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THE PALLID APRIL SUN barely peeked from behind the usual Pittsburgh cloud cover. The old, brick edifice of Zimm Glass towered against the sky like an impenetrable fortress.
Eli Winkler cracked the door of his ancient Toyota. He winced at the squeak in the door hinge and reminded himself that yes, for sure, he’d oil it sometime soon. Not today, but this week. Definitely this week. Unless it started snowing again, in which case the door would keep squeaking till June.
Chill air hitting his face roused him from his morning stupor with a mixture of familiar smells that have become familiar in the course of the last two months. The creosote of the train tracks behind him mingled with the emanations of the glass furnaces, and a scent of fresh donuts carried on the air from somewhere across the tracks.
His stomach rumbled. He’d eaten sweet cereal with milk an hour ago, but at twenty-six years, Eli’s metabolism was like that huge, glass-melting furnace hiding deep in the complex behind the tidy rows of office windows and fancy, century-old brick inlays.
He knew he was delaying going in. The new job made him all kinds of self-conscious and his gut was a roiling tangle of nerves. He wondered whether his ignorance was deep, like a bottomless pit, or whether it had levels. Sort of like a video game, where he’d kill the easy monsters, level up, and before he knew it, he was in deep shit again.
The labor would already be on the hot floor, setting up their glass presses while the foreman checked the glass melt temperature. The quality control department, or QC, would collect the annealed samples, examine them, and pronounce an edict as to which pots could be worked, and which had “issues.”
And QC – that would be him. Eli’s stomach twisted with nervous anticipation of all he had yet to learn. Six years out of college, an engineering degree, two years in the Peace Corps and four years in a high-tech research lab, and he still felt as dumb as rocks. Two months into his job, he still felt like he knew a big, fat zero about the intricacies of glass melting technology that was well over a century out of date.
What they did here – that’s how glass used to be made. It was different. He couldn’t even imagine standardizing procedures in a place where every pot was different and every glass composition had a different color and different melting and physical properties.
The learning curve rose like a steep edifice, seemingly unscalable, right in front of him.
Just like the old-fashioned facade of the office building ahead of him.
He wondered when the sheer, impenetrable wall inside his mind would begin to resemble a more customary learning sequence.
Eli sucked in some air and blew it out, trying to feel tougher than he was. Smarter, too. More experienced. Fake it till you make it.
He got out of his car and crossed the almost-empty staff parking lot to enter Zimm Glass through the fancy, wood-and-brass front door. As the door swung shut behind him and he ascended the seven steps into the small reception area, he heard the seven o’clock train clatter past the factory. A whistle blew on the other side of the ancient industrial complex – the shift had begun.
The frosted glass windows of closed offices, probably the original models from when the rocks were soft - were still dark. That was good. Most of the staff wouldn’t show up till eight. As the surface underfoot changed from brown industrial carpet to vinyl tile, he glanced up the stairs toward the laboratories. One of the lab guys always showed early. Paul was his name. They hadn’t talked much, not over the clatter of metal and graphite and broken glass on the shop floor.
Eli burst through the door of the packaging area, nodded hello, and crossed to the dark, square entry that marked an entirely different world.
A darker, louder, more dangerous world.
An alternate dimension separate from the 21st century, where fire ruled, melting pulverized stone into glowing, liquid glass. Vulcan himself would’ve been at home on the hot floor and Pele would demand her sacrifice.
In this world, Eli never relaxed, never let down his guard. Molten glass was searing hot, broken glass was wicked sharp, and steel machinery moved on with an unforgiving pace and momentum.
The hot floor fascinated him.
It also scared him.
He straightened his shoulders and took a cleansing breath as the floor underfoot turned from polished vinyl to a dark concrete scuffed with tire marks. Gone were the soaring factory windows of the tall packaging space. Passing through the square entrance was elemental and raw, from the civilized proximity of coffee machines to dust, noise, and mandatory eye and hearing protection.
He pulled shop glasses out of his pocket and set them over his regular prescription frames. Then he stuffed small cylinders of orange foam in his ears. They were connected by a neon-green string, reminiscent of a child’s toy.
The regular machine noise of the three lehrs to his left subsided into a cottony reprieve of dull, muffled sounds. The lehr’s steel conveyor belt was slowly crawling out of a hot, dark, rusty tunnel as long as two train cars. A woman – Vicky? - was already on the cool end of it, ready with her labeled cardboard box, geared up in glasses and gloves, neon green string crawling out her ear.
“Good morning!” Eli’s greeting flew right past her as she kept unloading plate-sized discs of red glass off the belt as more of them started to come through.
Eli waved instead. She waved back absently, focused on her task.
As he marched on, the old factory windows on his right sat long and squat and grimy just a foot up from the floor, yet even their thin light was bright compared to the cavernous darkness of the hot floor.
Or maybe it was just the volcanic glow of the glory holes that made everything else dim in comparison.
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PRODUCTION HADN’T BEGUN just yet. Crews of men clustered around their work stations. There were six crews today, which meant a crowded floor around the furnace. He nodded to the foreman, a tall, heavy man almost three times his age, and headed toward the daily log on a chest-high counter by the glassed-in foreman’s office.
A horrid, loud screech.
He jumped and turned.
Fractured glass screamed, breaking, grinding against the concrete floor. The shards of cullet vibrated, shrieking as they broke while pushed against the floor. There was so much of it, a man was using a front-loader to shove it to the side.
Some of the guys by the furnace poked each other and pointed with wide grins and meaningful nods.
The new guy is being a wimp again.
A tap on his shoulder.
Eli turned. “Hi, Paul!” he shouted.
“Hi,” Paul said soundlessly, with only his lips moving. “Come on.” He tugged the sleeve of Eli’s white cotton shirt, and Eli followed him through a crooked, narrow hallway and into the record’s room.
The noise subsided to a manageable level. They both yanked their earplugs out.
“What was that all about?” Eli yelled. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to shout.”
“It’s Pot 16 again,” Paul grimaced. “Full of stones, like before. They had to empty it. The noise was the glass cullet. They pushed it along the floor, getting it to the garbage dump.”
“There’s no remelting that?” Eli frowned. Cullet was a key ingredient. It lowered both the melting time and temperature, saving time and energy.
“No.” Paul’s jaw tightened and Eli saw a muscle work with nerves. “We don’t know what the stones are. You can’t remelt stony glass and hope for good results.” His expression brightened. “But we got good samples this time around. We gotta find out what that shit is.”
Eli nodded. The new stadium in Chicago had ordered the parts special. Zimm Glass had made custom molds for the giant Fresnel lenses, and the final pieces were so large it took two men to move one from the mold to the lehr. The glass was going to be subjected to extreme temperatures, hot on the inside and cold on the outside. Even the smallest flaw could cause stress to build up and make the lens break.
A stone was not a small flaw.
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TWO HOURS LATER, ELI was in his boss’ little office on the other side of lehrs. They each had a chunk of glass in their gloved hands. It was pretty in that sort of clear and cheerful way all glass is pretty, even with its sharp breaks and rough angles. Inside it, like misshapen chunks of used chewing gum, sat little white stones.
Eli turned it over, angling for a better look. If he could only cut it out and put it under the microscope. “Is it annealed?”
“No, it’s just cullet. You wanna cut it open and have a look?” Joe gave him a curious glance.
“Yeah. I do. But if I cut it now, it’ll fall apart on me.”
Joe gave a humorless chuckle and leaned back in his swivel chair. “It might do a lot more than that. It might explode in your face. Don’t fuck with cullet. The internal stresses are amazing. I’ve seen glass do just that.”
Eli moved the sample further away from his face. “That could be fun to watch.”
“Well,” Joe drawled and leaned back in his office chair, “when we have a bad batch that’s no good for remelting, the guys like to stay after work and shoot it up.” He paused, obviously waiting for Eli’s reaction.
“Shoot it up? With what?”
“It turns out, if you hit a chunk of cullet with a BB just right, it blows up like a charm.” He grinned. “Try it someday. We’re not supposed to, officially, but what the hell. There’s a BB gun with a bunch of shot on top of the vending machines. Sort of out of sight, y’know? That way old Mr. Phillips won’t stroke out over it.”
Just as Eli laughed, Joe’s expression grew somber. “Be careful with cullet,” he said. “Whatever you keep in your office has to be either annealed or tempered, okay?”
“Sure.” Eli knew that much already. “This’ll be a bitch, though. Who was emptying the pot?”
“Bo, I think. You can ask him when he takes a break.”
Eli’s breath stuttered. He coughed to clear his throat as well as his mind. Bo Bartowski was built, tall, and gorgeous. He wore his leather apron, long sleeves, and dark face shield like a medieval knight would wear armor and he wielded his six foot long punty, and the little steel ball at the end of it, with surgical precision. When Bo worked, Eli liked to hang in the shadows and just watch the man ply his craft. And his art, too. There was much to gathering glass. It demanded focus, strength, and skill. Getting a gob just the right size and temperature, positioning over the mold and letting it drip until the cutter detached the right amount using his shears was a learned skill.
Eli knew. Two weeks back they had him try it just for shits and giggles before the shift began. He had nothing but respect for the men doing the same task over and over for eight hours every day. Watching Bo work was like watching a pitcher on the mound, throwing ball after ball with tireless precision.
Bo never said much, which Eli found both frustrating and intimidating. Asking the man a simple question about glass was easy. Getting the answer was hard.
“I want you to talk to him and keep an eye on the next melt,” Joe said. “We’ll monitor the melting temperature, the time, everything. The lab might have a thought or two.”
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THE WORKERS GOT RESHUFFLED to a different pot and a different glass product. No sense wasting time and labor, especially when the lab gave them a go-ahead on the color on the cobalt blue for runway lights. All aerospace color filters had to meet certain FAA specifications. The rules were complicated, the concept of color was less precise than Eli had thought it would be, and he hadn't gotten all that far in figuring out the twists and turns of the manufacturing process just yet.
As he controlled the conductivity of a thin iridium coating on cadmium-red blinkers for airplanes, his mind kept drifting to Pot 16.
And to Bo.
Now he had an excuse to talk to Bo, not just observe him in his graceful dance with molten death. He could catch him during lunch, maybe. It meant taking his own lunch hour early, but Eli thought it wouldn’t hurt him any to get to know the guys in production a little better.
He was sure they knew more than they let on. Their thoughts weren’t always framed in the sort of technical language Eli was used to from his old job, but he knew right away that these grizzled, heat-seared, no-nonsense men were a repository of glass craft knowledge.
Whether they realized it or not.
He just had to find a way to make them share, whether or not Bo Bartowski felt comfortable talking glass with him. The thought of sitting down with Bo and actually exchanging ideas and words made Eli’s stomach twist, and he realized Bo wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel comfortable talking.
Bo surely knew a lot more than he did.
Eli hoped he wouldn’t come across as a fool.
He also hoped he didn’t stutter or blush. Men like Bo had that effect on him.