for some new purpose indistinguishable from anything previous. But now and again, a stranger or some visiting relative would ask what was done, what was ever actually completed in the factory, and no satisfactory answer was ever given. Work, they would reply, but what work?

The bosses did not live in the town, nor were they ever seen to leave the ever expanding factory. They were there when the workers came in in the morning, and there they remained when the workers left. The bosses were only ever known to be just that, bosses of men, never men themselves. There were not rumors of their cavorting with someone’s daughter, of their gambling or drinking, and all the regular, insipid excesses known to men of higher rank were not found in them. They might well have been parsons save even parsons could scandalize: These were as mechanical as the machine itself, and it was joked that if they ever suffered a cut, they would not begin bleeding until the necessary forms were signed permitting the expense of company blood.

The first death happened early, before the machine was called the machine and before the company had been much more than a name on a sheet of paper filed somewhere in a far distant office. This was back when the factory was a simple building and not a sprawling, interconnected maze of compartmentalized structures circling around and surrounding the town. The designs, it was said, were the working of a genius, a young man, who dreamed of a self-perpetuating mechanism that would need no laborers whatsoever. Reality falling short of the dream, hands were at least necessary to build the darn thing.

The workers were brought in, first building themselves some basic huts and then beginning construction on the new factory. Not one of them understood exactly what he was doing, least of all, some suspected, the young designer who fretted about the workmen with constant criticism, spewing countermanding orders in a state of flummox. He was constantly heard mumbling, “This is not what I designed.” That’s how the bosses were instituted, to stand between the workers and the designer.

Still, he was a great bother, and days might be spent on some delicate ordering of gears or arrangement of shoots only for him to decry it as, “Not my design.” He even took umbrage, it is said, with the exact height of the chimney. The money, though, lasted, even with these constant expenditures and delays, and the factory’s first building slowly rose. Some said it would never run. There was never any boiler brought in; there wasn’t a nearby river to power it; no windmill sails. What would cause the gears to turn and the belts to be pulled?

The fateful day came when the factory would open. The bosses dressed in their fancy suits and filed onto the upper gangways, and the builders filled up the work floor below. All waited for the designer to come out and start the machine. He started it, and his bloodcurdling screams echoed against the unadorned walls of his factory.

It was too late to do anything once they found him. His body was being consumed by the turning gears he had fallen into. Some concerned voices wondered at what was turning the gears, but the only one who could answer that was currently being ground up within them. The gears were turning, however, and that was enough for the company. The builders were kept on to continue further construction, and workers soon came in to do the inscrutable work done in the factory.

That was the first death, not the last, and by no means a strange death save for being the first and being the exemplar of all to come. It was, after four generations now, a matter of course that some people should fall into the gears at some time. It was just what was, how things were; it was as regular as the new moon. Some hated these conditions, they said they would leave, and maybe they did. None ever came back of those who left the company town and were last seen twisting their way through the maddening corridors of the machine. Maybe they made it out, but no word was ever heard again of those who tried to leave.