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Zaleski warned. "Like hell I'll take it easy ! " The burly foreman was on his feet, towering over the assistant plant manager. He spat words across the desk between them. "You're the one taking it easy-the easy out because you're too much a god dam coward to stand up for what you know is right .”
    His face flushing deep red, Zaleski roared, "I don't have to take that from you, That'll be enough ! You hear .”
    "I hear .”
    Contempt filled Parkland's voice and eyes. "But I don't like what I hear, or what I smell .”
    "In that cas e, maybe you'd like to be fired! " "Maybe," the foreman said. "Maybe the air'd be cleaner someplace else .”
    There was a silence between them, then Zaleski growled, "It's no cleaner. Some days it stinks everywhere .”
    Now that his own outburst was over, Matt Zaleski had himself in hand. He had no intention of firing Parkland, knowing that if he did, it would be a greater injustice piled on another; besides, good foremen were hard to come by. Nor would Parkland quit of his own accord, whatever he might threaten; that was something Zaleski had calculated from the beginning. He happened to know that Frank Parkland had obligations at home which made a continuing paycheck necessary, as well as too much seniority in the company to throw away. But for a moment back there, Parkland's crack about cowardice had stung. There had been an instant when the assistant plant manager wanted to shout that Frank Parkland had been ten years old, a snot-nosed kid, when he, Matt Zaleski, was sweating bomber missions over Europe, never knowing when a hunk of jagged flak would slice through the fuselage, then horribly through his guts or face or pecker, or wondering if their B-17F would go spinning earthward from 25,000 feet, burning, as many of the Eighth Air Force bombers did while comrades watched . . . So think again about who you're taunting with cowardice, sonny; and remember Fm the one, not you, who has to keep this plant going, no matter how much bile I swallow doing it . . . But Zaleski hadn't said any of that, knowing that some of the things he had thought of happened a long time ago, and were not relevant any more, that ideas and values bad changed in screwy, mixed up ways; also that there were different kinds of cowardice, and maybe Frank Parkland was right, or partly right. Disgusted with himself, the assistant plant manager told the other two, "Let's go down on the floor and settle this .”
    They went out of the office-Zaleski first, followed by the union committeeman, with Frank Pa rkland, dour and glowering, in the rear. As theyclattered down the metal stairway from the office mezzanine to the factory floor, the noise of the plant hit them solidly, like a barrage of bedlam. The stairway at factory floor level was close to a section of assembly line where early subassemblies were welded onto frames, becoming the foundations on which finished cars would rest. The din at this point was so intense that men working within a few feet of one another had to shout, heads close together, to communicate. Around them, showers of sparks flew upward and sideways in a pyrotechnic curtain of intense white blue. Volleys from welding machines and rivet guns were punctuated by the constant hiss of the power tools' lifeblood-compressed air. And central to everything, focus of activity like an ambling godhead exacting tribute, the moving assembly line inched inexorably on. The union committeeman fell in beside Zaleski as the trio moved forward down the line. They were walking considerably faster than the assembly line itself, so that cars they passed were progressively nearer completion. There was a power plant in each chassis now, and immediately ahead, a body shell was about to merge with a chassis sliding under it in what auto assembly men called the "marriage act .”
    Matt Zaleski's eyes swung over the scene, checking key points of operation, as he always did, instinctively. Heads went up, or turned, as the assistant