MRS.JONES AGAIN [100] Life went on. Hoist brought in yet another clapped-out banger that he and Jazz were expected to squeeze a few months' more running out of: it had run a big end on the M5. Optimus had finished his latest project; it was certainly not Ratchet's idea of first choice of which Transformer next to make real. Huffer was still hauling fruit from Birmingham central market to towns around; the previous day's run was to Kidderminster, where he had delays from new roadworks. Optimus had had a bout of that sort of delay when he had a period of runs to Trafford Park in Manchester: each week's thrilling episode of how they were digging up Seymour Grove (the road from Chorlton to Trafford) to mend a sewer, which they finished and made the rood good after themselves, then they dug up the road and the sewer all over again; and the other way he had to face traffic jams on the Barton Bridge from motorway works there. Laserbeak flying between hospitals and emergencies with medical supplies had the usual nuisance with takeoffs hindered by trees and bushes and parked vehicles. At Lichfield Hospital a gardener threw a hoe at him when his jet backblast burned some geraniums near Casualty entrance due to cars parked across his usual takeoff. At Birmingham, when he had blood to take to an ambulance team near Stourbridge treating a woman with a bloodily urgent childbirth complication called `placenta praevia', a parked van completely prevented takeoff, unless he took the law into his own beak and claws and grubbed up a large obstructing buddleia bush in the middle of Haematology lawn; which he did. Luckily the soil was very soft and easily dug. The hospital gardener phoned with the angriest abuse; but it wasn't the gardener's wife that had the placenta praevia. Prowl did one job, and afterwards found an invitation to a dinner ready for him, and a seat at an opera, and had to explain the facts of sentient robots and that he was not a human and had no human driver. Three people separately rang in wanting to hire that mythical vehicle, "Wheeljack's car". Optimus made some computer parts for James's orders; he remarked that with seven other Transformers around and another coming, it was getting a bit more like Cybertron and Oregon in the stories. Ratchet was intending to fetch some microchip etching materials from Smethwick. Huffer left for Leominster. Prowl went to the school in Worcester, feeling that the classes would run smoother without Paul Smith causing disruption; he would also collect some items for James while he was in Worcester. James in Wheeljack went to Wolverhampton to install some computer parts that they had made; on the way James caught up with some paperwork, for it was Wheeljack that was driving. As they left, outside in the street, someone counted "1, 2, 3". [101] Jazz and Optimus finished making and testing the microchips. Both were in vehicle forms except that they had unfolded their arms to work. Tabbins waiowhed at Optimus, who got him some fish and then went out to get some diesel. Jazz refolded his arms under his front end and drove out to deliver the microchips. Laserbeak obeyed a sudden urgent radio message to deliver an unpronounceable anti-tuberculosis drug from Birmingham Hospital to Stourbridge Hospital. As they left, outside in the street, someone counted "4, 5, 6". "RTA [= road traffic accident] at Woolmere Green 5 miles east of Droitwich in the B4090. Ambulance and towtruck needed." said a sudden radio message, and Ratchet and Hoist obeyed it. As they left, outside in the street Mrs.Jones (address: White House, Chellingham) counted "7, 8!". Huffer collected some machine tools and took them into a factory in Leominster, where he transformed and helped some workmen to install them. One of them used a bulky noisy two-handed electric tool called a `Kango hammer', looking like a smallish pneumatic drill with handgrips and a lethal looking jabbing bit for cutting away concrete. The workmen were not pleased at their boss having made them miss their firm's annual party for that work. "And no more hope than a $#@'s @#$ of that cold electromechanical thing from Wernicke's taking us out for a drink instead, I suppose." said one of them. [102] The work finished. The works party finished and the partygoers came back to collect their hats and coats. Of those who had to return to the firm's Worcester branch, one stayed sober, and they assumed that they had a driver to take them home; but that one went into his office and came out in motorcycling gear, and they knew what that meant. No, he couldn't leave his motorcycle there and drive them home, because he had never learned to drive cars, only motorcycles. That excuse may or may not have been true; the other men shouldn't have assumed his willingness, but they should have asked him first. So the job fell on Huffer, since Worcester is fairly near Droitwich. They crowded into his cab. It is a good thing that Huffer could drive by his own will and ignore his cab controls and let them twiddle ad lib, else he would soon have been wrapped round a tree, the way they were trying to drive him in their drunken condition. But he could not shut in their noisy drunken singing. Someone heard it it, and phoned someone, and at Bromyard he heard a police car siren behind him. The police car passed him and pulled him in, and he sat there looking as dumb as any ordinary artic cab while the police ordered all the men out of him and started to ask them for names and addresses and breath samples, and to tell them what they thought of drunk drivers. "You first, red check shirt! You were in the driving position. Blow into this. Then you others.". "But ofsher, it wazh driving itshelf, I wazhunt in sharzh (hic).". "Shut up.". "But I'm ...". "`... azh shober azh a hic judge', as you kind keep saying. 'll be judge of that.". "Brrrm! How about breathalyzing ? I was the one in charge?" Huffer called out. A policeman looked in vain for where the voice came from. He got into Huffer and looked about inside, and concluded that the voice was being radioed in by some joker, even though Huffer tried to explain what he was. [103] The policeman got out and ordered red check shirt to be handcuffed and the rest questioned, to find what asinine ass was trying to make him believe at his age that lorries can talk. Then Huffer's arms, which go up behind his cab corners, rotated downwards and untelescoped, lifting his front end in the air. The policeman thought it was a goods handling device misbehaving from that lot of drunks mis-setting it. Then Huffer's cab collapsed partly, revealing his head, and his rear end split into legs. "As you see, fleshling, I was in charge of myself. I'm the one to breathalyze.". said Huffer. "Er!? Holy Cybertron! Matrix preserve us!" the policeman yelped, and said frightened gibberish, as his tidy mental partition barrier between the real world of his work and adult life, and the imaginary world of his children's Transformers cartoons and stories, broke down completely and left his mind disordered. He felt giddy. "Albert, what are you on about?" said the other policeman looking round to see his mate. He also knew enough Transformers fiction to see and recognise Huffer. "Ye catfish!" he exclaimed, "Never did I think I'd see a real one of !" "Phew! Then you can see it too, Joe?" said Albert, "Then it exists. If it thinks I want to breathalyze its dirty diesel-powered exhaust pipe, it's mistaken. Modern advances in robotics and computers, had to happen some time. Best go and leave them. Nothing to prosecute here.", and explained what Cybertron and the Creation Matrix were. The men got back onto Huffer, who wondered why humans waste money on poisoning themselves with ethyl alcohol. [104] James in Wheeljack delivered the microchips and drove back to his works. The others were still away. James got out of Wheeljack. The rush hour in town was much longer than usual, because of extra traffic attracted by a pop group. "Pop music, pop music, pop music, until people get addicted to the noise and stress that it causes, and the delicate hearing nerve endings in the inner ear get so beaten up faster than they can heal, that they get half deaf from it. Don't go to more than one disco a week!" said Wheeljack irritatedly, and drove away to get petrol. James went into his rear garage. "What the !&^%$#@!" he said aloud. [105] James found the door unlocked, although he had left it locked. Inside, a large group of filthy tramps and their filthy scavengings stood or sat or lay about. "Get - out - now, before I call the police! How did you get in? This is part of my factory, not a derelict building!" James ordered. "Aw, please, we're all settled in." said a tramp. "I'm a gentleman of the road, and I will not be spoken to like that, my good man." said another, putting on airs, as that sort will. "Never mind! Get out now, before I call the police, and take your mess with you." James ordered, and started counting down from ten. "No, they don't! They stay here." said Mrs.Jones, coming in behind him and telling him off as if he was a naughty little boy, "Don't rely on your tin cans, they're all away. I can count to eight! 3 cars, 2 lorries, towtruck, ambulance, bird. They've nowhere to go! All this space, you can spare some!, and if you won't give it, I'm taking it! Learn to share!". "Mrs.Jones!" James replied angrily, "You and your latest silly pet scheme! need this space, which is mine and not a dosshouse! `All that whatever-it-is, you can spare some': that's your ritual warcry! Things aren't usually that simple! Well, can't spare space, and if I did, my neighbours would complain!". "They stay!" Mrs.Jones countered, "`Never Chellingham churls a cheese's rind / a mouse's meal can be made to spare', and you're as bad. I arrange for poor Mr.Brownley's grass to be cut tidy, and your talking car stops it. I said to that curate at St.Andrews that he could have those flowers from Mr.Bertram's garden which were just standing there, and he took them - and someone told Mr.Bertram, who took them back from right in the very church! [see 89] A real `Tale from the Crypt' as nasty as any fictional one! Just for a gilded bauble flower show prize! I arrange talks, people including you lot get them cancelled. I promise people's services, and they let me down. Why should I `ask first'? They always come out with some excuse. And, all that stuff in that great bulging rucksack of yours, share that round for a start! You can spare some of it! People can always manage on less!". "Not always, not that easily!" James exclaimed, "It's office papers in my pack! No use to them! Often things can't be spared!". "Papers, papers, the land wallows in papers! Carry something useful around in case you can give some away! Atone for meanness!". "No. I'm calling the police now.". "Sit tight, you lot!" said Mrs.Jones to the tramps, "Tell him why, tell him your history.". One of the tramps, sitting on the floor against a wall, said: "At first there were plenty of cheap beds. Then the old dosshouse shut without warning. We came back to find everything including our stuff stripped out burning in the yard. (The place got turned into a posh club.) So the new dosshouse charged twice as much, then four times as much, but we still got in somehow. Then the Aunt Sally [= Salvation Army] had builders in. Then Worcester's Aunt Sally burnt down and all their dossers crowded in here. Then the empty house we found, we were turned out after just three days. Then the new dosshouse went: bulldozers came in one day, and our stuff in it. Office block there now. Then we got into part of St.Andrews crypt, but two men came who said they were workmen, and turned us out. One of them had a blowtorch with its cylinders on his back like a rucksack. He burnt me with it because I wasn't fast enough going. I always thought those two were crooks: your robot caught them, but then barricaded up the place like Fort Knox. Then Smith & Malton's didn't want us, so we went in some bushes in the park, but we were turned out of there. So Mrs.Jones, bless her heart, found us this place. You wouldn't push us on again, would you, bitte mein Herr Wernicke?". "Very fine and well rehearsed." said James, "Pity I'm not some immigrant fresh from the boondocks from Germany, despite my name. There was never an `old dosshouse'. There was never a `new dosshouse'. The workhouse shut last century. There's only been the Salvation Army, and they've always been open. So much of that fancy speech was lies that I don't believe any of it! If I let you stay here, you'll start lighting fires and pestering the neighbourhood, and it'll end up as a Skid Row. Get out. Others of my people'll be back some time.". "Threaten, bluster, argue!" Mrs.Jones replied, "The Aunt Sally costs and in there they can't move for rules. In here their stuff won't get swept up by dustmen every night. And the new market feeds all its edible rubbish to pigs and burns the rest. Total loss, except yet more overfed pork for the overfed. All this space, you can spare some.". "I say no! The neighbours say no! We can't do with them! I need my space myself!" said James, "You say: `Spare some of this; sell that and give away the money; use your free time for ...', etc. What about ? Hoist saw in your house when he brought those papers from Mrs.Allington who you ordered to drive drunk in a silly panic over a recipe [see 23]. For a start, sell that fancy bureau and bookcase, and use packing case tops like I did when I was starting here!". "I need it to keep my project papers in order, else the maid'd mix them up and square them into one tall pile and ages for me to get them sorted again, or she'd throw some away thinking I had too many. Things have to be organized." said Mrs.Jones. "Your endless raids on people's flowers: plenty untouched in your own garden! Practise what you preach!" exclaimed James. "I need them growing to give a good impression when people call about my matters.". "You tell people to give up all sorts of things, but you spend no end on a maid's wages!, like a posh titled lady.". "I'm too busy with my matters to do all my own housework and fetching!". "You say: `All that space, you can spare some'. Only you and your maid in your house. Spare space enough in there!". "People that have to see me about my matters would keep away, if I let anybody doss in there. I need to give a good impression when people call about my matters.". "Oh, I see. Everything of yours is necessary and you need it. Everything of other people's is surplus that can be spared. That's what they all say. Next time you praise to the skies the selflessness of your Caius Vedilius who you say `once even gave away his own qwertyuiop when a beggar called and he hadn't anything else to give him' because he'd kept encouraging tramps to come round begging, give away your own stuff first! Other people sometimes need their own money and stuff! Don't thieve! Ask the owner! Don't bully! You simply like to feel you're boss, ordering people around and making them lose things and bow down to you, the old monkey instinct to impose inconvenience as a symbol of being above them in the `pecking order'. Leave people alone. And if I ever again hear of you `not asking people first because they'd have refused', I'll be straight into your house and take back the equivalent of what you pinched.". "[106] As far as I am concerned, Caius Vedilius and his good deeds exist. He lived in the Roman villa whose foundations are behind Chellingham church. He gave away many things precious to himself. So did his son Julius and his grandson Aelius, whatever their own ...". said Mrs.Jones. "And they very likely attracted every tramp in the county," James angrily interrupted, "who then hung around robbing and thieving. And people start leaving productive jobs to beg when they find that's easier. I'm sorry, but security for the means of production is the first requirement in keeping the world, including your precious vagrants, supplied! If you give your seed corn to a beggar, what will you sow for next year's crop? Far more food lost than what you should have withheld and sown. I don't care what you call me, I'm going to keep on committing the ultimate sin, namely, planning ahead despite whining beggars' scruffy little wants now!". "Caius lived! What matters is the Caius who is in my mind, and should be in yours but you won't let him in, not your disillusioning disproofs from dusty books of the dead past. We live now! He lived!" Mrs.Jones exclaimed, getting more and more shrill and excited, "And Aelius's son Aegidius who was put to death, and all his household with him, by that Anglo-Saxon chief Ceolla's barbarian sword. In the looted ruins of the villa and the village Ceolla [pronounced `Kayol-lah' or `Chayol-lah'] and his gang gorged themselves on food promised to the poor, who came to him for it as they always had and instead got drawn swords. Yes, that `cured the beggar problem'! And to obliterate even the memory of Vedilius he renamed the place after himself Chellingham, from `Ceollinga hamm', the pasture of the gang of Ceolla, short for Ceolwulf - Keelwolf - Shipwolf - Pirate! Sieg Heil Kielwolf mit seinem Wehrmacht in der fifth century equivalent of landing craft up the Severn to here! Not a time I admire! Sooner I'd call the place by its proper name Vediliacum! Honour him, the harmless sheep that unstintingly gave useful warm wool, not sword-men named after the murdering wolf!". "Of the Romans that lived at the villa, nothing is known!" James angrily countered, "Of Ceolla, nothing is known but his name, and that only by reconstructing it from the place name! I just to keep hearing your pet mythos that you invented and you keep trotting out full of every sort of ingenious patheticness!, like once when you hijacked a class who'd come to hear an astronomy lecture. People hang onto you like leeches, saying they're in need when they aren't, or that they know worthy cases when they don't, and you haven't the bottle to defer the impulse to give till you've checked validity of cases! Like the Simmonses [see 23] that you trusted money to that you talked out of people: several times people told you not to trust them, but you refused to believe that your honourable righteous etc helpers could of embezzling; but when someone pinched their list of beneficiaries, and checked the people named on it, he found that hardly any of them existed. Then the two left you. Never mind you saying that every stray immediate need must be satisfied before anyone's allowed to plan ahead: I - can't - have - tramps - dossing - in - my - storeroom! Even if I did, the neighbours wouldn't let me! Brrrm! Back to here and now! There's much that can't be divided into one portion more without it mattering!". "`Brrrm': that dirty diesel-powered noise imitated from your robots! Talk like a human!" Mrs.Jones replied, "And I won't mess about with excuses that things depend on things that depend on things that depend! That is an evasion, and evasions must be countered or ignored. You have sheltered space; these people need sheltered space. End of discussion. At Smith & Malton's works, Catfood Joe who I appointed to lead this group, to keep unity and thus strength, wore his larynx out before that night security man let them sleep in that old lorry garage there! But he gave way in the end, and they moved in, and they thought they were safe and sheltered, no street cleaners taking their cardboard boxes away, no Aunt Sally men imposing rules and rules and wanting a lodging fee ...". "And they said they were `only dossing' there," James interrupted, "but they started accumulating rubbish, and turning bins out, and pilfering, and pestering people, and lighting fires, and nosing around, and scrounging, and people around started to shout at Smith & Malton's for letting them in.". "But Smith & Malton's workmen came down on them like wolves on sheep," Mrs.Jones angrily resumed, "tooled up to the nines like strike pickets or riotsquad. Never mind the details, the helmets and the shields and the pickaxe handles and the walkietalkies used on them by ugly-minded industrial men making ugly-minded machinery such as those dredgersubs that they make, that suck up everything that they find, or swallow it with an arm with a roofed conveyor running up it from a clamshell grab on the end, and in for grinding up and dissolving to recover component metals and energy goes everything that previously could have been picked off an open tip and sold for a bit. (I suppose you're pleased at that, that it `stops rubbish pickers from cheating people selling scavenged rubbish as nearly new', I've heard all that.) I wouldn't like to meet one of underwater! Anyway, in marched a load of Smith & Malton's men, in thick overalls, gas masks or cloth masks so nobody'd know them, helmets with visors down, transparent shields, pickaxe handles, and Captain Blowtorch himself that runs the place had a lighted oxyacetylene torch running off cylinders strapped to his back like an aqualung. That's why he's called that. He's 17 stone, and none of it fat. He has a great bulging chest pouch to keep stuff in. He looks like a walking welding shop. He owns the place, but one of your funny computers does most of the paperwork and routine managing there, which leaves him to do shop floor work much of the time, such as welding, which they say he's very good at. They advanced in rank, and the tramps couldn't stop them. No point trying to fight that sort of thing. No point calling the cops, they'd only support Smith & Maltons's side. `Leave that! It's only rubbish! 'll throw it away for you!' Captain Blowtorch ordered when one of them started to take away an old orange box with bits of stuff in. He said afterwards that it was `important computer output' that had been taken for cooking fire fuel. Paper paper paper rules the world nowadays. They left. Several of them had mistrusted Smith & Malton's all along. But they found the way out held against them. A riotsquad could be equipped quite well from industrial safety kit. They were all shoved against a wall, and handcuffed and fingerprinted and questioned at length and searched and photographed. "I've got nothin'' said one, that Captain Blowtorch himself searched. Captain Blowtorch waved a metal detector over him and found a knife, which he destroyed leaving the poor man with no way to cut up a bit of food for himself, and a funny shaped lump of brass with dials on like clock faces that he'd been hoping to sell for a bit. "It's mine! I it! I need it to sell for enough to buy a few cheap meals!' the tramp pleaded. Captain Blowtorch didn't listen, but looked at it and read out a serial number off it. Another workman looked in a list and said it'd gone missing from Jackson Gauges nine days before, `I wish I could believe you sometimes. It's worth more like several thousand cheap drinks', notice `drinks', that stale accusation, they aren't all winos, `and you would sell it for scrap!' he said. Search, fingerprint, photograph, seize any kit. That's his usual routine. Doesn't only happen to tramps. Once I got talking to a birdwatcher who'd run foul of that place. He'd been one of three that went to birdwatch in Smith & Maltons's back land before it was wired off. (That land of his should be a common, for the poor to graze a few geese or a house cow and collect a bit of firewood, but that's a different matter.) A squad of Smith & Malton's workmen jumped them in full riotsquad kit and handcuffed them and took all their kit and bundled them into a van whose sides hinge up, and hauled them up before Captain Blowtorch. `What now?' said Captain Blowtorch, who sitting at a computer terminal, still wearing blowtorch and helmet and all. If there's one thing that gives me the shivers, it's a man with cylinders strapped to his back and blowtorch cylinder head pressure gauges `looking' over his shoulders, and a live blowtorch head in his hand or clipped across his chest. `Three men in our van. We found them observing on our back land. They say they're birdwatching. We seized from them 3 binocs, 4 cameras, telescope on tripod, ex-army nightsight, camping kit.' the squad leader reported very neatly and police-like. `Tweetybirds, or vehicle movements? There've been three attempts on our wages van this year. Have their film developed.' said Captain Blowtorch. `Have done. More than half of the shots had parts of the back of our works on them.' said the squad leader. Of course if you photograph birds near a big factory, parts of the factory'll get into some of the shots! `Birds everywhere, too many round the men's soft fruit on their allotments, why come here!' said Captain Blowtorch, `Last lot said they were studying plants. After that I had the back land dosed with weedkiller to stop that excuse. Destroy their kit. Dump them outside number 2 gate. Enough of noseyparkers. Time we properly security wired our back land off.'. So there it is. `Captain Blowtorch', I still don't know if he's Mr.Smith or Mr.Malton or neither. A true heir of Ceolla of the sordid sword who murdered the Vedilii! The tramps had to go. I told them to stay together: `unity is strength'. Now they are here. Optimus in the Transformer stories didn't turn away Blaster and his six followers stranded here on Earth!, he let them stay.". [107] Mrs.Jones finished at last. James Wernicke replied: "Blaster's seven were not tramps. Do not compare inappropriately. This lot of scruffs have no skills that I could employ them for. Even simple labouring they wouldn't stick at without a whip at their backs, that's why they're wandering and scavenging now and not at work or signed on at a labour exchange anywhere. Designing machines and keeping them working, matters, to keep the world supplied with basic commodities cluding food for your precious vagrants. More important than not letting people effectively protect the means of production from sabotage by petty theft. Mr.Malton, to give Captain Blowtorch his proper name, is an invading thug becoming local ruler by the sword, as you seem to imagine. He went through university to PhD in engineering and metallurgy, then left and bought a backstreet workshop and built himself up from there getting himself in hock to shareholders telling him what to do without knowing anything about his trade. That's why you won't find `Smith & Malton's' in the stocks and shares pages of newspapers. Mr.Smith's a man who worked with him for a while early. He's often slept in his kit. Not for him to `lose as a luxurious lord what he gained as a hardy warrior'. I don't suppose Ceolla was like you describe him, anyway. Nothing is known of him but the name, but it was the Anglo-Saxons, including likely Ceolla, that first used much in England the heavy plough that needed eight oxen to pull it, so they could plough and sow heavy clay land that was only used for grazing before, producing more food instead of fretting about how to distribute the insufficient food that they had before. Even if he had to send beggars away empty rather than give them his seed corn or work oxen that he needed to plough and sow for next year's crop. I've not got the time to invent a full Ceolla mythos of my own. You and those tramps go , or I call the police.". "No! Stay put! I'll confront this one right through! No more skulking off at the first officious order to go away!" said Mrs.Jones to the tramps, and then to James: "Disbelieve this, disbelieve that, doesn't soften your heart?" "OK." said James, "I saw the newspaper report: `Affray at Smith & Malton's. Workmen eject vagrants.'. Still doesn't mean I can afford to let them stay here.". The tramps still sat or stood about in James's rear garage. They and Mrs.Jones planned to wait, for James would have to go back some time to what Mrs.Jones called "his busy-busy work". And James was only one man confronting them all, despite his firm stand. The two heard metallic clanks and air hissings from outside round the corner of the building. Then heavy metal feet approached; James wondered if it was Optimus returning sooner than expected, and Mrs.Jones knew that trouble, electromechanical sentient variety, was coming. Some of the tramps got nervous and started picking things up. Then Mrs.Jones saw what was coming.