BRAITHWAITE [285] "You seem to be a lot at that factory called Braithwaite's in Tyneside, Wheeljack." said Jack Brown a few days later. "I've been advising them on some matters. They're making a sort of torpedo for the Navy, not explosive, but to pick up floating or sunken objects and return. There've been some foreign orders for them also. If you ask me, they're rather over-engineered for that sort of job, but that's how the Navy wants them. The television's going there live today!" Wheeljack replied. "I remember when the telly was there before." said Jack, "The announcer at the studio said they were a new cooperative who got their factory by occupying it, etc, `... the unions and an engineering firm are helping him. Over to a reporter on site.'. Then as he went to talk to Mr.Braithwaite, a microphone got too near to a control walkietalkie or something and there came over the air, faint but clear, the words: `Oh heavens, same as Mr.Malton at Smith & Malton's that time: overalls, helmet, backpack blowtorch, tools in chest pouch, not an office suit to his name, I bet - CRIKEY! For 'ssakes only let his top half into shot!'.". "That's how that firm started." said Wheeljack, and explained what had happened:- B & N (Imports) Ltd built a big warehouse and offices to store imported goods on a site in Tyneside where a coalmine had closed down a few years before. The place was completed and about to open. They heard of but ignored a big public meeting in the nearby town. There was a conference inside, of company sales policy planners and market researchers and suchlike. Then a big crowd of unemployed men from the town converged on the place and stormed it and occupied it, complaining of broken promises and wanting jobs there. One of the occupiers' leaders walked up to whoever looked like the most important of the businessmen there and held him tightly by the shirt collar, accusing him: "Where's our jobs? None while this place was being built, and now none to run this place! You import all men and materials. You said you'd provide local jobs. Where are they? We're taking over here, to run it properly!". "Who are you? This is a confidential meeting. Get out!" said the businessman, John Blore, not liking the look of the man's size and riotsquad-type gear and thick overalls and heavy hobnailed boots and helmet with visor, and blowtorch fed from oxygen and acetylene cylinders strapped to his back like a pack, and look as if he had few scruples what or who he used it on. He felt relieved that the blowtorch was unlit just then. The man also seemed to walk oddly; Blore looked down and gasped in astonishment and felt his hair stand on end. Below the normal but heavily muscular shoulders and chest and arms, the body widened and split (at the 11th thoracic vertebra) into two pelvises standing on four legs. Such was his first sight of the rare but known deformity called dipygus, the result of the embryo's rear end growing point jamming and splitting long before birth. He had seen similar things a few times, in the popular press, soon after their birth, and pitied them, and turned the page quickly. But to see something like that as an adult, half a head taller than he was, and apparently their leader! Nor did the backpack blowtorch and the capacious canvas chest pouch full of tools make the general effect any prettier, nor did the transparent shield slung on the back and the pickaxe handle with wrist strap dangling from one of the four hips. Followed by the other occupiers, the monster advanced, pushing him back into the room. "I'm John Braithwaite, who the men's union has appointed as the new boss here." the dipygus said, "You build this great place, all men brought in from far away, huge pre-assembled parts trucked in rather than pay a few local men to put it together. Even food and beer and newspapers trucked in rather than let your men buy it locally!". "I - khakh - didn't want to make shortages locally, buying stuff up ..." Blore whined, adjusting his disarranged necktie and broken front collar stud. "If the people round here saw a fiver a week all put together of your firm's and men's money, we were lucky! And we look like getting the same when the place is running!" said Braithwaite, "You import all this stuff past our noses instead of employing us to make it, or even handle and sort it. What men you do need, you bring in! Well, if you're so good at work, a little test: over there's a blowtorch and two pieces of mild steel that we've brought in. Make a right-angle edge to edge weld. Elementary stuff!". "That's welder's work. What's that to do with running a business?" said Blore. "Plenty! If you can't do the men's work, you can't understand their problems." said Braithwaite. "We're traders, not engineers! We've got a workshop for necessary maintenance, and that's all! Manufacturing's too much messing about." said Blore. "Time you learned some engineering, like used to be round here. You're now manufacturers, I say so. We're taking over and running the place to bring jobs to the town and money the country, not send it out to buy stuff in." said Braithwaite. "Oh are you? Get out, you - monstrosity! Enough of union troublemaking and sit-ins! Hobnail boots on my office floor - banging your cylinders on the panelling - ordering me to do workman's work -" Blore protested. "I stay, and so do you, learn to do proper work for a change, instead of maximizing your own profitability all the time! Same goes for all of your kind that's in here!" Braithwaite ordered angrily, "We've a few machine tools we can bring in, we can get more. A lot of this imported tat vanishes into this on-site destructor and materials recoverer of yours, to help to get raw materials to make British- made stuff! And all this scrapiron can help.". "That's customer's stuff!" Blore complained, "It's not ours to give you! And you say we were no benefit to the local people? We , by all the stuff that's been pilfered off site! Fuel drained from construction vehicles overnight, and often engine oil and radiator coolant and toolkits also! And a dumper vanished and turned up seven miles away on a farm being used to carry bales of hay and straw.". "Not guilty! OK, so a few got fed up of asking you when the local jobs would start and being told to come back later, so they took the law into their own hands. All we got off you lot was the roads muddied and chewed up by construction vehicles. Not so bad if you'd employed local people!" said Braithwaite, "They tried to sweep me under the carpet because I've got double hindquarters that I can't help; they try to sweep manufacturing under the carpet because it needs overalls and oil and grease and machinery and what some call unsightliness. Well, the people are going to see manufacturing here again, and me in public also, overalls, welding kit, four legs, and all! Right, you lot! Your names and addresses and qualifications and what jobs and schools etc you've been in?". "That's business.", "Not saying.", "I forgot it." Blore replied. "Next step, I suppose, is: we call the police, you call the unions for pickets, the police find excuses to avoid a fight, and our warehouse stays occupied by a load of out-of-work industrials!" said one of them. [286] Next morning there, John Blore, market research consultant for B & N (Imports) Ltd, was woken by someone prodding him with a pickaxe handle. He looked, saw one upper half but four legs, was briefly startled, but remembered. "Get up! No waiters here to get you breakfast in bed." he was ordered. His vision seemed a bit scratchy, then he realized he was looking through a transparent visor fitted to a helmet. He looked at himself and saw overalls and heavy boots and a bulky chest pouch for tools, and realized he had been put into workman's kit while under whatever he had been put to sleep with. He tried to get up and couldn't, despite repeated prodding, and, realizing he was strapped down to a table or something, pleaded for whatever it was to be done to him then and get it over with. The pickaxe handle prodded again. Blore pleaded, struggled harder, and found that whatever he was strapped to could be moved a bit. He reached for a water pipe on the wall and pulled himself up by it. He managed to stand, and found that he was not strapped down to a table but was wearing some extremely heavy kit on his back. Still a bit woozy from whatever he had been put to sleep with, he staggered over to a shiny sheet metal surface and turned sideways on to it, to see what he was wearing; he saw oxygen and acetylene cylinders, whose valves `looked' over his shoulders, connected to gas tubes looping over his shoulders to a blowtorch head in a holster on his chest. He shuddered. Blowtorches gave him the shivers, even on the television; now he had one strapped to his back like an aqualung and feeling like it was a built-on part of his body. His helmet's forehead bore the name `Blackrigg'. He looked away from the heavily equipped threatening looking workman that was his reflection, and tried to collect his thoughts. "Quick march! It's only fat and out-of-condition-ness! Now for your first day's work, Jack Blackrigg." Braithwaite ordered him. "Who's Jack Blackrigg?" said John Blore. "It's you!" said a man with `Aikbeck' on his helmet's forehead, "You wouldn't give your name and details, so we've chosen you a name and life history, to fill the blanks in your personal file. If you don't like them, hard $%^, you should have given your own in time. I'm Joseph Aikbeck. I was a shipbuilder in Sunderland.". "Leaving me on my back in all that heavy kit, `cast' like a sheep on its back in heavy wet fleece." Blore complained, "Blowtorches give me the shudders, now I've got one strapped to my back. Ye gods it's heavy. What do you want me to do with it? A lot of fancy work that I don't know the words for, I suppose?". "Jack Blackrigg. Left school at 15. Industrial apprenticeship at Mather and Platts in Manchester. Four years there, then redundant. Dole and odd jobs till you started here." said Aikbeck. "No! John Blore. Eton and Oxford. Honours in classics. Business as advisor ..." Blore started. "Sorry, but what I've got is `down and official', like you paperwork-minded characters keep saying." said Aikbeck, "Classics? No use! Who talks Latin now? That sort of thing's only for evening and weekend amusement! Can't waste time talking! Here's the drawing, make up what it says!". "Owww!" Blore thought, "Aikbeck and that monstrosity trying to turn me into a workman by blue-pencilling my past and writing in a working-class past instead until I start believing it myself. It still won't give me industrial skills instead of business skills, or make me like oil and coolant and machinery and tools. Him saying I was brought up in some scruffy backstreet workshop. And these hobnailed boots with steel toecaps are killing my feet. At least they support my ankles, with all this weight I've got on.". "Same here." said Stephen Malling, salesman, one of his business colleagues, "I'm listed as Peter Milnthwaite, welder and machinist. Typical workman attitude towards anything financial. Let's start trying to decipher all this lot and making what it says.". [287] He started trying to weld, gave up after a while, rummaged in his tool pouch, and took out another blowtorch head. "Ohooo!" he said aloud to himself in frustration, "Suddenly `dropped in the deep end' of the real world of where things we use come from, got up in all this kit like some factory heavyweight! This 'torch is no good for this! If I press the trigger, it blows the molten metal away, and if I don't it isn't (ain't, I better start talking like them) hot enough. Do I use this other `torch head that I found in my tool pouch? And what are all these bits of steel rod in my tool pouch for? O Hephaistos [Greek god of fire and metalworking], since I'm stuck in your service, turn all this useless classics stuff I've picked up, into the industrial apprenticeship and experience that Aikbeck and that `teras catadidymum' with twice his ration of legs declare me to have had!". "So you've noticed the difference between a welder and a cutter." said Braithwaite approaching, looking to Blore even more fearsome with his blowtorch lit, "How long before you find that you should fill the gap by melting one of those mysterious rods into it!?, not by melting the workpieces back, making them too short. That's why they're called `welding rods'! I don't care what psychological / psychiatric tricks I have to use (and I know plenty, from where I've been), if it's the last thing I do, I'm going to turn you bunch of ignorant money-obsessed speculators into efficient skilled workers! They pull down endless small factories and build offices and hotels and such junk instead, and then wonder why we have to import so much, and why fewer and fewer people are brought up industrial- minded! Never mind that posh people can't stand seeing ugly factories!". Blore gradually got the beginnings of the hang of blowtorch welding. "Akhhh!" he thought, "He's got as many legs as that centaur Kheiron who trained Jason's `Argo-sailors' on Mount Pelion, etc as the Greek legend, but far less attractive with it! Blowtorches give me the shivers. At least with that rig-out on he looks equally unattractively functional all the way up. I choose advisors of my own choosing for this conference, and what do I get instead? Aikbeck the shipbuilder and Braithwaite the dipygus! He's as lame as Hephaistos when he has to hurry! He carries on about `limits and fits' and `yield strength' and `eutectic' and all sorts of engineering stuff, and expects us to know it! Lucky he gives us about time to read it up in that works library he set up - in the boardroom! and the good panelling gets scarred by hobnail boots and tools from men going in there in kit. And he's told our families that we're staying on voluntarily for a `residential course'. All the muscle I'll put on heaving this lot about, I bet none of my suits'll fit when I get home. Ow, the weight of this kit, and my fat belly added to it doesn't help, that lot coming from a world where weight means muscle and obesity is unusual. A man called Patrick Shaw-Stewart went to fight at Gallipoli in 1914, very near Troy, and he wrote a poem about it. That poem I might well adapt for myself now thus:- Rough-minded from rough places, with scorn for men like me, unsightly second Kheiron, why must I learn from thee? On Pelion learned the Heroes, but we shut up in here. Got the Golden Fleece; what gold will come near? Was it so hard, O Jason, to forsake your herdsman's ease? Thou knowest, and I know too, that fates upon me seize. No rest for me in th' morning from grim Hephaistos near. Stand thou by me, O Jason, who sailed to lands of fear. What's happening back at my own business?, me stuck in here not allowed to phone out?". Malling was finishing his workpiece on a metalworking lathe, measuring and cutting alternately. Suddenly his right leg convulsed painfully. He thought he had touched a bare wire carrying mains voltage, muttered about electricians' standards nowadays, looked for the cause, and saw behind him Braithwaite holding what was all too clearly an electric shock prod, even though he had never seen one before except in pictures. "Now what's our four-legged friend want? I'm getting on with the work, aren't I?" he muttered. "Milnthwaite!" said Braithwaite angrily, "If I see you micrometering rotating work again, you get twice the voltage! Better that than you losing half your hand! Always let the work stop rotating! Safety rules are there for a purpose!". Mr.Walton, a manager for B & N (Imports) Ltd, looked at a clutter of variously shaped machine tool heads. He yawned and muttered: "Engineering drawing in the evening, nothing but eat and work and sleep. Which of these to use? Lets go through them. Mashie, niblick, putter - yowk!". The electric prod had found its mark again. "Now what's that bossy dipygus found fault with?" he said. "And don't call those tools by those silly wrong names again!" Braithwaite ordered behind him, "They ain't golf clubs! Find the proper names, don't invent names! Never mind that you'd rather be skiving off playing golf! For example, the tool that you're holding is called a `radius tool'". "OK, OK, I'll waste my time and the toolmaker's finding what they're called. What next?" said Walton. "And don't keep taking your kit off!" said Braithwaite, "Keep it on, then it can't get stolen, and you won't have to come back for it if you have to go somewhere else!". "But it's heavy." Walton bleated. "Then you need the exercise, to get used to carrying that sort of weight." said Braithwaite. "Says you, with four legs to carry that load you've got on you.". said Walton. [288] Next week a man in an expensive suit drove to the main gate and got out, holding a sheaf of papers. He gulped and stammered at the man at the gate's dipygus deformity, added to the usual unease caused by the man's riotsquad-type gear. Eventually he managed to announce himself as Mr.Bewdley, from B & N (Imports) Ltd's board of directors, and to ask for Mr.Braithwaite. "Man arrived at main gate." said the man into his walkietalkie, and then to Mr.Bewdley, "That's me. All the legs are my own.". Mr.Bewdley gulped again and said: "I'm here just to say that thanks to the mess and kick-up that you lot have made, B & N's are pulling out and selling up! No jobs here from ! Here's redundancy notices for my firm's staff who were going to work here. How to get you lot out of here? Police and courts drag their feet - you lot taking on a defence project, I bet the Navy's been pulling strings! And too many lorries bringing stuff from Smith & Malton's: that `Captain Blowtorch' is behind some of this also, I bet.". A big red artic cab with vertical chromed exhaust pipes and a stylized robot-face logo on each side arrived. Nobody was driving it. "I was passing. How are those new machine tools that I brought from Smith & Malton's?" it said. "They're working fine." said Braithwaite. "Another monster! It's that Optimus Prime from Wernicke's in Droitwich! Now I there's a conspiracy!" Bewdley thought, "And if that Optimus decides to transform, which to prefer? Normal-sized man but forked with double hindquarters, or roughly normal- shaped `man' but of steel and 25 feet tall with shiny smelly diesel exhaust pipes up his back!? What next?". Two men came to the gate. On the right chest of each of their overalls was a large round badge with the word `Braithwaites' round its edge, surrounding a logo like an inverted `Y' overlaying an `=' sign. He for a moment thought it was the Japanese `yen' money symbol inverted, then with a feeling of inevitability recognized it as a stylized representation of head, body, two outspread arms, and four outspread legs. "Imago Dipygi." he thought, in Latin for some reason, "I fear that maker's plates with that on will be seen on many engineering products made here.". On the two men's helmets' foreheads were the names `Skelgill' and `Milnthwaite'. Recognizing their faces, he asked them: "Mr.Walton and Mr.Malling? Why the new names?". "Great! Now we stuck here as workmen, or on the dole! Not our fault the natives got restless! Please" pleaded Walton. "We wouldn't give our names, that's business, so he chose names to refer us by. Lucky I didn't go cheeky and say I was Mickey Mouse, like some men would have." said Walton. "At least Blore's got his own business to go back to." said Malling. "Sorry, B & N's has no other positions available for you. Good luck." said Bewdley, and drove away. Mr.Blore looked for his car, and found it - sort of. All the body and insides behind the dashboard was gone. On the centre of the naked chassis was built a crane gearbox and jib, powered by an extra clutch on the lengthened crankshaft and controlled by extra levers to the left of the driver's seat, which was of steel like a dumper's and not the real oxhide leather that had been there before. "Misshapen himself, he denies other things a good attractive shape, but only goes for function. Never mind how competently he's done the conversion!" he thought angrily, and said: "Is that small mobile crane what you've butchered my expensive car into? "Why not?" Braithwaite replied, "Huge four-litre engine to carry one man and a packful of papers?! A motorbike's enough for me! Cheaper to run, gets into narrow spaces, less irreplaceable fossil fuel used!". "`Packful', he said, not `caseful', expecting people to march with packs on like hikers or like they were in the Army, instead of a briefcase or a suitcase that can be put down." Blore thought, and, asking Braithwaite how to call a taxi, was given a phone number which turned out to be a bus station's enquiries number. "Now I'm to make a workman's choice of which public transport to use now." he thought, "OK. OK, I'll be a workman till the last, to satisfy him, till I'm out of here.". His backpack blowtorch and chest tool pouch lay on the floor; he felt no sadness at leaving them. He took his overalls off, and realized that his executive suit was so rumpled and stained and battered from being worn continuously under an overall for every sort of hard manual work for a month that it was now very far from presentable. He put his overall back on. "OK. I'd rather look like a workman than a tramp, till I'm home, the state my suit's in," he decided, "and I'll keep my pack to carry my papers in, to match, and Mammon alone knows where my office shoes are that I came in. OK. Overall, heavy boots, pack, helmet so I can pull the visor down if it rains, workman's full marching order three miles to the main road to the nearest bus stop that has a good service. Newcastle and home, rest, change my clothes, office shoes instead of hard marching tread of hobnails on concrete whenever I walk a few steps, end of Blackrigg the welder.". It was not to be so. He got home and rang his office, and found only his harassed-sounding secretary. While he was away, Mr.Grey his partner had taken advantage of not being supervised to neglect Blore's business and spend most of his time on other businesses, for Grey had too many fingers in other pies, wasting time, and too many fingers in Blore's till, wasting money. Investment and consultancy opportunities galore had blown past and fled downwind, not taken up by either of them. Then someone had made a huge cash withdrawal in Blore's name. ("Handy to buy machinery with, instead of investing in investment companies and suchlike qwertyuiop.", Braithwaite thought.) Then Grey had suddenly cashed what he could and run away with it, leaving Blore with all the partnership's debts. Those debts going bad would mean debts owed by the creditors going bad in their turn, and the knock-on effect would spread. Businessman aren't all Rothschilds. Blore fled from a baying horde of creditors and writ-servers and miscellaneous angry people, and again put on the heavy thick overall with the Braithwaite's badge, despite his dislike of the now too familiar stylized dipygus logo on it. Under it this time he wore clothes chosen for hardwearingness and not for appearance. The heavy boots; as much personal stuff as would fit into the largest rucksack that he could buy; the helmet. John Blore, businessman, disappeared as tracelessly as the groups of skindivers mentioned by newspapers and television news from time to time. Jack Blackrigg, welder, went home by train to Tyneside and marched the three miles from the main road bus stop to Braithwaite's and a life in overall and work kit and the smell of machine-shop. Braithwaite was at the main gate. "Welder Jack Blackrigg reporting for duty. All my kit's here." said Blackrigg. "Oh I see. `There's no honour among thieves', as they say. Here's your locker key. The two days you were gone count as part of your holiday allowance. Kit up and join Aikbeck's squad welding that boiler that he's working on." said Braithwaite.