6 - Tom

TOM

I knew what to wear for my first day at the Army Engineering Labs because I had asked and a man had told me. I had brought pressed white shirts and tan trousers from home, fully expecting both to be covered in grease within a matter of days. If they had wanted me to wear working man’s clothes, I would have happily picked some up, but the man I spoke with told me that shirts and ties were fine.

It cost me just a few gildnotes to buy a couple ties from a shop between the lodge and the labs. I didn't need fancy. Plain was fine. I arrived a little earlier than the morning rush on my first day, to make a good impression, but when I got inside I saw that there was already a dawn shift hard at work with lathes and milling machines. It was loud, and they all looked very focused, so I didn’t want to interrupt. I simply walked past the lathes and continued into the modern facility until I reached a man who looked like he might be in charge.

He had a square, tan head and was just below my height. He wore an olive Army uniform, but had foregone the hat. His hair was starting to gray, and I thought he might be roughly the age of my father. Since he didn’t seem to be working with any dangerous machinery, I fely it was safe to try and get his attention.

“Excuse me,” I called out. “Sir, I’m looking for Major Summiter.” Summiter was the man to whom I was intended to report.

The olive-uniformed officer turned around, clay on his hands from whatever he was sculpting. “You found him,” he said, and I realized the man himself was Summiter.

Because of the clay, I did not offer a hand to shake. I gave the slightest bow and spoke. “I’m Tom Trussford. I was told you can tell me who to report to for lab work.”

“You found him too,” said Summiter. By this he meant that he himself was to be my direct superior. Following the clarification, he did indeed extend a hand, and I gripped it firmly for a shake despite the clay that would transfer between us. I thought it important to show him that I was not at all afraid of getting my hands dirty.

Despite my quick reciprocation, he noticed me noticing the muck. “An engineer who doesn’t have to wash his hands by lunchtime is not appropriately applying himself,” the major told me, and this would come to be something of a credo in the engineering labs in the years to come.

Leaving his sculpted model of a naval torpedo be, he motioned for me to cross the shop with him. “Wear glasses?” he asked as we passed a few idle milling machines.

“No.”

“Then you need to keep safety goggles on you. New lab policy. You’re too valuable to the Army to end up blind.”

I had known that aeronautical pilots wore goggles, as did motorcyclists, but I hadn’t heard of them being used in a machine shop context. Already, I could tell that things were different in Paxlight than in the shop class of my state school.

“I’m surprised to be working directly for an officer, sir,” I said to him.

“You’ll find you’re an Army man in all but name once you’ve been here a while, son.”

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I watched the square-headed major wash his hands at a sink. There was a second faucet, and so I joined him at the long basin to wash his clay from my own hands. “What will you have me do?” I asked.

Summiter dried his hands on a towel and turned to me. “Today we have the luxury of time,” he said, “one day we won’t, so we need to get better at building the tools that will build the war machine of tomorrow.”

I followed what he was saying, the idea of building the tools that will build things. It was not what I had expected to be working on when I first arrived. “My background is in civil engineering more than machine tooling, sir,” I said in full disclosure.

Summiter seemed to react to this with a snap. “You have no background,” he said. “You’re fresh out of state school, and a smart man is a smart man. Calculus stays the same no matter where you apply it.”

I was surprised to hear this remark from him, and, though it was delivered as a retort, it seemed in substance to be a vote of confidence. He was saying, in short, that he thought I could be trained to do anything.

I dried my hands, and Summiter led me away from the concrete machine shop floor into an office filled with books and prototypes and blueprints. There was one large central desk which I took to be the major’s.

“Have you worked with electric motors?” he asked me.

Now this was a topic of excitement. “I’ve read all about them, sir, but no. I’ve dreamed of it. That’s all. On the way here, actually, we saw a TM 3 and I—”

“We have coal power coming out of our ears through the grid, and still our machinists are slaving on belt mills,” Summiter groused. “Have you ever used a manual belt mill?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Back in school.”

“We got rid of them here. Know why? Feel the floor.”

I stood in silence, as did the Major, and we both felt the ground below our feet. It was utterly still. “No shake,” I said, surprised to not detect the rumble of belt mills just outside.

“Belt drives shake the whole damn building,” said Summiter, “and there go your tolerances on a tight cut or bore. You can’t do anything precise with all that ruckus going on. Now we need to do for the rest of the nation what we just did here. I want you to take a look at those ugly electric mills the boys rigged up out there and draw me plans for a mass-production model.”

This was a lot of responsibility. I wondered if he might already have a mass-production model drafted, and he was simply testing me by seeing if mine would be as good as his own. “What’s the timeline, sir?” I asked.

He looked surprised to hear this asked. “Quick as the wind, Trussford. Quick as the wind.”

I would come to know that this was the timeline for everything at the Army Engineering Labs. There was never a deadline because everything was always supposed to be done as quickly as possible. It was exhilarating and exhausting all at once.

Standing beside the desk, I noticed a window with curtains pulled partially open. Through it, Summiter’s office looked down on a partially subterranean production warehouse. In the center, to my astonishment, an unpainted steel light tank stood gleaming silver on the concrete floor. It had heavy treads, a round dome, a long barrel, and a burnished finish. It was just about the most fearsomely advanced war machine I ever could have imagined at that time.

“Wow. I’ve never seen a Mark II in real life,” I said, referring to the common chassis type of Paxanan light battle tanks by name.

“Well, you still haven’t,” said Summiter.

At first, I thought he was just pushing for secrecy, but then I understood his true meaning. The tank down on the production floor was not a Mark II at all. I gazed at it, taking in the details, and realized the sight before me was a completely cutting-edge state secret.

“You’re right, that turret looks over twice the size. Secondary cannon, new crown shape. That must be the—”

I was about to say ‘Mark III’ when Major Summiter pulled the blinds shut.

“Classified,” he said. “Stick to your station and draw me an electric mill, Trussford. You’re a part in a large, important machine, not a boy on a field trip.”