As the sounds of the machinery died away, Pirie was still absentmindedly forcing the plastic parts together. He waited. This might be just another flicker in the power grid, or it might be a full-scale blackout. That meant…
“Time to party!” whooped a nearby line assembler as the emergency lights came on and directed employees through the vast, dark maze of the manufacturing floor of Cut-Above Plastic Components. They were laughing and whooping—what could be better than getting time and a half for doing nothing? Their labor contract guaranteed they got paid no matter what closed the plant, including act of God, act of war, or act of the President.
“It’s not that big,” announced a woman with a battery-powered boom box who was listening to talk radio. “Just a twenty-mile radius.”
“They got power in the city?” Paul Pirie asked. The city of Wichita was nearby. “They know what made us go black?”
The woman grinned. “They got no clue. They just said it’s major.”
Pirie liked the sound of that. If he was real lucky, the power would stay off for the rest of the shift. It was time to sit back, relax and have some grub. He wandered over to the buffet, where the cafeteria staff was serving up midnight lunch over little fire pots to keep it hot. The labor contract stipulated that, regardless of the catastrophe, there had to be food for the idled personnel.
Pirie filled his plate with mashed potatoes, stew and gravy, and only noticed the heavy silence as he took a seat at a cafeteria table. There had to have been thirty, forty employees sitting around, and none of them said a word.
“What’s going on?” he asked a woman at his table. The woman, by way of answer, started screaming. She flung her arms up, spattering Pirie’s face with blazing-hot beef stew. He ran around the cafeteria shouting in pain while she ran around saying, “They’re coming! It’s the apocalypse! I don’t want to be left behind!”
More people panicked, and when Paul Pirie got the beef stew out of his eyes he saw what all the excitement was about.
It was about albinos who killed people. Gaunt, naked, filthy rat-people with pink eyes, who swatted at the plant workers with casual ferocity. Pirie saw heads smashed and chests caved in.
The killing died down abruptly when the albinos discovered the beef stew, which they ate with enthusiasm.
Amazingly, if Pirie’s stewed eyeballs could be trusted, the albinos were interested in factory equipment, as well as people.
One of the albinos spoke to him. It took him a while to figure out that the grunts and hacking coming out of the creature’s mouth were actually words, but a few fists in the gut improved his hearing. The albino was ordering him to dismantle some of the machines on the assembly line.
The albino gave him a sheet of paper printed with a fist of equipment—mostly it was small, specialty stuff used in the engineering lab. Pirie didn’t ask questions, just got his shift personnel to work tearing down the machines. The albinos opened up expandable, bullet-shaped sleds with heavy-gauge wire sacks suspended inside the framework. The parts had to fit into the sleds.
“We don’t know how to take these things apart,” hissed Alma, one of the senior assemblers.
‘They don’t know that,” Pine whispered. “Just keep taking apart until they’re small enough to fit in their sacks. The sooner we’re done, the sooner they leave.”
The dismantled components were stuffed into the suspended sacks and wired closed. Other sleds were filled with high-grade steel sheets and plastic blocks used for prototyping.
“What are they gonna do with all that stuff?” Alma demanded.
“I couldn’t care less,” Pirie said. “I just want them to go away.”
The albinos did go, but they took the entire night shift with them.
“Why?” Pirie cried. He was hitched to an equipment sled and had marched for an hour in the blackness of the cavern.
Everybody in town knew about the cavern. The Boy Scouts explored it every summer. You couldn’t get lost because it was only a hundred feet deep. Who’d have thought it contained an access crack that led into a cave that was miles and miles long?
“You to put this back together,” grunted the albino who did all the talking, and he waved at the sled full of components.
Alma, who was tied up alongside Paul, cackled joylessly. “You want to tell them or should I?”
“Shh!”
“Hey, you, what if we can’t put them back together?” Alma asked. She clearly felt she had nothing more to lose.
The albino shrugged. “If you got no use, then you get eated.”
Alma laughed again. She’d lost her mind. Pirie envied her.
“What are you planning?” Chiun demanded over the noise of the rotors.
‘I’m not planning anything.”
“Do not use that tone of voice with me, Remo Williams,” Chiun snapped. “I see your brain working.”
“My brain works?”
“Infrequently and poorly, so it is like a poorly kept automobile that functions loudly and with much gear grinding.”
“I’ll try to hold it down. Yippee, we’re back in Kansas.”
