MRS.JONES AND OTHERS "Mrs.Jones once came to our school to take a lesson." said Jack, "She told about a Roman called Caius Vedilius who lived at the Roman villa behind Chellingham Church and he gave everything of his to the beggars, and his sons after him the same, but the last one, who was Aegidius Vedilius, was killed by an Anglo-Saxon chief called Cheela [correctly Ceolla, pronounced Kayol-lah or Chayol-lah], who killed the beggars, and it was sad, but the headmaster came in and ordered her off and told us to forget what she had said as it never happened and she's obsessed and a bit funny in the head.". "Aye, she billeted a load of tramps in here, and James and Shockwave had to sling them out and clean up after them [see 104 etseq]." said Optimus, "Don't give anything to tramps, whatever they say. They're hard cheeky cunning liars. They say they're all sorts of people temporarily in need, and most of it goes on drink. Don't believe stranger. Don't give anything to any stranger, whatever he says, however pathetic it sounds: most of them are liars and can perfectly well do a day's work. Drink's why a lot of them are tramps in the first place. Once they get the idea that someone or some place is an easy touch, the word goes round and they come in crowds annoying everybody else near also and scavenging and thieving. Genuine need that won't mean you'll be feeding them for ever, yes. The lazy and persistent vagrants, no. `Charity begins at home', it is said: attend first to your own people that you know about. Feeding the world needs first of all and most importantly even if it means being very rough on thieves, as Smith & Malton's know, the amount of people they've caught nosing round their back land that couldn't explain their business properly. Trying to cure crime or get stolen property back by making criminals feel ashamed, as some suggest, hardly ever works in reality ... Oh, Mr.Malton, what brings you in here?". Mr.Malton, nicknamed Captain Blowtorch, who owned Smith & Malton's Ltd, came in. His size, thick overalls, heavy hobnailed boots, helmet with visor, bulky chest pouch for tools and accessories, and oxyacetylene torch clipped to his chest and fed from large cylinders strapped to his back like an aqualung with their pressure gauges looking over his shoulders, made him look rather lethal to those not used to seeing him; he did as much shop floor work as anyone else there, for a computer from Wernicke's did most of the routine management and accounts and paperwork. "I just came to find if one of you's ready to come over to install those microchips." he said, "Oh yes, that lot you were talking about, Op, they were nosing round our back, I took some of my workmen to challenge them, they said they were in the RSPB [= Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] checking on rare birds seen in the area, they showed all the proper documents, and I let them go; but a week later one of them was in a bunch that we caught trying to rob our wages van. I'm fed up of birdwatchers and botanists wandering round my back. Ten may be genuine, and the eleventh's spying to steal. I can't risk it. To me now, `RSPB' means `Ready to Spy with Powerful Binoculars'. A great lot of rare birds and plants live round my non-ferrous metals store building, it seems. Last week some of my men caught two men climbing in and they said they were studying rare plants, but they were obvious gipsy types and they had in their packs stuff that the police and my men identified as stolen. [152] I had a run-in with Mrs.Jones at home also, two Christmases ago. She knocked on the door. My wife offered her a cup of tea and went back in the kitchen. A bit later I came in and found Mrs.Jones in the sitting room with my children, who weren't opening or playing with their presents. They seemed very interested in her, and I could tell that she had persuaded them with one of her ingenious ways of begging for people's stuff and time. As I came in, she looked at me as if expecting trouble. `Why aren't you opening your presents?' I asked my children. `Auntie Jones and us are going to take them to give ...' one of them started. `She was telling us all about ...' another of them said at the same time. `But can't we even keep one?, Auntie Jones?' another pleaded. (I've got three children.) `No. We agreed that. Caius'd never have kept one back, diminishing the gift, less help given than could be.' Mrs.Jones said firmly. As soon as I heard that name from her Vedilius fiction that she keeps on obsessing and parroting, I knew what had happened. `What the $#@'s she been talking you into?' I demanded, `They're presents, not hers.'. `Get out!' I said, grabbing her wrists and shoving her out of the house, `Coming on here in a false excuse to pinch my children's presents by telling them your pet set of fairy sob stories. This is the day for happiness and forgetting day to day anxieties, but you coming filling their heads with nasty little torturing moral dilemmas, and when your hypnotism wears off they'll realize they've been conned out of their Christmas presents by a stranger.'. `All those presents!" she replied, `All substance, no teaching of things that need teaching! Shoving me out like a stray dog, you dirty oversized industrial thug, like a wolf, which is ever so gentle with its own cubs and murders everything else! I was just explaining to your precious children the need to ...'. `... see their presents that they've been looking forward to, sold for pence to satisfy your desire to meddle and see people losing things to satisfy your monkey instinct to be pack leader, for that's all it is at bottom. You called yourself `Auntie Jones', but you're no relative of ours, coming in scrounging and thieving. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, `Get to thy lair, Shere Khan!'!'. She strode off down my path and slammed my front gate and marched away, talking to herself: `Agh! Another load of `pearls wasted on a swine'! I should've known better that to try at Captain Blowtorch's! I'd just got those kids talked round to my way of looking at things, when he stomps in and ruins everything. All those presents, the amount they could've fetched for my project. All those self centred little households that often don't want even their own grandparents or in-laws living with them. he compared me to Kipling's nasty murdering tiger as bad as Ceolla! It's to line my pocket. It's to line my pocket. It's to line my pocket.'. My children opened their presents and started playing with them. `Those people that she talked about?' one of them asked. `Then we don't have to take the presents to where she said to? But we promised.' another asked doubtfully. `Well, I'm cancelling it for you.' I said, a bit roughly, `You keep all your presents. Forget her. There were no people called Vedilius. That story never happened. She's not a relative, just a local busybody and %$# cunning with it. Don't let strangers in or talk to them, whatever they say! I've checked, all our food's still there, lucky she didn't get around to scrounging all to feed tramps or sell or some such daftness. She can't see anyone keeping something, but she tries to make them give it away. She's a pest. Anyway, forget her. Put all the wrappings in the dustbin liner in the corner, to keep tidy. Dinner at 1pm. See then what Aunt Mary (proper aunt!) brings.'. that evening she tried to scavenge the fag end of that forlorn hope by ringing us, but I found a `flea to put in her ear'. `Hallo?' she said, `I presume you've forgotten your hasty words about what I was explaining?'. `What?' I replied, `You've already spoilt my children's Christmas, or would have if I hadn't come in just then.'. `All your precious compact little households. I was just explaining a few things that need explaining about the outside world ...'. `They've been looking forward to Christmas and presents.' I said, `They've had enough last minute disappointments, with promised trips out rained off, and suchlike; I'm not going to disappoint them again at this time! All I know is that you tried to scrounge my children's Christmas presents.'. `Very well, Captain Blowtorch,' she said, `enjoy your industrial false world made of iron and electronics instead of people, and your cosy compact little family household, while you may! Nothing lasts for ever! Out there there are ...'. `... things that I'll tell them about when they're ready for it.' I said, and put the receiver down.". [153] "Mrs.Jones this, Mrs.Jones that." said Optimus, "She's in her `eclipse phase' for the next several months, luckily. She stays at home and does nothing much. Brrrm!, the microchips! I'll send Wheeljack to install them when he's through his checkup.". "They're brain chips for a grab dredger-submarine with an onboard recycler, like we make." said Captain Blowtorch, "They're the lot that had a narrow escape that time from the tramps that Mrs.Jones let into one of our buildings. They turned our dustbins out and then got the package the microchips were in when they pilfered round goods-incoming. We were only just in time to stop them from burning it for the fuel value of its wrappings. Those miserable scruffs soon found what our riotsquad gear's for, the hard way.". "One of those tramps had a narrow escape himself, two days ago. Shockwave was clearing up rubbish and old junked furniture cleared out of derelict high-rise flats which were being knocked down." said Optimus. "Those flats were a disaster." said Mr.Malton, "Anyone could muck about in the corridors out of sight of people and police; the lifts kept breaking down; people left rubbish everywhere; the doorman's office was hardly ever manned.". "Anyway, he was clearing up what the demolition men were stripping out ..." said Optimus, and said what he had been told by Shockwave about what had happened. Two days before, Shockwave, in vehicle form, went to the demolition site and was helping the demolition men by consuming on site much stuff that would otherwise have to be expensively tipped. He unfolded his right arm. Old mattresses, old beds, broken furniture, heaters and boilers and tangles of pipe and wire vanished into his grab and up the roofed conveyor belt running up his arm to his grinder, which with loud splintering and tearing noises reduced to fragments all those odds and ends that were part of the lives of people who had lived there until dirt and endemic petty crime and general nuisance drove them out. Now they were merely scrap to be disposed of. A television tube exploded in his grinder. Disease-laden fleas and lice and bedbugs found no blood to suck from his steel innards. A traceless end came to £1247 in old banknotes along with the old settee that it was hidden in. How it got there matters not to this story, for neither Shockwave nor the demolition men knew that it was there. The hard steel hydraulic powered grab squashed the settee enough to make it swallowable. A bulge passed up the conveyor cover to the grinder, which destroyed it. He transformed and stood up and used the suction tube on his left arm to clear an accumulation of small debris out of half-demolished rooms. Again he had no time to sort through it all. Meanwhile, inside him an advanced type of `fuel cell' dissolved everything and efficiently recovered component energy and metals. It consumed many sorts of things: anonymous broken pieces of ground-up things; splintered furniture wood; paper; £1247 in banknotes and the torn remains of the cocoa tin they had long been hidden in; a diamond ring, long ago thrown across a now vanished room in a row and never found; lost keys and coins; dust and fluff and bits of plaster; all were treated the same. By evening he had taken in an impressive bulk of stuff; he finished breaking it down and dissolving it overnight parked there. In the morning, apart from purified separated metals, only a little unoxidizable matter remained; certainly no unburnt or half-burnt run-off or fumes to cause pollution. He kept the `heavy metals' for re-use instead of letting them become pollution, and recovered much metal that had got dilutely dispersed among other stuff by the carelessness of men. In this case, he did not need the electricity output from this fuel cell, so he used it to generate hydrocarbon fuel from the water and carbon dioxide that it output. "Two more shovels and a lot of salvage went last night. Night security say they saw nothing." said one of the workmen as they went home that first day, leaving Shockwave parked silently in the boarded-off site. "I wonder if they'll have any better luck catching any of those nightly pests night?" said another. They went home. A little later five boys, four on bicycles and one on a 125cc light motorcycle, arrived. "They've gone. Lets go in and do the usual." said one of them, pushing up a loose board of the wooden surrounding wall. "We want quiet." said Paul Smith, who was one of them, in a `common' voice carefully chosen to sound rough and threatening, "You switch yer engine off and pedal, that noisy tinny smelly little %#$, or I'll $#@ to your dad what yer doing.". "OK, OK, Paul, why can't I go to the pictures as I wanted to?". "Never mind. Button it." said Paul. They took their bicycles inside. One of them saw Shockwave and started to remark about `that funny badge on that purple tanker'. "Button it." Paul Smith interrupted without looking at the `tanker', "Leave it. Too many alarms on cars and things nah'days, and people come runnin'. Leave the bikes be'ind this `ere junk'eap where nobody'll see `em. Then foller me.". They obeyed. One of them had had other plans for that evening, but dared not disobey Paul. "How come you can keep coming out with us?" one of them asked Paul, "I thought you were already on bail for that other business. It was in the local paper.". "None of yer $#@ business." said Paul. (His father was on overtime, and Paul's mother thought he was at his aunt's, to get out from `under his mother's feet'.) "But ..." started one. "Orders, orders, like we were in the army, the bossy little unpleasant %$#." one thought, but did not say it. "Try their site 'ut again." said Paul, "When we go to the -whatever-, 'll do any talkin' needed. No back-answers, or I'll %^%$ yer after ...", and broke off as a lorry engine started across the site and there were a succession of grinding and scraping noises. "What's that? Get to the `Wolf 'Ole' and keep quiet!" Paul Smith ordered urgently. [155] Shockwave's load had digested down some way, so he unfolded his grab arm and started picking up rubbish again. Old wooden furniture crunched up satisfyingly in his powerful rotary grinder, in the same way as when people like nuts. He also quickly disposed of a pile of old bedding; he had thought that he had cleared it all up in daytime. As the bedding reached the top of his intake, an eye that he had inside the entry to his grinder saw something. "Great Matrix." he thought, "The third one I've nearly recycled along with rubbish, and one day I likely inadvertently will, if I haven't already without knowing it. I'd like to, but some fleshlings may complain.". He stopped his grinder and folded its blades back to make a clear wide passage, which he pumped something through into his large object compartment. He would let the security men see about it in the morning. He got back to ordinary work. Removing a few more grabfuls from the junkheap revealed four bicycles and a 125cc light motorcycle. Nobody was looking, and he had no sympathy with people that mess about on sites at night, so he scooped up the bicycles and the motorcycle in his grab, squashed them into a cylindrical bolus, and swallowed them. Metal tore and spokes twanged as his grinder broke them down. "My first motorcycle. Smith & Malton's makes good machinery." he thought. [156] The boys' `Wolf Hole' was a surviving corner of a large half-demolished ground floor room. Looking through a glassless window in the graffiti daubed remains of a wall, they saw with dismay Shockwave's large dirty scarred steel clamshell grab with a fringe of wheels and handlebars. The fringe disappeared inside, and a bulge went up its intake, and there were scrapings and twangings of breaking spokes. The boys now knew that they could not now get home in time to pretend that they had never been out. In his alarm one of them said so aloud. Shockwave heard and drove round the end of the wall and asked them what they were doing. Those words they had heard before, and their reaction was, as usual, to run away. But Shockwave stopped diagonally across the room corner, blocking them in. His right side faced them, and he waved his grab arm threateningly. "Please. We weren't doing anything." a boy pleaded, looking frightenedly as Shockwave's purple-painted uncompromisingly mechanical high-capacity steel bulk. "You lot!" the driverless vehicle replied, through no larynx of flesh, from a sentient brain made not of living cells but of silicon, "Nearly every night you or some lot muck about this site. If you've got nowhere to go, go home.". "Only old stuff that nobody wanted." said another boy, forgetting Paul Smith's order for the rest to be silent in any confrontation. "Turn those bags and your pockets out! 'll be judge of that." Shockwave replied. "There's nobody in its cab!" said a boy. "You with the red tie, where did you get that spanner? And other people have complained about you lot." said Shockwave. "Transformer badge on it! Yet another of Werwolf Wer-nick's funny vehicles!" Paul Smith exclaimed, and lost his carefully practised threatening tone and started whining, "Please. Mr.Robot, let me go, I won't do it again, I promise, mummy mummy waioowh help.". "Tools going, stuff messed about, site office rummaged - no more of it!". "You don't know our names, ha ha ha hee hee hee.". "I know one of you at least, bossy swaggering twerp who goes back to the baby in a tight spot. Not knowing your names doesn't matter if I've got . A little trip for you scraplets. Not everybody can say they've ridden in Shockwave the Decepticon leader!". "Don't tell my father, <>, he'll ...". "Too late! The builders don't drive their dumpers all over your gardens, so you keep off their site and leave it alone.". His grab arm extended fully and swung round. A few minutes later he drove away leaving nothing, for his suction tube had cleared up a dropped shoe and a school cap. [157] Shockwave drove round the site perimeter inside the fence. A cat caterwauled somewhere near. Someone climbed the outside of the fence and looked over it, but saw Shockwave moving and backed off down. Shockwave thought that the night security guards would have seen that sort of intrusion themselves; then he realized that he had seen nothing of them, and wondered where they were. After some searching he found both guards in a hut in a sheltered corner. "Oh you are." he said, "No wonder thieves get in. Lets see what you've got here.". "Er - what happened?" asked one of the guards. Shockwave's left side was towards them. "Nice cosy little `home from home' you two've got here, `all mod. cons.', to do anything but keep watch as you are paid to." he said, and unfolded his left arm from its resting position down the side of his back tank. Successive accurate jabs of the arm's wide powerful untelescoping suction tube into and around the guards' hut picked up cards and money off a table, and interesting books, and two six-packs of beer laden with drunken sleepiness and lack of concentration, and warm bedding. A jab at a guard's chest accurately, without disturbing anything else, sucked up a portable stereo that had been drowning out night noises that the guard should have been listening for. Rattling noises passed up the steel tube and then up the wide flexible tube that ran from it into his tank. The two old mattresses were too big for his suction tube, but he sucked each of them against the tube nozzle and threw them over himself to his grab, which swallowed them; old cartons used for extra shelter soon followed them. This clearance revealed two helmets with visors, and two walkietalkies, and two pickaxe handles with wrist straps. Pointing at them with his suction tube, Shockwave said angrily, "And under all that dossing stuff there's your kit, thrown aside out of reach! What if intruders come? Never mind scruffy dossing in old cartons like tramps instead of patrolling!". "Our stuff!" one of the guards complained, "It cost! Give it back! It's ours!, you - - Decepticon!". "Ten-shun! Put your kit on! Then get on patrol!, you idle collection of gasket-blown spare parts." Shockwave ordered, "And you, blue shirt, swallow that slovenly chewing gum down and give me the packet!" he continued, pointing his high-powered suction tube at them threateningly, "Any moment you may need to be understood urgently correctly first time, and you can't with stuff in your mouth. Apart from that, gum chewing's a scruffy lazy dirty habit. And you, check shirt, put that fag out and give me the rest of the fags and the lighter. No smoking on duty! Never mind you sloppy-minded lot always needing to be doing something with your mouths! If you two'd patrolled properly, you'd have found the loose fence panel that those thieves kept getting in through! That stuff that you shouldn't have been using on duty cost less than the copper and lead and tools that I found on that lot that I caught among rubbish tonight!, that you should have noticed and caught while patrolling instead of idling in here!". "Please, I've got expenses." one of the guards complained as they put their kit on, "Please don't tell about this, or my daytime boss ...", and stopped too late to avoid `spilling some beans' that he did not want to be spilt. "Brrrm!" said Shockwave loudly and angrily, "Moonlighting, is it? Use this job as your dormitory to get your beauty sleep for your daytime job, is it? I'll see what your boss says. You're paid to and ! I, a Decepticon leader and warrior, having to run about after you two idle skiving dormice!". [158] He wondered whether anyone would notice or bother chasing up if five vandals and a thieving tramp vanished without trace, and then decided that letting the legal authorities handle the matter would create less trouble in the end. "Ten-shun!" he continued, "Batons on your belts, not for leaning on! You aren't that senile yet. Do at least the tail end of the job you are paid to do! Radio the police to come and collect six suspects, and statements. Then keep moving, on patrol. And don't slip out to buy newspapers to read instead of staying alert.". One of the guards called on his walkietalkie for the police. "Agh. That I should see the day when I am ordered about by a talking dustcart!" said the other sleepily, "(yawn) So what, the firm'll get it back from the insurance. (yawn) And I'll be sleepy and making mistakes in my daytime job. I need both jobs, I've a mortgage to pay. (yawn)". "What the insurance pay, comes out of customers' premiums, which go up. And it still causes delays and loss." Shockwave replied, "Moonlighting cuts into sleep and causes accidents, and it gets found out. One fictional case that I heard of was when a hospital matron went to a cafe and the waitress that came was one of her nurses moonlighting. What if she'd given someone a wrong injection through being short of sleep?". "Well!" said one of the guards to the other later as they boredly patrolled and repatrolled the site, "Into that thing's grinder and recycler without trace goes either this job or my daytime job!, after this affair, if the boss here starts checking up. Oh well. Good things don't last. Lovely having two pay packets a week. (yawn)". "Walking round and round this place," said the other guard, "and my portable stereo's in that thing's stomach, so nothing to listen to but someone's shut-out dog, and a tomcats' concert, and distant traffic. (yawn) And it got all our beer also. (yawn) Nothing else to do or listen to till the morning birds start. Shouted at like I was in the Army. (yawn)". A police siren sounded outside, and someone thumped the site gate. The guards let the police in. "Five vandals for you. don't just call them naughty boys and let them go to do it again. We're sick of them." said a guard. "Where are they?" asked a policeman. The five boys had been pumped through dark narrow steel passages and found themselves in a cramped dirty steel storage compartment. "Ooh - er - where am I?" asked one dazedly, relieved to find that he had missed the grinder that he had heard in operation. "(yawn) I dreamed that a funny dustcart chased me." said another. "Itch itch! And I'm too tightly wedged in here to scratch myself.". "What's it going to do with us? Firms with fancy new equipment.". "Not a dream! We're in some sort of iron tank! My pockets are empty! Something went through all our pockets to find our names.". "It sent us to sleep somehow, to search us for clues who we are, and then it'll tell all our parents and teachers. Paul! It was your idea to come here!". "I'm a (hic) reputable purveyor of shalvizhd mat - mateliar - I musht inshisht -" said a man's voice in there. "Oh? And I've got some of his `livestock'! No wonder I itch. That thing tanked us along with some rubbish picking tramp that it swallowed along with rubbish that he was sleeping among.". "'Ere! When we get out, you take your fleas and lice back!". " it lets us out! Help! Let us out! Mummy! Mummy!". An electrosynthesized voice then spoke from outside the compartment: "You lot should have thought of that you came on site thieving. 'll decide whether to let you out of me, or whether to ...". The police that came in saw a large flap door open in the side of Shockwave's back tank, revealing mechanism including a horizontal cylindrical storage compartment. A flap door then opened in the side of the compartment, revealing five boys and a ragged tramp packed in tightly - like frogs in a stork's stomach. "OK, you six, get out of me." Shockwave ordered, "In the small compartment labelled `3' is my statement on a length of printout paper, and their pocket contents.". The six, blinking at the daylight, climbed out and down over Shockwave's stowed-away suction tube and were shoved into a police van. "Yes, that's me!" said Albert Smith to his son Paul Smith in Worcester police station cell corridor, "Me called out of bed by police for you ! You can't keep out of things! Already on bail for the drugs matter, and you start up again setting up your own little bunch! ordering other children around, stealing, lying to us where you were.". "And I can't keep away from Trans-$#@-formers! Shockwave, now! Robots, robots!" Paul Smith moaned. The six were led handcuffed into the police station yard where there was more room. "My son said he was just watching, not taking part, and up that thing's intake went his 125cc Honda and was ground up and digested." complained one of the parents who the police had brought or called for. "Sorry, but the boss told me to." said Shockwave, who had brought the two guards and the daytime site boss there in his cab, "He - everybody round here - 's sick of kids, kids, like thieving picking monkeys. There's a new law coming out that says that parents must pay for damage that their children do, if the child can't pay. If they've got nowhere to go, they must go home.". "I'm the site boss." said a man in overalls and a safety helmet jumping down out of Shockwave's cab, "As far as I am concerned, hanging about on the edge of trouble's the same as taking part. When trouble starts, go right away from it and leave it, then you won't get blamed along with them.". "I see." said the same parent, "Counter-summonses on the way. Our sons' bicycles against a huge inflated bill for damage that our children are supposed to have done, plus a fat rakeoff and interest and fee and administration costs etc. Forget it.". "Oh heavens." said another parent, "I stopped thinking in terms of talking vehicles when ... If it's like that statement of yours says, no wonder your site boss was not very scrupulous about what happened to that lot's bicycles. Still doesn't stop that bicycle from being his, and not yours to gobble up like celery. He's been telling me he was going to a friend's.". "And you were on a bicycle! Where did you get it from!? I took your bicycle to help pay for the rates money that you stole and gambled away that time! Enough!" said Albert Smith to Paul Smith, "One more lie from you, one more penny or item on you that you can't give a good and true reason how you got it, one word to me or to anyone in that threatening tone or manner of yours, and you get the same again! Now you're in trouble with both sides of the law! In future, keep away from people and other children - keep out of premises - keep your hands off objects! No more of it! I should have done this long ago!!", and thrashed him soundly.