Black Cat Weekly #11

THE PIPELINE JUGGERNAUT, by Lester Dent-1

THE PIPELINE JUGGERNAUT,

by Lester Dent

THE earth seemed to turn inside out, A blue-hot flash lighted the telegraph office of the pipeline pump station. The big windows flew to bits. Rocks, dirt, fragments of steel spouted into the office. Then came the roar of the explosion. It made the solid red soil of Oklahoma shimmy for miles around.

Evans was telegraphing the hourly gauge to the oil despatcher at Tulsa when the blast came. He had just finished sending the total of oil moved by the pump station during the last sixty minutes. He was waiting for the oil despatcher to okay the transmission.

The concussion slammed him against the telegraph table. His shiny nickel “bug” was knocked off the table. The bug, capable of making dots and dashes far faster than they could be made with the prosaic telegraph key, hopped across the floor.

Dazed, Evans hauled himself off the table—the only piece of furniture the telegraph office held, other than a chair. Dust powdered his long frame. Clods and chunks of mortar fell from his baggy clothes. Blood from a cut in his scalp looked like a red cord hanging down his bony face.

He reeled over, picked up his bug and plugged it back into the telegraph circuit. He made sure he heard the sounder tongue click down. No good operator ever went off and left the wire open.

To the door he stumbled. It wouldn’t open. The blast had sprung the pump station walls. Evans climbed out the gaping hole where the window had been.

Spud Rainer, the assistant engineer, came racing from the direction of the pump room.

“Tully! Where’s Engineer Tully?” he screamed. Spud was short and much too fat. He was puffing, although the run from the pump room was not a hundred feet.

“What about Tully—” Evans began.

Spud pointed with both arms. His voice became a piercing shriek.

“The gate-house! That explosion was in the gate-house! And Tully went in there!”

Evans stared. Horror seized him—it was like oysters sliding down his back.

Thirty yards distant, gory, awful flame climbed into the night. It made a roaring like a whirlwind in a scrub oak thicket. The intense heat from it dried the very moisture out of his eyes.

“Tully went into the gate-house?” he rasped.

“He sure did—to take out the scraper that came through the pipe from the Seminole station!” Spud’s fat face was as gray as if it were cellophane stuffed with ashes.

Evans dabbed at the wet cord of crimson wriggling down his bony face. There was nothing they could do for poor Tully. To go nearer that searing, moaning colossus of flame was impossible.

“I can see the body—what’s left of it!” Spud said with a sort of mixture of horror and morbid interest. “It’ll all be burned up in about a minute!”

Evans turned swiftly and walked behind the pump station. There were things no man cared to see. What was happening in the ruin of the gate-house was one.

A car roared up the near-by road. It stopped with a squeal of asbestos lining on brake drums. A man dived out and ran toward Evans.

It was Roy Glick, the superintendent.

Glick was a solid man with a loud vest and a louder voice. He reminded Evans of a carnival spieler. But Glick had fists that might have been chisled out of fourteen-inch bit steel. He was the stuff they make oil men out of.

“What let loose?” Glick yelled. “What happened? Has somebody got your tongue? Spit it out, damn it! Can’t you talk?”

The way he spewed words reminded Evans of a carnival spieler, too. Some day, Evans reflected, he’d like to take his shiny nickel bug and bash Glick between the eyes. Maybe it would shut the man up for a minute.

“Somebody just murdered Engineer Tully,” Evans said.

“Murdered! Murdered! Murdered!” Glick might have been spellbinding an audience of a thousand. He always sounded like that. “Where’d you get that idea? What makes you think so? How’d it happen? Who murdered him?”

As if that wasn’t enough, fat Spud mopped his ashy face and whined shrilly:

“Ain’tcha goin’ off half-c****d, Evans? Tully went out to take the scraper from the pipe. He must’ve been smoking’ a cigarette and touched off some gas.”

Evans wiped the crimson off his face again. “No gas lines go into that gatehouse. Where would the gas come from?”

“Well, maybe oil leaked out—”

“Don’t be a nut, Spud. You could drop a match in a fifty-five thousand barrel tank of crude and not get as violent an explosion as that.”

“Well, maybe somebody stored some nitro-glycerine in the gate-house!”

Evans raised his voice. He was impatient. “I went out to the gate-house fifteen minutes ago to listen on the pipe. I wanted to see if I could hear the scraper coming. There was no nitro around!”

Glick clapped his hands like an auctioneer. That was another trick he had.

“Dry up about it being murder!” he shouted. “I don’t want to hear such damn stuff talked until we got some proof! Go tell the oil despatcher to shut down the station pumping to us from Seminole. We don’t want to lose any more crude than we have to through the broken pipes in that gate-house. Here comes the fire truck from the refinery. We’ll soon have this blaze extinguished.”

Evans climbed into the telegraph room through the hole that had been the window. He could hear the red fire truck wailing up.

With the bug, Evans called “DS” a couple of times. The oil despatcher answered. Evans gave him the news. The dots and dashes that came from Evans’ bug were beautiful. The bug was set so fast the dot strings sounded like the whizz of a grasshopper’s wings. But Evans didn’t stumble once or make a single combination. His sending was far more expert than the oil despatcher’s, whose salary was a hundred dollars a month more than a pump station operator’s.

Evans sent a personal message. In five minutes, the answer clicked out of the sounder. It read:

GLICK

EVANS WILL TAKE COMPLETE CHARGE THERE STOP WORK WITH HIM.

It was signed by the “Old Man” himself—the owner of the great pipe-line and refinery corporation.

Evans climbed out through the gutted window once more. The red fire truck had extinguished the burning oil in the gate-house with chemicals.

Evans gave Glick the message from the Old Man.

Glick read it. He looked like he was going to burst a button off his loud vest. His loud voice bellowed out until stillmen in the refinery half a mile away heard it.

“What the hell is this? You’re taking charge here? You—a damned brasspounder—”

Those looking on saw Evans’ shoulders shift a little. They didn’t quite catch the movement of his right fist. That was a bit too much for the eye.

Glick seemed to curl up in the air. He flew ten feet like a thrown coat. He rolled fifteen more and made a loud splash in the cooling pond.

Evans knew the fist blow wasn’t necessary. But he had been wanting to do it the entire month he’d been here. So he permitted himself the pleasure.

Running forward, Evans offered to help Glick out of the cooling pond. Glick cursed him and refused the aid.

“Who are you, anyhow?” Glick bawled. The punch certainly hadn’t hurt his voice.

“My name is Evans—the same as always,” Evans told him. “And I’m your new general superintendent. Next to the Old Man, I’m the big muckety-muck of this company. That enough to satisfy you?”

“Damn you! You can’t hit me—”

For the second time, those looking on didn’t quite see it happen. But Glick curled in the air again. He didn’t roll in the cooling pond this time. An ornamental cottonwood tree stopped him.

“Why can’t I?” asked Evans.

Glick felt too sore around the jaw to answer.

“I’ll damn well hit any man working for me,” Evans added. “Just as I’ve seen you hit the men working under you.”

Evans walked over to the gaping hole where the gate-house had been. Hot metal steamed and sizzled in the ghastly pit.

“You heard me tell Glick—I’m your new boss!” he informed the men gathered there.

He roamed his eyes over the men. They gave him back stare for stare. They looked tough. They had to be tough to stand the pipeline gaff—wading all day up to their hips in basic sediment in storage tanks with gas masks hampering their breathing—or wrestling eight-pound tongs and twelve-hundred pound casing.

“You can probably guess why I came here as plain Evans, the telegraph operator,” he told them. “It was because I wanted to trap the gang of rats who have been setting fire to storage tanks of this company, putting sand in the machinery, and other similar stunts that have been costing us in the neighborhood of one million dollars a month.”

The listeners swapped covert glances. They had heard all this stuff as rumors. They knew men were quitting the refinery because accidents were happening too often. For an accident in a refinery usually means from one to twenty men killed. But it stirred them to hear a big shot in the company admit the situation was this bad.

The concern couldn’t stand many months of losing a million a month. They’d have to sell out to their competitor, who had the refinery on the other side of town.

“In my personal opinion, a certain oil company who wishes to buy us out is hiring this vandalism done!” Evans said bluntly.

Again, the listeners exchanged glances. This guy Evans didn’t mince words.

“I’m here to stop it!” said Evans.

The listeners somehow began to get a sneaking idea he would stop it, too.

Evans let his eyes rove over the men. His eyes were very cold and blue. Looking into them was like looking into the barrels of a couple of six-shooters.

“There was no explosive in that gatehouse fifteen minutes before the explosion,” he said, as if he wanted everybody to understand clearly. “Either it was put in later, or—”

He paused. He knew how to build up drama that gave his words force.

“The scraper that came through the pipeline was a bomb!” he ended.

“You’re wrong there,” said a stocky gangman.

“What makes you so sure?”

“The scraper is layin’ in the hole. It must’ve got here after the explosion. It ain’t hurt none, except that the temper has been drawn by the heat of the fire.”

Evans went over to stare into the hole. The gangman was right. There lay the scraper. The torpedo-like contrivance certainly had gone through no explosion. It was about as it had been inserted in the pipe at the Seminole pump station. The scraper was forced through the miles of casing by the moving oil. Meanwhile, the projecting blades cut from the pipe interior paraffin and other sediment which had hardened there.

Glick had been talking to one side with Spud, the assistant engineer. Now they called Evans.

“Spud just told me something you oughta know,” said Glick. He spoke as though there had not just been a fight. But that was the way of pipeline men. They fought. They forgot—sometimes.

“Yeah—I think you oughta know,” said Spud, thrusting his cellophanestuffed-with-ashes face close to Evans. “I overheard poor Engineer Tully talkin’ over the phone about two hours ago. He sounded worried. He sounded like he was worried ’most to death!”

“What’d he say?” asked Evans impatiently.

“‘Are you gonna kill me?’”

“Who was he talking to? Did he make the call—or was it made to him?”

“He made it. I dunno who to, though.”

“Thanks,” said Evans.

Evans climbed into the telegraph office once more. He was tall and not at all natty in his baggy clothes. He didn’t look like the company’s new boss. But that was because he had been trying not to look the part.

He called the girl at the refinery phone switchboard. All calls went through her. She might have listened in. Girls had a habit of doing that.

“Tully called his sweetie,” the phone girl informed Evans. “Her name is Bid Liswood. She lives at nine-twenty Crown Street.”

Evans hung up, blessing all feminine inquisitiveness.

* * * *

Nine-Twenty Crown Street was a nice little brown brick English cottage. It looked like it had been built about a year. The roses Evans’s car spotlight picked up in the yard were pretty. Some day he’d get married and blow himself to a layout like this.