Warren Lapine

“Bent through shieldings of every color, size and shape. Rolled over panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers. Tumbled down long surfaces of gleaming bakelite. Plunged through color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances . . . . . . . here machine and man learn to work very intimately together. As he drifted through the machine tooled nightmare, Marquis knew what he had been fighting all his life, what he would continue to fight with every grain of ingenuity. Mechanization—the horror of losing one’s identity and becoming part of an assembly line. He could hear a clicking sound as tubes sharpened and faded in intensity. The clicking—rhythm, a hypnotic rhythm like the beating of his own heart—the throbbing and thrumming, the contracting and expanding, the pulsing and pounding . . . . . . . the machines and the nervous system of the workers become slowly cooperative. * Beds were spaced ten feet apart down both sides of a long gray metal hall. There were no cells, no privacy, nothing but beds and the gray metalene suits with numbers printed across the chest. His bed, with his number printed above it, was indicated to him, and the guard disappeared. He was alone. It was absolutely silent. On his right a woman lay on a bed. No. 329. She had been here a long time. She appeared dead. Her breasts rose and fell with a peculiarly steady rhythm, and seemed to be coordinated with the silent, invisible throbbing of the metal walls. She might have been attractive once. Here it didn’t make any difference. Her face was gray, like metal. Her hair was cropped short. Her uniform was the same as the man’s on Marquis’ left. The man was No. 4901. He hadn’t been here so long. His face was thin and gray. His hair was dark, and he was about the same size and build as Marquis. His mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were closed and there was a slight quivering at the ends of the fingers which were laced across his stomach. “Hello,” Marquis said. The man shivered, then opened dull eyes and looked up at Marquis. “I just got in. Name’s Charles Marquis.” The man blinked. “I’m—I’m—No. 4901.” He looked down at his chest, repeated the number. His fingers shook a little as he touched his lips. Marquis said.”
― Warren Lapine, Fantastic Stories Presents the Worlds of If Super Pack #1

“We probably won’t be seeing one another again. The bells take care of everything here. The bells and the machines. There is never an error—never any mistakes. Machines do not make mistakes.” He was marched out of there and through a series of rooms. He was taken in by generators, huge oscilloscopes. Spun like a living tube through curtains of vacuum tube voltimeters, electronic power panels. Twisted and squeezed through rolls of skeins of hook-up wire.”
― Warren Lapine, Fantastic Stories Presents the Worlds of If Super Pack #1