The next Saturday he skipped out again, in search of interesting rocks for his “geology” project. He arrived at the factory breathless and rushed to see if the plant was still there. It was. He couldn't tell if it was the same plant, or one that kind of looked the same, but it was definitely growing out of the same valve, wrapping around the steam pipe almost half way up now.
Richard, who worshiped the scientific method, tied a little string around the plant and marked its height on the pipe. He tried to snip a little piece of stem with leaves, but the stem was harder to cut than a steel cable. He managed to pull a leaf, after much struggle, placed it in the back pocket of his pants and tended to other things of interest, after all his secret weekend kingdom had so many things to offer.
He wandered about a little bit, moving from the engine room to the pipe manifold distribution center, the most impressive area in the factory, and Richard's favorite spot. It looked almost like a gigantic organ, with tubes splaying out in every direction, through windows and transoms, along walls and bending around openings, snaking about a few inches off the floor, splitting and reuniting with the twisted patterns of a gnarled old tree. Richard spent hours wandering inside this mechanical forest, following its logical flows, trying to understand which steam pipe fed what, learning the inner works of its vortex flow meters, its pressure couplings, its every bend and elbow.
There was a place inside this knot of metal limbs, a clearing almost, a hollow, from which he could see the entire manifold branching overhead, and when he sat there, on a little concrete base that for some reason had remained unoccupied, it made him feel as if the entire power distribution system was an extension of his person, and that as small and weak as he was, compared to this enormous metal monster, he was its heart, the soul in the machine, the essential component that allowed the whole system to work. Even though he knew the distribution manifold very well, and if he closed his eyes he could see its every detail, he liked to take a walk around and inspect it every time, and then, with the relief of having found everything exactly the way it was supposed to be, he sat there on his concrete base for a while, and dreamed. And, indignity of indignities, that's where he found the plant again, inside his precious, sneaking out between two pressure rated flanges and then back in via an isolation valve.
At first he didn't want to believe it, of all the places this trespasser could choose to inhabit, to intrude on his beloved pipe manifold was simply unthinkable! He looked closer at the pressure flanges. The plant seemed to grow not through them, but from them, there was no discernible space between the stem and the metal. Richard was dumbfounded by this living puzzle, and in his bewilderment he failed to notice that the temperature in the room was significantly higher than usual until pearls of sweat started beading his forehead.
“What on earth?” he thought. “Do they turn off the fans over the weekend? This place is an oven!”
He didn't remember it ever being that hot in the manifold room, and since the seasons were moving in the wrong direction for an increase in temperature, he had to accept that the reason for the unusual warmth could only be the other parameter in the equation. He turned around and touched one of the leaves, which was hot.
“Oh, this can't be good!” Richard panicked. He agonized over the fact that now he would have to tell his father, it was the right thing to do, and face the consequences of his unauthorized access to the factory floor. On the other hand, if he noticed all of these changes, and they were quite blatant, surely somebody else, a grown-up, with any luck the very person in charge of this section, would notice too. How could they not? They'd have to turn down the heat, for one, nobody could work in that sauna.
But then again, what if nobody did, and his precious distribution manifold would end up fully engulfed in hot plant! The vision of a very large and strange tree, a fusion of green and metallic branches, with limbs made out of steam pipes and twisted ropes of green stems running between them occupied his mind. The thought made him burst with laughter with its absurdity.
He headed home, eventually, so deep in thought he didn't notice the light drizzle that felt bone chilling after leaving that toasty tropical greenhouse environment. When he got to his room, the leaf in his pocket was still warm. Tormented by guilt and curiosity, he spent all his weekend orbiting around his father, trying to strike up conversations in the hope of finding out if he knew anything about the plant. Surely somebody must have noticed it by now, it was literally taunting people, that cheeky vine, as plain as the nose on their faces.
Listen to the whole story here.
