Later on Nina wrote that Rick was back at his father's home, and she was helping to take care of him. “Write him affectionate things and cheer him up,” she said. The knee is a difficult place to heal, and if Rick was ever to walk again, it would be with a steel brace on his leg. Poor, proud, defiant, impatient aesthete, he was going to be a pitiful, nerve-shaken cripple; his wife would be one of those devoted souls — millions of them all over Europe — who were glad to get even part of a husband back again, and have that much safe from the slaughterman's ax.
IX
Every time Lanny went swimming or boating, he saw great towering iron chimneys, pouring out billowing clouds of smoke. At night, if he sat on the front porch, he saw down the vista of the elm trees a dull red glare in the sky. That was Budd's; that was the plant, the source of all Lanny's good things, and one of the places where the war was being won. From earliest childhood he had listened to discourses about its functions and ownership — those precious pieces of paper called stock certificates, which guaranteed safety and comfort to whoever held them, and to his children and his children's children. Robbie, man of business and of money, had been wont to preach little sermons, playful yet serious; he would see a ragged old beggar slouching along in rain or snow, and would say: “There, but for the plant, go you!”
Of course Lanny wanted to see it, and Robbie promised to arrange it. As soon as they heard the proposal, Junior and Percy put in their clamors; they had seen it before, but no one could see it enough. And then Bess, loudest of all — why did she have to be left out of everything? Bess had heard about votes for women, and declared that she believed in them from now on. Hadn't she just had her tenth birthday party, and got better marks than either of her brothers in school? The father said, all right, he would have one of his secretaries take Saturday morning off and escort the four of them.
They drove through the great steel gates of the plant, guarded now by armed men, for there had been explosions in American munitions plants, and German agents were known to be active. They were led from one huge building to another, and saw white-hot steel being poured from giant ladles amid blinding showers of sparks; they saw golden ingots being rolled into sheets, or cut by screaming saws, or pounded and squeezed in huge presses. The clatter and clamor was deafening to a stranger. Their escort said that munitions were noisy at two periods of their career, the beginning and the end; he said that men got used to both, sooner or later. The foreman on the floor could tell in a moment if anything went wrong, because one of the familiar sounds was missing or out of tune.
They were taken through rooms as big as railroad sheds, in which traveling cranes overhead brought heavy parts, and electric motor trucks brought other parts, and men working in long lines assembled heavy machine guns, which were on wheels. A gallery ran about the rooms, from which you could look down upon the crowded floor, and it seemed a place of hopeless confusion; but the secretary assured them that every motion made by one of those human ants had been studied for weeks in a laboratory, and that the movements of each piece of machinery were timed to the second.
They walked through long rooms like corridors, in which such things as time fuses for anti-aircraft shells were made. Women and girls sat at a table which the children thought must surely be the longest in the world; on top of it was an endless belt, gliding silently. The object being manufactured started from nothing, and each worker added a bit, or maybe just turned a screw, until, at the far end, the completed products were slid onto trays, and taken by truck to a part of the plant where shrapnel shells were loaded. That place was remote, and visitors were not permitted there — not even members of the family.
Lanny was interested in time fuses, but still more interested in women and girls. He saw that they all wore uniforms, and that the motions of their hands were swift and unvarying; most of them never took their eyes from the job, and if they did, it was only for the fraction of a second — even when there was a good-looking young man in the line of vision. They were riveted to this task for seven hours and forty minutes every day, with twenty minutes for lunch, and Lanny wondered what it did to their minds and bodies. The secretary assured him that all this had been studied by experts, and the speed of the belt precisely adjusted so that no one would become weary. It was a pleasant thing to hear, but Lanny would have been interested to ask the girls.
Of course he might have gone out at night, in the parts of the town where the picture theaters and the bright lights were, and it would have been easy to “pick up” one of them and get her to talking. But Lanny wasn't roaming the streets at night; he was studying and earning credits with his family, as well as with St. Thomas's prep school. All he would know about the Budd plant was what a friendly but discreet young secretary saw fit to tell him. This was wartime, and every department was working in three eight-hour shifts. Those who couldn't stand the pace went elsewhere.