The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

However, the planned mission had a certain slippery point – the Car Repair Shop Floor and Club were located at the opposite ends of Plant. Dragging the whole sheet thru all of the Plant territory? Chuba refused to take such a risk, neither Skully showed any whiff of enthusiasm. As usual, the hardest part in undertaking rested entirely on my and Vladya's shoulders…

Still and all, Chuba partially collaborated and ripped the plywood sheet loose in a car waiting for repair on a sideway outta his shop floor. Besides, leaving the car, he somehow forgot to lock its door as required by the regulations… Thru the above-mentioned door, I and Vladya penetrated the car to find, in the indicated place, the coveted treasure – a standard sheet of thirty-millimeter-thick plywood blotted in a couple of spots but, on the whole, it did not matter.

We dragged the plywood out of the car, grabbed at the edges, and carried on over the crunching gravel of the track ballast shoulder, then along the even and not so noisy asphalt paths between the Plant shop floors. On the way, we kept persuading each other that the sheet was not particularly heavy and that there was nothing special if two workmen carried it bypassing the shop floors within Plant. Although we, personally, had never observed such a picture because dollies were a usual means of transportation for the purpose.

When to Club there remained the smaller leg – to pass by the Smithy Shop Floor, the All-Plant Bath House, the Fire Brigade building, the Oxygen Tank Filling Station and the Medical Center, Skully raced up from the Mechanical Shop Floor to inform that Borya Sakoon sent after us and if we didn't show up we'd be fired.

That was some news, our Overseer at the Experimental Unit never came up with so fiery threats. Could it happen the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department came on another visit?

So we rested the sheet against the smoky wall of the Smithy Shop Floor under the marble tablet screwed to the bricks to announce that in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Power, there was embedded a message to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant workers who would work there in the year of the centennial anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Making sure that our sheet did not interfere with the traffic, we went to the Repair Shop Floor.

Borya was raging way more furiously than Fantômas himself – where the heck we two been paddling when the whole Experimental Unit was sent to Harvesting?.

Yes, Harvesting was not a thing to shrug away. It was like parading the entire workforce of the Experimental Unit. That was the moment when everyone was engaged in earnest, to the utmost.

All the locksmiths from the Experimental Unit, in full collection, with the paper slip of order listing the required materials and quantities, were making for the Central Warehouse. There, behind the All-Plant Bath House, heaps of rebar rods of divers diameter, by heaps of metal fittings of powerful profiles, by heaps of pipes with the cross-section of no less than 10 centimeters were piled crisscross by the railway track.

Soon after, the workmen were joined by a dolly-car, and then along the tracks about the Central Warehouse, a stocky railway crane would roll to their group and hover the dangling steel cables of its beam over the tangled heaps and hills of all those piles of metal.

Two of the most experienced workers, equipped with steely breakers, would noose the pipes, rebars or channels named in the paper slip. The rest of the congregation, keeping a reasonably safe distance, would profusely share their sage advice and agitated comments. At last, the crane would strenuously yank the snapped bunch of metal, pull it up and, with scraping screech, tear out from the heap of iron jumbled with all the previous Harvestings by representatives of different shop floors.

The catch would then be lowered onto the waiting dolly-car. The Ware House employee would compare the approximate amount of the cargo with the figures scribbled in the order and give his "go ahead". Returning from a safe distance, the dolly-car driver would drive it to the Repair Shop Floor, scraping, on the way, the asphalt of the paths with dangling ends of rebars, or pipes or whatever else was there in the paper slip. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit would start back to the Repair Shop Floor in one, cheerful, monolithic mass, proud of the fulfilled duty…

And now the coming back harvesters appeared from the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, yet we were not among them. We failed to attend the holy rite of Harvesting. Fortunately, our Overseer had a kinda soft sport for Vladya because of having the mutual last name, even though without being relatives, and we again slipped from the Experimental Unit directly to our sheet under the memorial tablet.

The Manager of the Repair Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, Mozgovoy, stood next to it eyeing the plywood avidly and swallowing his managerial saliva. Of course, such a material would whet anyone's appetite. We clawed our prey like two winning vultures.

"Where to?" asked, in pain, Mozgovoy in his plaintive falsetto.

"To the Plant Management," said, casually, Vladya and we dragged the sheet in the direction of the Main Check-Entrance next to the backside of the Club building that substituted—for the stretch of its length—the wall around Plant.

The back door, sure thing, was not locked. We dragged the sheet in and leaned it against the bunch of canvas-covered frames opposite the movie list painters' room…

When after work we came to Club to move the plywood to our room, the crisp-curled House Manager, Stepan, was already wheeling round and about our sheet. By so deficit material, anyone could be tempted into improper dreams and plans, even a do-nothing, who in all of his life