The Mojave Desert is the setting for Dan Davis and Miles Gentry’s move from wartime service into manufacturing: in an Air Force surplus building, they establish the small factory that produces Hired Girl. The location gives concrete form to Dan’s belief that an engineer could build a business on modest capital and inventiveness, but the factory eventually becomes the site of a conflict over who controls the work, the company, and Dan’s access to his own creation.

A Small Factory and an Independent Ambition

After the war, Dan and Miles go into business as insurance companies begin selling cold sleep. They set up their Mojave Desert factory in a building left over from the Air Force and begin making Hired Girl, combining Dan’s engineering with Miles’s experience in law and business. Dan says he invented Hired Girl and her related machines, including Window Willie, even though his name does not appear on them.

The choice of a modest desert factory reflects Dan’s rejection of the conventional routes open to engineers. He considers employment with major corporations, where a worker might receive a pension and a testimonial dinner but would never be his own boss, as well as civil service, with its secure benefits. After what he calls a long government vacation, he wants independence. He is drawn instead to “bicycle-shop engineering”: starting with little capital and bringing a first model to market without the enormous investment and labor he associates with large-scale industry.

The Workshop and the Cost of Production

The factory is both the base of Dan’s creative enterprise and a source of frustration. As production expands, he is repeatedly pulled away from invention to correct manufacturing problems. He compares the interruption to being dropped from a warm creative fog into ice water. The prospect of additional surplus buildings and a night shift makes him fear that the workshop will leave him no quiet time to create.

Dan therefore proposes shrinking the operation rather than enlarging it. He wants the company to license Hired Girl and Window Willie to other manufacturers, and to license Flexible Frank when the machine is ready, while a small research corporation concentrates on new inventions. His proposal makes the factory’s central tension explicit: the same production capacity that gives the business reach threatens to consume the inventing work that began it. Miles rejects licensing because he believes direct production would earn more money.

Exclusion and the Factory’s Reversal

After his confrontation with Miles and Belle, Dan leaves abruptly, without his hat, and fears that remaining might lead him to kill Miles. Before dawn he decides to retrieve Flexible Frank himself. He pays more than the machine is worth, arrives at the plant with a pickup truck, and plans to load Frank—who weighs four hundred pounds—onto the truck’s tailgate.

The factory is no longer simply the place where Dan’s invention can be made. A new padlock blocks the gate. Dan climbs over it, cutting himself on the barbed wire, and enters the property intending to use the shop’s tools to deal with the lock from inside. The physical barrier turns the dispute over company policy into a confrontation over access to the workshop and the machine Dan created.

A board letter dated November 18, 1970, formalizes that exclusion. The directors terminate all of Dan’s connection with the corporation except his status as a stockholder, invoke paragraph three of his contract, and request that he stay off company property. They promise to forward his personal papers and belongings by safe means. The Mojave Desert factory thus marks both the beginning of Dan’s independent industrial venture and the point at which that venture separates him from the company’s operations and its premises.