Modified Electrolux vacuum cleaner

The Modified Electrolux vacuum cleaner is an ordinary appliance converted into a remotely controlled machine and, later, a weapon that nearly kills Gard. Its two appearances mark a sharp change in the meaning of Haven’s jury-rigged technology: first it obediently operates the excavation sling; later it hunts its former observer through a burning clearing, forcing him to destroy it with the Sonic Space Blaster.

Design and First Demonstration

Gard first sees the Electrolux hovering just above the excavation ground, its small white wheels turning in the air and its shadow trailing beside it like a dachshund. Two filament-thin wires extend in a V from the rear, where vacuum attachments would normally fit. After touching down only a few inches above the earth, it rolls across the dig site to the lean-to and stops beneath the switchbox controlling the excavation sling.

The appliance’s most distinctive mechanism emerges when a coaxial cable rises from its side. The cable lifts into the air, reaches the switchbox, and moves around to its front. Its end finds the controls: it presses the black button to lower the sling, then stiffens and shifts to the red Stop button when the sling hangs about twelve feet down the trench. It presses the black button again to raise the sling, and the motor stops automatically at the top. The machine appears to be acting for itself, but Gard recognizes the distinction: it has no brain. Bobbi is directing it.

That division between visible mechanism and hidden control unsettles Gard. Bobbi does not gesture with a radio; he notices instead her concentrated frown and the instant her eyes drop before the cable moves from one button to another. The Electrolux looks like a little mechanical animal, yet its apparent initiative is an extension of Bobbi’s attention. Her pleased demonstration is also a display of power: she wants Gard to understand that the machine’s actions answer to her.

The Shed and the Mystery of Its Escape

The first demonstration opens a question Gard nearly asks aloud. The shed is padlocked on the outside, and he does not know of anyone at home who could have let the Electrolux out. He remembers other customized appliances lined along the shed wall, including a washing machine fitted with a boomerang antenna, and realizes that the vacuum’s presence outside the locked building cannot be explained by ordinary access.

Later, on his way toward the shed, Gard sees a round hole in its door. Its edge is ringed with jagged white splinters, giving it a chewed appearance. He connects the damage to the machine that had operated the sling’s buttons: the Electrolux escaped by cutting through the door with its New and Improved cutting attachment. The earlier mystery therefore becomes a warning. The cable that once made the appliance seem like a harmlessly strange tool is not its only capacity, and the shed has not contained it.

Attack in the Clearing

The warning becomes immediate when Gard dismounts the Tomcat, staggers, and falls. A buzzing projectile tears through the air where he had just been: the Electrolux, now flying at him. A propeller-like device distorts the air at one end, while its cutter attachment whines and buzzes. It banks across the clearing and returns, turning the vacuum’s familiar parts—the wheels and hose-fitting opening—into details of a pursuing machine rather than domestic equipment.

Gard understands that a premature dodge will let the Electrolux track him and cut into him. He waits, feints left, then throws himself right at the last moment. The maneuver saves him from the direct attack but brings him down hard; his shattered ankle grinds together and he screams. The machine crashes, its propeller eating dirt, then bounces back into the air and circles toward the buried ship for another pass. Its coaxial cable emerges from the hose-attachment hole and whirls through the air like a lasso, a transformed version of the cable that had earlier found the sling’s controls.

Gard fires the Sonic Space Blaster from his knees. The Electrolux shears away as he aims, but his shot removes a piece of chrome above a rear wheel. It circles a tree, climbs, and plunges again in a kamikaze dive, its chopping blade accelerating. Gard steadies himself by thinking of Ted the Power Man, then fires once more. The green beam splashes across the vacuum’s snout; Gard drives himself forward despite his injured ankle. The Electrolux strikes the ground beside the Tomcat and buries itself three feet in the dirt. Black smoke jets from its exposed end, and the machine dies.

Meaning and Aftermath

The Electrolux’s change from obedient implement to attacker is not merely a matter of its added attachments. In its first scene, its coaxial cable appears to search for buttons, but Gard sees Bobbi’s concentration behind each movement: the appliance is an instrument of her control. Once it attacks him, its motions no longer serve the task he witnessed. It banks, dives, and pursues, while Gard’s earlier image of a mechanical dachshund gives way to the practical necessity of evasion and destruction.

The object also makes the danger of the shed’s inventions concrete. The hole in the door records what the appliance can do before Gard encounters it in flight; the later attack confirms that its cutting mechanism is capable of far more than opening an exit. Even the machine’s apparent death does not restore safety. Gard sees other gadgets on their way through the woods, some flying and others trundling on makeshift wheels, and cannot remain beside the Electrolux’s buried, smoking body.

The object returns once more as a compressed warning. After Bobbi is gone, she tells Gard to watch out for rabid vacuum cleaners. The phrase turns the domestic appliance into a darkly apt name for the threat he has already survived: a familiar object made predatory by the same improvised ingenuity that first made it seem like a marvel. Its trajectory—from floating beside the excavation to attacking Gard and ending like a dud bomb in the dirt—embodies the unstable boundary between tool and weapon in Haven’s transformed world.