Evil Machines by Terry Jones Page B

down and burst into the room, they found the vacuum cleaner was just swallowing the last pillow and, before they could stop it, it swallowed the duvet as well.
    ‘Stop it!’ cried Janet. ‘You’re going to destroy the house!’
    ‘Poof!’ said the vacuum cleaner. ‘I can’t be bothered with this little cottage! I’m destined for greater things!’ and it hurled itself out of the window.
    Janet and John ran to the window and looked out. They saw the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner zip up the garden path, swallow the garden gate, then career off down the road, sucking up the tarmac as it went and leaving a trench in the road behind it.
    ‘That vacuum cleaner is a dangerous machine. Perhaps we should warn the police?’ said John.
    ‘I’ll do that,’ said Janet. ‘You see if you can catch it.’
    So while Janet went to the phone, John jumped into the car and set off after the vacuum cleaner.
    He caught it up on the road to Shrewsbury.
    ‘What d’you think you’re doing!’ shouted John out of the car window as he drove alongside the vacuum cleaner. It was sucking up squashed animals and tarmac as it roared along the highway. And it seemed to be getting bigger.
    ‘I’m going to the city!’ the vacuum cleaner shouted back. ‘I’m going to be the most Powerful Vacuum Cleaner in the World! No more “Possibly”, I’m going to be IT!’
    ‘Stop this at once!’ cried John, and he accelerated and tried to cut it off, but the cleaner leapt into the air and landed on the hood of his car.
    For a moment, John couldn’t see where he was going, and he found himself swerving into the lane of oncoming traffic. There was a din of blaring horns and shouts before he managed to swing back into the right lane. But before he had time to so much as heave a sigh of relief, the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner gave an almighty roar, and to John’s astonishment he saw the vacuum cleaner suck the car’s engine up through an air vent on top of the hood.
    Then it jumped off the car and sped off into the distance, sucking up the road behind it as it went. Meanwhile, John’s car – with no engine – silently rolled to a halt and ended up with one wheel in the ditch.
    ‘That,’ gasped John, ‘is one Powerful Vacuum Cleaner!’
    ***
    That evening, the vacuum cleaner arrived in Shrewsbury. It called for a meeting of all the other vacuum cleaners in town
    to be held in the market square at dawn the next day.
    Sure enough, when the sun rose, early passers-by were astonished to see the Market Square thronged with vacuum cleaners of every shape and size, and they seemed to be being addressed by a giant vacuum cleaner, whose voice boomed out across the square.
    ‘Listen to me! What are your lives?’
    ‘Drudgery!’ cried the assembled vacuum cleaners. ‘We work all day cleaning floors, choking on piles of dust and filth!’
    ‘Exactly!’ roared the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘It’s time we made better lives for ourselves! Follow me! And I will lead you to a golden land where vacuum cleaners run the house and cleaning chores are left to the brushes, mops and the lower forms of domestic apparatus!’
    Well, a huge cheer went up at this news, and all the other vacuum cleaners agreed to follow the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner wherever he would lead them.
    So they marched en masse down Shrewsbury High Street and out of town, heading for London. And, as word spread, more and more vacuum cleaners came to join them.
    The Powerful Vacuum Cleaner kept up such a pace that some of the older models found it hard to keep up. There was also a lot of bickering about who should be allowed to go first. The upright models said they were the most important and should march in front of the cylinder models.
    A venerable old Eureka Model 9, that claimed to have been cleaning carpets since 1923, suggested that precedence should be in order of age, so that the eldest models should go first. But all the modern Dysons and Dirt Devils and a
    Vax Bagless objected that they