The woman nearest the door turned heavy, uninterested eyes to me. “They’re not hiring.” She went back to her papers.

“I’m not looking for a job,” I said patiently. “I just want to talk to the personnel manager.”

All four of them looked up at that, weighing my suit, my relative youth, trying to decide if I was OSHA or EPA, state or federal. The woman who’d spoken jerked her faded brown hair toward a door facing the one I’d entered by.

“Across the plant,” she said laconically.

“Can I get there from inside or should I go around?”

One of the smokers reluctantly put down her cigarette and got up. “I’ll take her,” she said hoarsely.

The others looked at the old-fashioned electric clock over their desks. “You going on break then?” a flabby woman in the back asked.

My guide shrugged. “Might as well.”

The others looked chagrined: she’d been faster than they to think how to squeeze five extra minutes from the system. One of them pushed her chair back in a hopeful way, but the first speaker said sternly, “One’s enough to go,” and the would-be rebel scooted back to her station.

My guide took me out the far door. Beyond it lay the inferno I’d been expecting when I first entered the plant. We were in a dimly lit room that stretched the length of the building. Stainless-steel pipes ran along the ceiling and at intervals below, so that you felt suspended in a steel maze that had flipped up on its side. Steam hissed from the overhead pipes in little puffs, filling the maze with vapor. Large red “No Smoking” signs hung every thirty feet along the walls. Enormous cauldrons were hooked to the pipes at intervals, huge vats designed for a coven of giant witches. The white-suited figures tending the place might have been their familiars.

Although the air in here actually smelled better than it did outside, a number of the workers wore respirators. I wondered about the majority who didn’t, as well as how smart it was for my guide and me to be taking the shortcut through the plant. I tried asking her over the hissing and clatter of the pipes, but she apparently had decided I must be an OSHA spy or something and refused to answer. When an overhead valve let out a belch so loud that I jumped, she gave a small smile but said nothing.

Skirting the maze expertly, she led me to a door diagonally across the plant from the one we’d entered by. We were in another narrow cinder-block hallway, this one forming the base of the U. She took me down it, turning left to follow the second arm toward the river. Halfway along, she stopped at a door labeled “Canteen—Employees Only.”

“Mr. Joiner’s on down there—third door on your right. Door marked ‘Administration.’ ”

“Well, thanks for your help,” I said, but she had already disappeared into the canteen.

The door marked “Administration” was also made of grainy glass but the rooms beyond it looked a little classier than the Tartarus where I’d visited the four clerks. Carpeting, not linoleum, covered the concrete floor. Wallboard ceiling and wall covering created an illusion of an intimate space within the cinder-block tunnel.