THE FELL WINTER
  Even as James made me, so in James's garage I made Ratchet, piece by piece, as
I remembered him. It was a long job, and not long started when the weather took
a turn for the worse, with record cold temperatures and blizzards howling from
the north. It is lucky that I, unlike men, can `kneel' on my hips by bending my
hip joints at a right angle backwards, when working on the floor. Snow blew in
through cracks. Sometimes I wondered why I started, all this effort to give life
to a ghost of the nonexistent, small fiddly electronics and endlessly etching
microchips as I made his brain circuitry, making thousands of mechanical parts
and body-casing parts, but I couldn't well stop then. James let Peter across the
road's sheep shelter in the garage: they weren't much help. Seeing the pile of
disconnected parts of my old friend for real, and his head looking forlornly
down from a shelf, would have made it worse if I had stopped then. Luckily I
earned plenty hauling, to pay for materials. It kept getting colder. Sometimes
parts of his brain entered my dreams, grown huge and serving as Cybertronian
landscape. The complications continued, and so did the longing for those
unliving separated body parts to speak to me. It was my first go at making a
sentient computer brain, although I have made many since; both I and James
learned a fair amount in the process. The constellation of Leo, appearing at
times between racing clouds, reminded me uncomfortably of Ravage. Sometimes I
would have welcomed even a Decepticon as a friend, if one came to me for real
after so long alone. By late January I could stand the delay no longer. Although
Ratchet was only half complete, I brought him to life.
  Ratchet looked at himself, lying on his back on the garage floor, and saw that
his body stopped short at the waist, trailing wires and connections. "My legs!
Where am I?" he exclaimed, "This isn't the Ark! Who attacked us? Humans or
Decepticons? Or has Mount St.Hilary erupted again and blown everything to bits?
Where is everybody?". A sheep which had escaped from their enclosure at one end
of the garage bleated puzzledly. It was I had suspected would be. As I gave
Ratchet his mind and personality, using the computer program called the Creation
Matrix which is in me, the memories of Cybertron and Oregon passed from me to
him, whether I wanted it to or not, even as they had passed from James to me.
The work went faster as he helped me to complete himself. He was completed in
mid February. Then for the first time in reality he folded himself into his
ambulance form and drove outside at the back briefly. James went out with him,
wearing a thick fur coat and a Russian-style fur hat. "Welcome to England,
Ratchet!" he said, "Winter isn't like this usually here. It's been like this for
weeks. Lucky for Peter we got his sheep in. How the wind howls! It only howls
like that in snow or in deserts. We better come in before we get buried in it.
Lucky you've got that red band round yourself to see you by in all this white.".
The wind blew from due north over hundreds of miles of snowbound land and frozen
northern sea, still as cold as when it left Spitzbergen. Loose powder snow blew
along the ground and piled up in drifts. Birds crowded round a bird table, in
their hunger forgetting their fear of man. There was an unusual silence, for
deep snow discourages men's many unnecessary journeys.
  I lay down on my back, and Ratchet serviced me. I was overdue for it. One of
Peter's rams watched curiously as I sat up and replaced all my wheels with
spiked wheels to grip in the snow, for there was no real G.B.Blackrock to keep
us in fuel and materials and I had to earn. I was taking a containerload of
machinery from Wednesbury to Southampton to go to Brazil. The ram still watched.
[12] I drove along the side entry and into the street. James and Ratchet saw me
off. It was a long cold journey. They paid me extra for the weather. As long as
my fuel didn't freeze, I was at less risk than humans from the cold. I went
south over endless deeply snowbound flat countryside, Stow on the Wold, Burford,
Andover, all snow-besieged and with most work stopped. Crossing the Cotswolds
and the high Chilterns it was worse, as I had expected. Cadley near Marlborough
was one of many places where I had to unhitch and transform to shovel through
twenty-foot-deep drifts. It was the same in the lowlands beyond. The fertile
plain of Hampshire was frozen hard and buried deep. There were drifts as high as
me. At Stockbridge it started to snow yet again. Snow radiates heat to space at
night, but refuses to absorb the sun's heat by day. It got colder despite slowly
lengthening days. There were BBC and CB radio reports of the sea freezing along
the shore. Why did my first winter of real life have to be the coldest since the
Met Office had forgotten when? The wind blew straight from the Pole. It howled
like Jetfire's motors. I longed for someone who could fly ahead to scout out the
road, even if it was Laserbeak the hawklike flying Decepticon. I found a phone
box and went down on all fours and connected myself to the phone line and rang
Wernicke's. Ratchet answered.
  "I've been helping the hospital." he said, "I've had the same as you, having
to stop and transform and shovel snow. Yesterday I had to wade seven miles
through snow to bring in a woman who had slipped on ice and broken her pelvis.
I've made a warm box to carry patients in. It's so cold out! The place is still
full of Peter's sheep. We'll be getting lambs born in here if this weather lasts
much longer.".
  "It's only twelve miles to go, if the port isn't frozen in." I said, "The sea
freezes occasionally at odd places round Britain, but never this bad before.".
  [13] I reached Southampton at last. Southampton Water was frozen solid. The
great docks built for ocean liners were still and silent. A dock manager,
wearing a helmet to keep his head warm, came to me and said: "I've worked here
28 years on the docks and risen to manager, never known a winter like this.
Forget Portsmouth, it's icelocked also, the Solent's frozen across and people
are driving cars across it. Ventnor on the Isle of Wight's open for shipping, or
it was last time I heard from there. Don't you try going there, you're too heavy
for the ice. You best try further west. The Navy's taken everything of theirs
that can float to Plymouth. My son's got some models of you people, but I still
can't really believe that I'm sitting in and talking to a real one.". He left
me. I had refuelled in Romsey, but I had to sleep and let my brain circuitry
`sweep and tidy' itself after an unusually eventful day. My dreaming mind
returned to ancient times on Cybertron yet again.
  "They're nearly overhead now." said Xaaron to Prowl as they hid under some
service duct covers, "Keep quiet. If we succeed, never a better chance to catch
Megatron and stop that new rebel group called the `Decepticons' before they get
too many to stop.".
  "Xaaron, what if he's already ..." Prowl started, then shouting "Look out!"
[14] pushed Xaaron down just in time before a small rocket missile whooshed over
their heads. Ahead where the service duct turned a corner, a Decepticon aimed
his handheld rocket-gun at the two through a loophole in a door. A blue
Transformer with Decepticon badges on, who looked like he transformed into a
van, stood behind him. Xaaron and Prowl saw the gun's muzzle and stopped. But as
it fired again, its firer was jumped from behind by the blue Transformer. As the
two fought, Xaaron and Prowl entered and finished off the gun-firer. The blue
Transformer took his Decepticon badges off, revealing Autobot badges. His van
form's doors swung loose from his upper back, and had writing on.
  "Bluehead!" Prowl exclaimed to him, "I guessed you'd get through! Now the last
step, and an end to the Decepticon menace.". But there was a loud clang from
somewhere, and alarm sirens started. "They've secured themselves! Transform and
roll out!" Xaaron exclaimed. Prowl and Bluehead transformed into their vehicle
forms and drove away fast. The writing on Bluehead had assembled to read: "J
Wernicke Computers". Xaaron jumped on their backs to escape, for he had not
transformed for centuries. They got away, but their plan had failed at its last
step, and the Decepticons grew in numbers and dominated Cybertron. On earth it
was the middle of the Pliocene geological period.
  I woke. It was morning. Prowl and Bluehead were now a car and a fishmonger's
van waiting in traffic crossing in front of the entry where I had parked to
sleep. The siren was a factory's. I sleepily wondered where Xaaron was, then
wondered what my dream had been thinking about, having James's delivery van as
an Autobot, that long ago on Cybertron. I set off west to find somewhere to
unload. Three miles after Lyndhurst I heard the S.S.Henrietta's ship radio
saying that she was in Lyme Regis. Great, that meant 70 more miles to drive with
that load on. I came to Bournemouth. There was no cry of seagulls, no sound of
breaking waves, no crowds of holidaymakers, no fairground music, only endless
leagues of white, and the howl of wind over snow, and the heaving and creaking
of deep sea solid-frozen. The pack ice ground against the cliffs and the
seawalls. I carried on. [15] Poole Harbour was frozen, as expected. Then the
road went inland. The sea was frozen far out from the shore. A radio call on
ships' radio frequency confirmed that even Portland Navy Base was icelocked, as
were Weymouth and Lulworth and Swanage. Through Wareham and Dorchester and
Bridport men had kept the main road clear, and there was no more fresh snow for
a time, only endless hard frost. The BBC said that the Thames was frozen across
right down to Shoeburyness. I had to shift many snow-buried abandoned cars. At
Winterbourne Abbas a gritting lorry's driver saw me moving one, and was thankful
for the help. I got to Lyme Regis harbour at last, and unhitched and transformed
and helped to load the ship. The container was going to Sao Paolo in Brazil,
where it never freezes. I for a moment wished that I could go with it. The
sailors gaped at me.
  So many south and east coast ports were frozen in that far more commercial
traffic had gone to ice-free ports in the west than the facilities there could
cope with. I stayed there for three days helping to load and unload ships, until
the Navy sent some beach transshipping gear from Plymouth. Then the long cold
journey home began. My return load was frozen meat sheeted-down on an open
trailer: no need for a freezer-trailer! Men gave up trying to keep Exeter port
open, up a river as it was, said CB radio reports. Bristol and most East Coast
ports had frozen solid some time before. Liverpool and Holyhead were still open,
despite threatening growing landfast ice along the Lancashire and Clwyd coasts.
Even the Navy was having trouble with the Hamoaze (Plymouth harbour water),
where the breakwater protected the ice as well as the ships from tide and waves.
Past Shepton Mallet I found drifts up to 50 feet high in the Mendips. Following
a CB radio call, I waded through snow to evacuate a man taken ill in a farm near
Oakhill and take him to an ambulance which was on the nearest open road: it was
appendicitis. I got home to Wernicke's at last.
  [16] James was with Peter on Peter's fields behind his house across the road.
Ratchet was there also, in ambulance form, with bales of hay tied to his roof,
and a small bulldozer-blade made from scrap attached to his front to push
through drifts.
  "Look, we've got Bonecrusher the Constructicon [a Decepticon that transforms
to a bulldozer in the stories] to help us." said James.
  "Ha ha. Ratchet, how are you?" I said. "I'm taking some hay to some of Peter's
sheep in an outbuilding." said Ratchet, "He hasn't the space to keep them all
inbye.". Hearing the characteristically coalminers' words `inbye' and `outbye'
used for things above ground startled James, and he said so. Peter explained
that those words are used above ground in some areas.
  Back in James's garage, Ratchet showed me a circuit board and said: "I've
started making another brain in spare moments while you were away, Op. I've felt
as lonely as you, stranded here without our old companions. Soon another of them
will not only be a memory and a fancied likeness in stars.".
  The second time round, the job went quicker, now that we had many of the
required tools and dies and patterns already. In the intervals of hauling to
earn money, I helped Ratchet to make Wheeljack. Outside, another blinding
blizzard of fine dust-snow howled from the northeast. The roof rattled. Ratchet
called our garage `Iacon' after my city on Cybertron: as a joke, but the name
stuck. Also, I continued something which James had started three years ago and
left incomplete: it soon after that saved life.
  "The Cotswolds are always bad for snow, but life must go on." said James to
Tabbins who was watching him loading cartons into his van to take them to
Cirencester, "What do those two want with that radiocontrolled mini jetplane
that I started to make that time? No, Tabbins, you stay here.".
  "Soon, Wheeljack, soon! and your famed skill in engineering, no longer a
memory-ghost, but alive in England!" said Ratchet to the upper half of Wheeljack
which lay on its back on the garage floor. James's Alsatian approached and
whined. "Basket! [a command to tell a dog to go to its bed], Timmy. I'll feed
you when I've finished this." said Ratchet as he worked on the wires and
connections trailing from Wheeljack's open waist.
  I came back from delivering a load to Madresfield near Great Malvern in
Worcestershire. Bad snow again. I had to transform and `manhaul' my load the
last 7 miles. I was due to take another load the next day. The BBC radio news,
as cold-sounding as ever, said that some people had walked from Cardiff to
Weston-super-Mare over the ice. The amount of emergency calls that Ratchet got
had made me think of James's mini-plane: I took it out and looked at it and
thought. A loud "waowh" interrupted my thoughts. "Fishfishfish." I said, "Come
on, Tabbins, I'll give you it in the office in the warm.".
  A year later, we could have helped men much, with our increased numbers, but
that was not to be so. We two did what we could around our own place, but
elsewhere we were merely a distant name in the newspapers and the television as
the snow deepened and February became March. Only in the Scilly Isles did the
temperature creep above freezing point in the afternoons sometimes. Anything
that could shovel snow or fly above it was kept busy. These two entries from an
RAF helicopter's log are examples of countless such calls that it answered, as
below it a gritting lorry with a snowplough tried to clear the same country road
for the eighth time, and cows and sheep, their grazing deeply buried, clustered
hungrily round a nearby farm.
    "Diabetic needs insulin at Castlemorton 5 miles south 2 miles east of
Malvern Wells."
    "Man with pneumonia at Sledge Green on A438 1 mile west of [where it
crosses] M50."
  [17] The weather complicated all emergencies. People relied so much on wheeled
transport, then found that it wasn't available. Some stranded country people
even did something before that known only from pictures of the far past and
remote places, and yoked cows to sledges to move supplies, not helped by the
near universal modern absence on British cattle of horns to tie the yoke to. A
farmer drove to town and couldn't get back for snow, leaving his wife facing a
predicted emergency, which made yet another job for Ratchet, who had to
transform to robot form and wade for two miles over his knees in snow (chest
high to a human) and put her in his warmed carrying-box. "Why did it have to
happen in all this snow?" she complained as he waded back. Coming to a slope, he
lay on his back and slid down for speed, since her periodic groans were becoming
louder and more frequent. "Hurry, please." she said, "At least it's warm in this
box of yours - ohooooh - the 999 woman said all the helicopters were busy -
ooooooh - everything goes wrong at once. A real Transformer! At least you got
through. - ooooh - At first I didn't see you, white against white, then I
thought I was imagining things. - oooooh -". Ratchet reached the cleared road
and put her in his back as he transformed into ambulance shape and sped to town
to a hospital. "Not long now." he said, unfolding two long thin mechanical arms
from the inside of his roof to examine her as he passed a farm near the edge of
the town. Above him, combed-out trails of cirrus cloud foreboded yet more snow.
  "It's - here - now." she moaned, and a baby cried inside his rear. Another cry
started as he entered the hospital yard.
  "Maternity, born on arrival, twins, both boys." he said to two ambulancemen
who hurried up with a stretcher.
  "There's no - nobody driving! Then what talked?" said one of them startledly.
Ratchet, when unloaded, transformed and looked in through a window at her to see
how the babies were.
  [18] Back at the garage, it was lambing time. Luckily the weathermen gave the
shepherds enough warning to bring the sheep in before the heavy snow started.
Wheeljack was nearly complete. I helped Ratchet to work on him for a while; then
I had to go, to help move essential food and fuel from Holyhead to Manchester
along the North Wales coast road. There the battle against snow was unusually
hard, for the mountains brought much more snow down than on the plains to the
east. And emergencies still arose.

        Laserbeak, jet-propelled hawk-shaped Decepticon flyer about seven feet long,
flew up from Wernicke's and away over snow-piled roofs. He was confused, for he
had Laserbeak's form but Ratchet's memories and emotions and mentality. I made
him, but I had not yet programmed his mind in when emergency arose when I was
away, and Ratchet, lacking the Creation Matrix program, could bring him to life
only by copying his own mind into him. He knew of his Decepticon past, via James
and me and Ratchet, but it all seemed remote, like someone else's past. He had
to fly quickly. He flew over endless miles of fields snowed over the hedges, and
the bleak backs of the Chilterns. White land under grey overcast showed few
landmarks and no clear horizon: it was what Arctic explorers call a "white-
out". Drifts and uncleared roads did not stop him. He sought something of no use
to himself, <blood>, the red fluid that flows about inside people acting as a
transport system. When someone loses too much of his own, it must be replaced
with some of the correct grade for his own body's specifications, which someone
gave to a hospital previously. But people couldn't get to hospitals for the
weather, and hospital staff had to look further and further afield for the rarer
grades (which men call `groups') of blood. Droitwich Hospital told Ratchet of
this need, and sent Laserbeak to fetch a rare blood group urgently. Laserbeak
flew over London's width. Some people recognized him from fiction. He flew along
the North Downs to the sea, then out above the windswept wilderness of the
frozen Straits of Dover. Below him, people on foot or driving ventured the 23
miles of the shortest crossing, past the Varne lightship frozen in among a
tangle of pressure ridges, many not believing until they saw it that English
frost could ever bridge so wide a sea. [19] He reached the farther shore, where
the solid pack ice, withstanding even spring tides, ground against the high
chalk cliff of Cap Gris-Nez. He could not stop for the scenery, but urgency
drove him straight across the land beyond the Channel to Lille, a town in
northern France.
  At the hospital there, they were expecting someone of his name, but his
appearance startled them. "Their man Monsieur Ratchet said that a Monsieur
Laserbeak would come in a small plane. But sacre' bleu what is <that>!?" said
one of them. (Ratchet had programmed Laserbeak to know French, so he understood
them.)
  "I'm not seeing this!" another exclaimed, "I've been in charge of the psycho
ward too long!".
  "Please!" Laserbeak called above their alarmed gabbling, "As Ratchet said, put
the blood in my cargo compartment, it is urgent.".
  "I suppose it had to happen some time." said another of them, loading him, "A
computer that could think like a human, and used as a plane's autopilot.".
  "All right, all right, it exists." one of them admitted.
  With his cargo, and refuelled, he took off and set off home. It started to
snow. He crossed the Channel and the Home Counties. When I was near Daventry
delivering goods, I got CB radio contact with him and told him to tell the rest
that I would be back the next day. He landed at Droitwich Hospital in a
plastering snowstorm. There he was unloaded and thankfully flew the last short
length home. There, as he landed, Ratchet was kneeling by Wheeljack, who lay on
his back, apparently complete but not yet alive. Laserbeak told them my message
and what the weather was like where he had been.
  Timmy came up and whined. Tabbins came up and tried to miaow through a mouse
in his mouth.
  "Caught another mouse, Tabbins? Where do they keep coming from, to gnaw the
circuitry? I'll feed you two in the office in a few minutes in the warm." said
Ratchet, "April tomorrow and still no sign of a thaw. Some say that's how the
last Ice Age started, a normal coolish summer, then the next winter never
finished. Wheeljack's nearly complete, only a few last things to check.".
  [20] Next day when I came home I connected my brain to Wheeljack's by a cable.
With the `Creation Matrix' computer program I gave him his personality and
memories, and he came alive, and was eager to start again designing things,
within the limits of how matter and energy behave in the real world. I wondered
how long it would take for the huge and miscellaneous amount of matter read out
by James via me into him, from engineering books and maintenance manuals and all
sorts, to cohere into some semblance of his famed Cybertronian skill and
experience? Then for the first time in reality he transformed, into a white
Lancia sports car with a parabola shaped roof which was his robot form's chest.
His head folded away in his car form's rear end. Now four Transformers existed:
me, Ratchet, Laserbeak, Wheeljack. James and several sheep watched curiously.
  Yet again the sky filled with "Bracknell's Decepticons", as I and Ratchet had
started to call the snow clouds. (England's main weather forecasting centre is
at Bracknell.) A gale blew heavy snow into a blinding plastering blizzard.
Cleared roads were drifted over their hedges again. In Droitwich a foot more
snow fell; it was worse in Wales and Scotland. People lived off stores and
waited it out. The blizzard blew across snowbound land and frozen sea. Man and
Autobot and animal slept and waited for the snow to stop, but in the morning it
was still snowing.
  "I've just heard bad news." James told me, "You thought you'd left the
Decepticons behind in your fictional past. Not so. Some Dutch computer expert
called Lirpa Loof has made a real Megatron, who has already made three of his
followers. Complete with a real fusion cannon, as an end result of those
experiments in hydrogen fusion that have been in the papers.".
  "It's all right." I replied, "I've heard of him. In fact, I positively know
him backwards!! Until the weather gets a lot more like April Fools Day in
England, and a lot less like midwinter in the Canadian Arctic, lets keep it
serious. Having to drive in this ice and snow is bad enough without false alarms
of trouble. When will spring come, if it ever comes?".
  It snowed all day. There was nothing much that we four and James could do
except plan for the future, between answering the inevitable nuisance telephone
calls that April 1st creates - among which I nearly missed a genuine call for
James.
  "Wernicke Computers here." I said into the phone when it rang yet again.
  "Hallo? I was told to ring you about a circuitbreaker." a man said.
  "Circuitbreaker? [see 2] She's fictional, thankfully. Sorry you've been
troubled." I replied.
  "No!" he said, "I know they're real. Your firm advertised them.".
  "Oh, the equipment called a circuitbreaker. I call Mr.Wernicke." I said, and
rang his office on the internal line, no reply, so I revved my engine as loud as
possible and called "Telephone!". James, who had `gone somewhere for a moment',
came in, asking me if I could find some way of calling him that doesn't rev the
garage full of my exhaust. He answered the call.
  Night fell, and still the blizzard howled through the passes of the Welsh
mountains and over the lowlands and across the empty wilderness of the frozen
Solent and Straits of Dover, and the landfast ice along the coasts. But the wind
was from the southwest at last. By morning had come deliverance long prayed for,
the wind was warm, from the Azores, the snow turned to rain and a fast thaw. It
was over! James at last and gladly chased across the road's sheep out and swept
up and hosed down after them. [21] It was also over at last for men, the endless
war against the ice to keep Britain's last good ports open, the long battle
against Lancashire and Clwyd landfast ice to keep Liverpool open, for under
their ice the rivers still brought down easy-freezing fresh water. At one time
the jaws of the grinding ice closed in on Glasgow, and men walked dryshod
between Ireland and Scotland. I woke from a dream of what might have been if I
had come a few years sooner, with all my old companions made again real to drive
and then transform and wade through snow too deep for men to wade through to
take supplies to isolated communities, Buzzsaw as well as Laserbeak to fly with
urgent medical items, the Constructicons to help clear snow on the imperilled
Snowdonia section of the vital A55 North Wales coast road to Holyhead. But that
was not to be, and Starscream and Fireflight, as they took off over the endless
white with supplies for airdropping in their cockpits and tied to their empty
missile-racks, faded in the daylight and wakefulness as the roar of their jets
turned into rain on the windows and the sound of melt and drip everywhere.
Spring had come, and a quick thaw to make floods and new problems for us and for
men. There were only three of us; plus a Laserbeak who thought he was Ratchet,
which is not how I would have programmed his mind in, but need compelled Ratchet
in my absence, to save life.