CONSTRUCTICONS "Now for Wernicke's latest addition." said Mr.Malton, taking the old plough away for scrap in the dumper. Brennan rode with him, into a building where there was a big tracked long reach excavator and a big concrete mixer truck. Both were new and light green and had what most of the men there now knew were Decepticon badges. "I know this one!" Brennan exclaimed, "What looks like the mixer drum is actually a recycler digester, that can digest and make ...". "What you on about? Can't you see that ..." Mr.Malton interrupted. But he also was interrupted, as the mixer truck, Mixmaster the Constructicon, spoke for the first time in the real world. Optimus, there to take Wilhelmshafen's sub away, had programmed his mind in and brought him to life that morning. Mixmaster explained: "In the stories, my drum a destructor recycler, which also could do things impossible in this `real world' where I suddenly find myself deposited. Rather a letdown to find that I'm just a concrete mixer truck, and Shockwave's got a backpack destructor recycler instead. And those subs. I still don't suppose that some joyrider wanting a spin in one of your works vans, 'd want a spin in my drum instead! Ha ha! Soon make them get their fun some place else!". "When there's a few more of you, I suppose there'll be plenty work for you on new motorways, or on that new land reclamation scheme they're planning." said Mr.Malton. [328] The mixer truck's cab collapsed, and split into legs. Its rear axle assembly unfolded into arms. It stood up, revealing a face under what had been the vehicle form's rear end, and with its mixer drum on its back. "Oh heavens, it's transforming. I'm still not used to that sort of thing." said Brennan. "They're going to Braithwaite's to help him to build an extension." said Mr.Malton. "First, I better go and help to build the next one of us that is being made." said Mixmaster, towering above them. "He doesn't rearrange as much as some, when he transforms." said Mr.Malton. "Sometimes I wonder which takes more getting used to, those robots, or Mr.Braithwaite with his forked backbone and two pelvises and four legs, I saw him once, they call him a `teras catadidymum', that is, `monster twinned below'." said Brennan. "Otherwise known as a `dipygus'. His back end growing point split." added another workman, who also knew about Braithwaite's unusual deformity. "And usually with a blowtorch fed from cylinders strapped to his back, or an electric arc welder fed from a generator strapped to his back. Neither really make the total effect any prettier. But he's a very good metalworker. Four hobnailed boots to march roughshod over everything." said Brennan. "Save the teratology lesson." Mixmaster interrupted, revving his engine loudly and exhaustily to call for attention, "All this chattering wouldn't have been tolerated by Shockwave in the stories, making us in J.B.Blackrock's factory which he took over.". "How long before he's ready?" someone who had just come into the building asked. "Mr.Braithwaite! What brings you here?" said Mixmaster, recognizing him from a description, and then to Braithwaite, "He needs a bit more painting, then Optimus can program his mind in and take him to your place.". "Oo-er, here he is." said Brennan about Braithwaite, reflecting that four legs on an adult human were definitely two too many. It was as Brennan said. Braithwaite's helmet with visor, and chest pouch for tools, and heavy electric arc welding generator strapped to his back and loudly blowing exhaust upwards, did nothing to make any prettier the general effect created by his oversized partly double body encased in thick overalls and odd dipygus gait as he approached. "He better not use that too long in here. We've got electricity and compressed air mains to having to run things making exhaust indoors." Brennan commented. "I normally use it on sites where I have to climb about and take my power source with me." said Braithwaite, and got on hands and knees to look at the long reach excavator's tracks. "Brrrm! Is he ready or shall I come back?" said a different electrosynthesized voice behind him. "What?" said Braithwaite, getting up, "Oh, it's you, Op [= Optimus]. Your diesel exhaust pipes in here, and they complain about my welding generator. He's ready for you.". [329] Optimus unfolded his left arm from his cab, and connected his brain to the excavator's with a cable. With the `Creation Matrix' computer program he programmed Scavenger the Constructicon's mind and memories in, and brought him to life. As Scavenger's mind started to function, he realized differences. There was no Autobot / Decepticon war, no Cybertron, no space travel, no ray guns, no Autobot or Decepticon bases. Only 16 Transformers including himself existed. "Erhh? Where am I?" said Scavenger, "Last thing I knew, Starscream [a transforming F15 jet fighter] had been at the Underbase and went mad - or was it Unicron attacking Cybertron? - those stories run in different versions. They're only tales told by humans. I'm too big and heavy even to fly in an aeroplane. How long do I get to collect my thoughts before I start a lifetime of earthmoving? No real schooldays to remember like humans: everything's just copied into me and I know it at once.". "Why's he called Scavenger?" a workman asked. "The boxes that the toy models of me came in say that I'm too fond of collecting bits of rubbish and bringing them back to base. Like puppies are. The story writers saw no need to give me silly characteristic! Nor did Wernicke and Optimus making me as real. But I'm still stuck with the name." said Scavenger. "Mr.Malton says: can you grub out a tree? It's starting to get in the way of his #2 gatehouse watching his back land." said Braithwaite to Scavenger, and got in his cab and directed him to the site, where he got out. "This tree." he said, "He gets too many intruders trespassing, although he's security wired his back land off. Hard enough without vegetation for them to hide among. I get the same nuisance at my works.". "As a `special purpose design', you were obviously not designed for speed!" said Scavenger, looking at Braithwaite's usual clumsy four-legged canter of a dipygus in a hurry, "What'll he do with the wood?". "[Send it to the] foundry, probably, to make patterns to make moulds; or for furniture." said Braithwaite. "Stand back while I grub the tree out." said Scavenger, and quickly dug the tree out. Its strong deep roots yielded easily as the excavator's huge engine blasted upwards. At one moment as the tree started to lean over, Braithwaite saw Scavenger's digging arm in front of the trunk of the tree like a `7' overlying a `/', like the Chinese character for `li' meaning `force', which he happened to know. "One way to remember that particular character!" he thought. Scavenger got onto Optimus's flatbed trailer to go to Braithwaite's, for tracks like a tank's are useful on rough ground, but fuel expensive and destructive on long journeys on made roads. Mixmaster followed to push where needed on steep hills, thinking: "What on earth'd Megatron think, us associating with Autobots? We are Decepticons, or were!, stuck here without hope of space travel.". [330] Braithwaite got back in Optimus's cab, and put his helmet and his backpack welding generator on the other seat. He went onto the M5 and then the new time-saving M42 till it ended at Ashby de la Zouch, which was only a small place, as was Thringstone a bit later, so there were not many Transformers fans locally to crowd across the road delaying him. He got onto the M1 at junction 23 and away to Braithwaite's familiar North along the M1 and A1. They went along the Boroughbridge bypass. Optimus told him what had happened in 1945 there, before the bypass was built, when the bridge over the River Ure collapsed under a steel mill roll housing on a flatbed between two enormous lorries going from Sheffield to Falkirk, and what the Government, who were trying to recover from the 1939-1945 world war, had angrily said about it. Later they passed Catterick, where there is a big army base. Braithwaite explained that this name is from Roman times, but is not Celtic but actual Latin (cataracta = waterfall) - or rather from Greek via Latin. "Some place names have odd origins." he said, "That town Baldock in Hertfordshire, its name's an attempt at `Baghdad', as in Iraq, that the Crusaders brought back. They brought quite a lot of exotic words back, to show that they'd been to the Middle East.". Optimus reached Braithwaite's and stopped. Braithwaite put his kit on, to carry it, and climbed out, putting his inner two legs on Optimus's front wheel hub while his outer two legs hung loose. "Home again. Thanks, Op." he said, "Chilham's lot from [see 285-299] nosed round here again, but they used two-way radio, which some of my men overheard, and soon deciphered that jumble of medicalese and psycho-ese that they used as radio code. Chilham can't stand the sight of this place. If he has to refer to it, he calls it in medical Greek `Teratochora', meaning `the land of the monster'. Its proper name reminds him too much of me and the law getting the better of him.". [331] Scavenger got off Optimus's trailer. Nothing unexpected had happened while Braithwaite was away. "Another tree to grub up. A big one. It's in the way of building. I'll get a wire rope for you to pull it down with." said Braithwaite to Scavenger a few days later. "No need for the rope. After all, I can transform." Scavenger replied, and drove to the tree. First he dug six feet deep close all round the tree; his engine roared and wood broke as his steel-toothed digging bucket cut even thick roots. Then he folded his bucket arm and from the sides of his body unfolded two arms, which with a huge revving of engine pushed his body up until it was on edge, hinging up from his tracks, which stayed on the ground like a sitting man's legs, and became his legs. His head emerged, and he stood up, huge and powerful, an improbable alien sight come to England from men's fiction story worlds. His hydraulic digging arm hung down his back like a tail. "What being of flesh gives orders to Scavenger the Constructicon?" he roared, still not quite mentally accustomed to his new situation. "Two humans," he said, seeing Braithwaite and Aikbeck, "one of rather nonstandard design. I suppose I must obey, to earn my fuel. I'll soon see if I can pull up this overgrown backyard weed for you. Stand back.". [332] He held the trunk in his huge hands and swayed it to and fro, steadily weakening the remaining roots, until the tree fell. He sat on the ground and transformed back. Braithwaite cut the branches and the roots off the trunk. Scavenger asked him why he used an axe sometimes instead of his chainsaw. "If I chainsaw into wood which is being compressed, which includes the side that it is being bent towards, the saw is liable to get trapped. A common mistake that people make." said Braithwaite. "What happens to the wood?" said Scavenger, putting his digging bucket near, for there was an eye and an ear on its support. "It's good oak. It'll probably become furniture. Please, I'd rather not talk use sharp tools at the same time, that causes work accidents from not concentrating." said Braithwaite, and continued work, finding that four legs were sometimes not better than two, when he had to kneel close alongside the trunk to saw branches off flush. The trunk was sound, but in a few years gale damaged branches would have started to heart rot back into the trunk. Time to cut the tree down and use its wood. There was good timber in three big branches also. "`Captain Blowtorch' says there's one of your old friends coming soon. He can help load these tree trunks onto one of my flatbed trailers to take them to the sawmill." he said when he had finished. "Which one? How soon?" said Scavenger. "I'm here now!" said a voice over Braithwaite's walkietalkie, "Fresh from Droitwich with Optimus's lead seals on my braincase lid still warm, through Derby and up the M1 and the A1 ...". Then with a blasting of engine and a breaking underwheel of fences and scrub in rushed a huge light green four wheeled front-loader excavator, much bigger than the ordinary double-ended JCB's commonly seen on building sites in England. "Scrapper! Foreman of the Constructicons!" it roared. "Yow! You sure can move! A lot faster than ordinary excavators! So much for Captain Hurlock usurping Navy patents - I bet there's a few Army tank patents in you!". said Braithwaite a bit startledly. "There are certainly some in Bonecrusher the bulldozer! He's next! Not much stops ! That's four Constructicons out of the six made real now." said Scrapper, "You look like you're rather an experimental design, Mr.Braithwaite!". "No. I'm a dipygus." said Braithwaite, finding himself having to explain his deformity yet again, "My back end growing point split, part way down me, before I was born, so I've got two pelvises and four legs and a big nuisance getting clothes to fit me. You've come just in time. B & N (Imports) Ltd took all their construction vehicles away before we took their place over.". "Starting with making a ridge and trench round all our back land perimeter, to keep itinerants off our land." said Aikbeck. [333] "And here I am!" a big light green driverless bulldozer with a Decepticon badge on its blade and on its cab roof roared, charging across country like a tank flattening fences and drystone walls, as it arrived and stopped, "Bonecrusher, the fourth Constructicon to see reality! Nothing's going to stand in way! Now to start clearing up the mess that the Coal Board didn't clear up after themselves, and B & N's didn't either!". "And don't forget us! We're here also!" said a big light green truck-crane that followed him and arrived a little later, accompanied by a big light green lorry built for carrying rock on unmade sites, "Hook the mobile crane and Longhaul the dump-truck! Now the Constructicons are complete! Now what does who want doing?". "Not quite complete." said Longhaul, "We can't combine like in the stories, it can't be done in the real world, there can be no `Devastator'.". (Devastator is a giant humanoid made in the stories by all six Constructicons joining together.) "Crumbs, the squeeze getting into your cab with my pack on." said Braithwaite climbing onto Scrapper, "Another `fat man's agony'. Too few people consider fatties or dipyguses or men with big packs on. First make a perimeter trench and ridge, including round the Coal Board land that B & N's didn't use. It was an opencast mine, so no shafts or mine-tunnels to bother with. You six know from the stories what to do if those tinkers come again and their mess and junk.". He sat down and put his pack across his two laps and took some plans out of it and showed them to one of Scrapper's various videocamera-eyes, and said: "Dig out all those dirty pollution outfall pipes. From now on we consume all our waste. That'll leave a hollow to make into a submerged dock for divers and small subs (something to do with the Navy, they want me to make and test something).". The work started and proceeded. Braithwaite's cordless telephone rang, and he took it out of its pocket and answered it. "Hello? Is that Mr.Braithwaite?" a rough-sounding man's voice said over it. "Yes, who is that?" Braithwaite replied. "I run a local pressure group speaking for travellers. You security fencing such a lot of land off round your works. (%$#@*& off! Sorry, someone came in the office.) If you don't let u' in site like B & N used to, w' 'll have nowhere to go. Not their fault they keep having to move.". "Sorry, but no. They make mess and steal every bit of metal that isn't nailed down, and anything else they want. Sorry, no.". "But w' need ...". "Look, tinker," Braithwaite interrupted sharply, "you can't hide your accent and your manner, and I can tell you're speaking from a callbox. You lot were a pain in the @#$ to B & N's and the local residents. We're more than you. You keep off. We consume all our and the village's waste, so we'll have no scavengings for you.". "Look, monstrosity out of the late night horror film, if we can't get on our usual pitch -" said the rough voice, trying to leave a threat hanging in the air. "Go on, I'm trembling in all four of my boots." said Braithwaite. "Forget it! %$# you! Nobody wants us around!" said the tinker, then aside to another tinker but still audible by Braithwaite: "Leave it, that monster won't be scared, and there's too many men there now. That's another place we can't go now.". The tinker swore violently down the telephone at Braithwaite and hung up. Braithwaite's cordless telephone rang again, and he answered it: "Who's that? Sir who? Oh, you. Yes, I get your solicitor's letter, and my answer to it's the same. You and your father etc didn't bother to collect rents or claim ownership by some visible symbol of possession since 1931 in your great grandfather's time, and you want to claim that all the land round here's still your family's and so now yours!? You're on very doubtful legal ground after so long. As far as I'm concerned, that land went to the Coal Board in 1938, so it later went to B & N (Imports) Ltd and now it's mine.". "OK, OK." Braithwaite replied to the caller, "I know, it was the thirties, your great grandfather couldn't make his estate pay because of the depression, with what the income tax left from what he could get out of the land, so he abandoned it, and his tenants started to call themselves owners. Not guilty, that was long before I was born.". The caller spoke at length again. Braithwaite replied: "Look, Your DISgrace, if you or anyone else sends a load of roughs round to take stuff for real or alleged money owing, people are allowed to resist, and I and my workmen and security men are allowed to help them to resist. I thought you'd have known that. So my men slung your men off and gave them a good hiding. Distraint's the courts' job, not yours. Don't send roughs round thieving ...". "Look," the caller interrupted, "you four-legged freak filling my estate with dirty industrial stuff when I thought my family was going to get the Coal Board off it at long last and plant a shooting covert over their site, but first that lot B & N's came on it and then you. Don't you call my estate staff thieves when I send them to enforce rents which the occupiers refuse to pay me, and insultingly at that. I wrote enough times explaining the situation to that lot you let live in those houses built on land ...". "by the Coal Board, and some by B & N's, so you'd only get ground rent anyway. Leave my men alone." Braithwaite interrupted, "If you send any more thieves round, they'll get the same, like those tinkers got that time. And you were already acting like you owned the place, trying to tell my men they can't keep guns, or dogs that can run fast, or kill rabbits or deer, or have wire fences in case they hindered your precious foxhunt. I'm going to security wire my land and my men's land off properly, and foxes aren't going to stop me. And it was I - I - I shot the running fox in front of your hounds that time, else all those horses'd have followed it right down a line of my men's gardens trampling them. The - land - round - here - is - not - yours.", and rung off. The work proceeded. Scavenger was digging out the outfall pipe run, which half filled with water. He put the dug-out earth in Longhaul. "This cove isn't natural." said Braithwaite to them over his walkietalkie, "It's part of the opencast coal mine that got flooded from the sea after the Coal Board left. It hasn't got a name yet really. I suppose that Dr.Chilham'd call it Teratokolpos, Greek for `Monster Bay', after my deformity.". [334] "Yes, medicalese and psycho-ese, everything in Latin and Greek." said Longhaul, "When his lot came again nosying around, like you told me about, his idea of radio code [to try to stop outside people overhearing it from understanding it], even I could have worked out that `Aorta' meant the A1, `Foramen Magnum' meant the Tyne Tunnel, `atheroma' meant roadworks, `coarctation' meant that contraflow in Jarrow, and which organ name meant which local place. Give me proper CB jargon any time!, like a proper trucker.". "Too many people even now treat me as something to be pitied or kept out of sight." said Braithwaite, "People give me bits of money. I can't stand beggars, and I can't stand people who treat me as one. People offer to fetch and carry things for me as if I was ill. People ask other people what I want, as if I was too ill or thick or mad to answer. Once a group from Leicester turned up with a lot of money they'd worked themselves to a frazzle with sales and all sorts to collect, for pay for an operation to `correct my deformity, the poor man'. Real right butcher sized job it'd have been. Private hospital bed booked, everything arranged - except asking me if I wanted it done. I kept the money a while and then spent it on machinery. You may call it dishonest of me, but that lot should've asked me first if I wanted it doing. I don't honour unwanted undertakings made in my name by busybodies without asking me first. People try to sit me behind things to hide my lower half, and bring things to me so I needn't move around. I'm not going to hide myself like the dirty laundry just because my back end growing point split.". The Constructicons made the pipe trench into a short canal leading from the sea into Braithwaite's factory. Hook lowered lock gates into place. The job finished, and they did other work on site. Finally, Braithwaite and some of his men, as a change from endless dust and noisy diesel exhaust, put on scuba diving gear, with aqualungs with round breathing masks that hid the face except for eye windows, and safety helmets with the firm's stylized dipygus logo on, and dived in the cove to survey it and to relax. Braithwaite's aqualung had a third waist strap, to go under where his backbone forked. "And for you, a more useful and energetic sort of swimming than idly floating belly up like a dead fish." said Braithwaite to Skelgill. "That two weeks holiday." Skelgill complained, "Once I was Mr.Walton, sales planner for B & N (Imports) Ltd. I was looking forward to relaxing, and you book a diving training course for us. Always you workman types want tough energetic holidays.". "Lets all go in." said Braithwaite. They dived, in line abreast. "Umf, his dipygus swimming stroke." Skelgill thought watching Braithwaite rhythmically spread all his legs and bring them together to create a pump effect, "A fair bit more effective than the lurching canter that he has to use when he has to hurry on land.". Braithwaite began to wonder if a sort of rubberized cloth skirt strapped to all his legs might improve the propulsion pump effect: something which a two-legged man couldn't use! Suddenly all the diving party jumped in fright as they heard a loud hollow metallic "clommp" like a steel bin shutting, for they knew what sort of equipment that sound probably came from, tracelessly disposing of all the rubbish that gets into the sea in its area, mostly with a fishing boat type code on its steel hull and an aggressive inshore fisherman's semi-naval mentality in its steel braincase, equipped usually with Hurlock sonars and electric-powered accurate powerful nailguns. A sound which rumour said many more sport divers suspected of taking shellfish had heard than had got away to tell of. They awaited their end, ultrasound beam or steel grab-teeth, or the off-chance that it was a salvage firm's like Cetus [see 320]. "Perhaps it'll know me from my legs, if it's heard of me and knows that we make stuff for some of their people." Braithwaite hoped desperately. They turned towards it, not bothering to draw their diving knives, knowing that point or blade or small explosion would beat in vain on it as their bulges went down its intake for disposal, to be, they feared, probably first examined or questioned stowed away securely inside its impersonal rounded-ended cylindrical steel hull and not outside in the sea where some of them might get away while its mind was busy with others. They saw it. As they thought, it was a Smith & Malton's type G3 grab dredgersub. Skelgill gave a long sigh of relief, for its grab arm was folded on its roof and it bore the name `Delphinus, London' and not a fishing boat type code. "Phew! Only a commercial one! - unless it still thinks that a bit more recovered metal and ..." he said. [335] The dredgersub spoke. "I'm not that either, nor the Navy's." it said. "Me making that noise behind divers usually makes them jump! I'm the one that the BSAC [= British SubAqua Club] bought. `Delphinus' is Latin for `dolphin', and also is a constellation. Now that certain hostile men know that I'm around, they get less sure of themselves. Enough of group diver disappearances. No, you're safe near me, or even inside me. Some of my inside compartments can be used as decompression chambers. You're an unusual model, with a double stern! Captain Blowtorch told me about you. He said you run this place.". "That's better news. Diving clubs buy a dredgersub, and leave its mentality as the makers intended it." said Braithwaite. "No group diver disappearances where go," said Delphinus, "unless you smuggle drugs, like two I caught off Bideford in north Devon. That's not a good diving activity. They had 60 kilograms of it on them. All the crime committed by addicts desperate to pay for `fixes' that lot'd have caused if it had got ashore and distributed. Unlucky dilemma `blowtorching' at my emotional instinctive circuitry: I suppose that the traceless disposers-of like that CR79 alias Aphanistor at Crabhaven `ll be boasting that `despite my high principles got from the BSAC and a mentality like that Cousteau's, I've `broken my duck' on that way of dealing with outsider divers' - unfortunate expression, since it's ducks dredging about in ponds that people compare us to, including when a duck finds a frog. Enough of group diver disappearances. If I find a bunch of fishermen diverbusting with those Hurlock sonars that can locate and zap with a lethally powerful ultrasound beam, I may be tempted to do something about it.". "Some of my men went to Robin Hood's Bay to dive." said Braithwaite, "No physical trouble, but some fishermen, seeing them come, sang: `Jack Cousteau skindived here last fall, so known he thought no harm'd befall. But, ignoring his fame, our dredgersub came, and swallowed him airtanks and all.', and more verses like that. It's all right, Cousteau's still safe in Monaco.". "Each set of diving gear is precious to its owners." said Delphinus, "but often my onboard destructor recycler consumes it in the end. Test-failed cylinders, corroded regulators, torn fins, worn-out diving suits, travel my `one-way road', and my grinder runs for a while. Nothing lasts for ever. After one big lot was rubbish-picked off a tip and got into `Exchange and Mart' magazine as `nearly new', the diving centres insist on watching it being destroyed, to save people's lives from using bad kit that they bought as good kit; and many of them haven't got an incinerator on site. 23 regulators of a make that kept jamming in use; 11 rebreathers crudely converted from lifejackets (someone inherited them from a schizophrenic who was preparing to secretly equip a squad of commando frogman for when the world gets taken over by the, etc, anyone who knows what schizophrenics and their silly ideas are like can fill the rest in): it all comes to me for disposal, and nothing is left of it next day but sorted metal oxides and stored energy.". "Some sympathy is due to the schizophrenic, I've known some." said Braithwaite, "Their minds are driven to frantic efforts as if by a cruel inescapable whip by the danger which is all too real and imminent to them, even though it is actually imaginary, or far less than feared; an oppressor that they can't escape for long, for it is part of their own malfunctioning brains; and in the end someone merely slings into a destructor the result of all that hard frantic desperate although misguided effort. Has to be done, though.". "Yes, This is some of what the diving centre man told me about that kit, when he brought it to me along with other rubbish in his dumper." said Delphinus, and played back a recording: "There are 11 sets of that junk. The man who made them died of meningitis, and a nephew of his inherited them and brought them in here trying to sell me them as second hand. Either he knew nothing about diving gear, or he hoped that I didn't. I don't sell badly worn stuff anyway, I'm not a scruffy back street general dealer. Some of it like fins are good shop stuff still in its wrappings, that I can use. And I've kept four of the suits which are good shop wetsuits still in their wrappings. There is one crude but usable home-made drysuit. The other six suits, I best not describe them, they're bodge-ups of all sorts of stuff that aren't even any use as overalls or raincoats, and I'm not risking tramps picking them off the tip. Three of the breathing sets have been converted adequately, although I'd only use even those in a dire emergency; two more are bad but would be correctable; the other seven are just nasty pitiful mockeries. The sets and the suits have got numbers 1 to 11 on them; if that's time order, the early ones are the good ones, from before their maker'd gone to pieces so much. I made sure to get hold of them, as the man that brought them in said he was hard up, trying to get sympathy to get a high price off me; if it was true, he'd likely have felt tempted to take the stuff away again on an excuse and try to sell it in pubs to people that didn't know enough about diving gear. Here's the bad suits and all the sets and the other stuff that's no use. I've emptied all the cylinders, to save you having to fiddle with them. The sooner this stuff's down your hatch the better, it gives me the shudders just looking at it. Thank %$# their maker hadn't got around to trying to recruit members for his squad from people who didn't know good from bad, for from what his nephew told me of him he'd sounded persuasive and plausible when he explained his plan to people.". "Anyway," Delphinus continued, "he slung the lot with other rubbish into his diving centre's dumper, which was emptied down my intake when I went there next, and all that misplaced effort ended up as routine work for my grinder and digester.". "That firm Underwaterwork's grab dredgersub `Cetus' [see 320] consumes all old kit, so it won't get picked off tips." said Braithwaite, "Once his men left tools on the bottom between dives; and other men who'd stolen some diving gear used it to dive to steal from the work site and never came up again, for the site was guarded, although not by humans.". "Oh." said Delphinus, whose bluntly tapering stern and propeller between four hydroplanes were now facing them, "Even 's `broken his duck', or rather, acted like one. (`Swallowing duck 'f the cylindered / sought town-frogmen haughty.' goes one line of a song that someone heard inshore pot-fishermen singing in a pub at Filey in Yorkshire.) It had to happen some time, I suppose. Where does all this stop? as ever more people crowd in on the same area and resources and livelihood.". "Aye." one of Braithwaite's men replied, "CR79 alias Aphanistor at Crabhaven; Big Jim at Conway and Red Wharf in North Wales; and others. Rumour says that many have met them who didn't get away to tell of it. They're starting to say the same about Yormungand (code numbered WY17), that whacking great 60-foot-long dredgersub at Whitby with the aimable suction pipe nearly five feet across inside that can suddenly untelescope to 40 feet long, instead of a grab-arm. Usual mentality, and a front large object hatch that could swallow a cabincruiser. Will soon be safe to dive? without having to get all sorts of permissions in advance off the men that live there.". "Too true." said Delphinus, "Again a new invention upsets a long-established applecart. Hurlock sonars are legal in parts of the USA, supposedly against seals that damage nets, and it's happening. An American diver showed me a newspaper from Portland in Maine. It said `Autopsy says that 7 scuba divers washed up dead in Muscongus Bay were killed by highpowered ultrasound. Scuba clubs blame the `Hurlock sonars' commonly used by fishermen as anti-seal weapons. Police are investigating. Fishermen's leaders refuse to comment.'. And other cases over there. And craft like me openly used as inshore patrol craft, and with markings saying so.". "I heard of that case." the diver replied, "With the traditional American right for everybody to have firearms, I fear they won't ban those sonars, in which in some areas sea sport scubadiving's had it, unless there's a big lot of prosecutions. Even now, divers there often go away without diving when they see sonar blisters on fishing boats in port or pulled up on shore.". "A big lot of prosecutions, I hope." said Delphinus, "They don't own the sea. They overfish and they blame everybody but themselves. Us talking won't do any good. I better go and get on with my work.". He unfolded his grab arm and started to dredge up the dirty washings-through and thick deposits of coal dust left from Coal Board times; his onboard destructor recycler would make plenty of hydrocarbon oil from it. Braithwaite and his men went back to surveying the cove.