The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

by Ian Hutson

  ‘So - setting the duration? You didn’t answer. How can that be done if there are no external controls and we shan’t be around to open the machine?’ Mrs Smith allowed emotion to cloud her deportment, and she clung to Mr Smith’s elbow and laid her head briefly upon his shoulder.

  ‘Oh - I’ve given Raymond his own set of calendars for the appropriate years with a big red cross marked on the day that he should stop the machine by opening the hatch and re-connecting it with the general space-time flow. To be safe, I set that to his twenty-first birthday. The world should certainly be a distinctly better, safer, more sane place by then!’

  ‘One would hope so. This machine - you do say it is... reliable?’

  ‘Oh very. There’s absolutely no mechanical parts or electric circuitry to malfunction. The only thing I’ve found is that you need to avoid damp - it affects the plywood structure deleteriously.’

  The “All Clear” sirens sounded, bringing them back to their own lives with a bump, and to the far side of yet another atomic false alarm. Presumably, one with all of the missiles and aircraft with nuclear bombs heading back to base and a full English breakfast or whatever the Americans and Russians ate in lieu thereof. Life would go on for another fresh day.

  Mr and Mrs Smith took one last look through the Mica viewing slot into the dark, shadowy recesses of the T-Chest, and said their fond farewells to chubby little Raymond, his gas-mask and his teddy bear. Raymond, seeing his parents eyes peering in at him, made that funny little “grabbing fingers” wave that children often do, and he wondered what this new everything was all about. He supposed that time alone would tell, and then he had a poo.

  Mr and Mrs Smith turned out the lights in the cellar-workshop-fall-out-shelter and trudged back up the stairs to see to the dog. After a few minutes of reckless, headlong time-travel Raymond’s eyes adjusted to the subterranean gloom that was lit only by the amber glow of the oscilloscope read-out on the bench alongside him. He kept a weather eye on the little “viewing slot” and popped his first Civil Defence food pill under his gas-mask. He was good at waiting. He had practiced waiting in his pram on the lawn, he had practiced waiting in his pram outside shops, he had practiced waiting in his cot in the third bedroom with the door shut because no-one wants to raise a cry-baby, do they?

  Waiting he could do. Raymond waited.

  Mrs Smith sought some final, maternal reassurance as they re-opened the curtains and prepared to carry on living. ‘Darling - this will work, won’t it? Raymond will be safe, won’t he?’

  ‘Absolutely dear. Whatever the risk, I can’t think of any other way to keep Raymond safer, and you can’t expect a child to live like this. If we survive, he’ll thank us for this in the future, you mark my words.’

  Mrs Smith twiddled the stop-cock under the sink and then filled the tea kettle from the tap.

  ‘So, time-travel eh? You clever thing! What else have you been cooking up in that secret government laboratory of yours that you haven’t told me about?’

  ‘Oh, lot of exciting things. The whole place really is at the leading edge of the finest English technological research. One team has been exploring the power of the human mind and I can tell you that I think we’ve almost cracked it.’

  ‘You’ve finally cracked the human mind?’

  ‘Absolutely! We had to, couldn’t let the Russians or Uncle Sam get there first!’

  ‘You mean remote sensing, telepathy and telekinesis I suppose, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Yes, although our chaps have so far only been working on telestasis. That’s very like telekinesis, but the subject remotely uses the power of their thoughts to make some object stay where it is. The Ministry of Defence has high hopes for practical military applications from that one.’

  ‘Gosh yes, I see. Stopping missiles from being launched at all, preventing troops from moving?’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s in the early stages so far, obviously. At the moment the slightest physical disturbance can move the test objects even when several operators are thinking hard on “freezing” them in place, but I’ve no doubt that given time they’ll get there, no doubt in my mind at all.’

  Mr Smith let Boadicea out into the back garden, and glanced to the front to check that the Humber was undamaged and not still running.

  ‘One of the nastiest areas of research - this one’s a bit grubby really - is known as Experiment IV. Professor Bush is leading the team on that one. It’s all about using sound waves as a weapon. The Army have got us working on developing a sound that can kill someone from a distance.’

  ‘That sounds like a mistake in the making.’

  ‘So far the prototype we’ve developed is a long-playing record of George Formby’s “When I’m cleaning windows” played through a directional horn speaker at high volume - with the meters over in the red. As yet it doesn’t actually kill the test subjects, it just makes them run away.’

  ‘But music was made for pleasure. Music was made to thrill, not kill.’

  ‘Yes, I did say that it was fairly horrid. What’s for dinner, dear?’

  ‘Egg and chips darling? I didn’t get a chance to go to the shops I’m afraid, what with the advance warnings of the Four Minute Warning and everything.’

  In the cellar, in the amber gloom, Raymond blinked and poked a finger in his ear as he waited. Perhaps there might be some wax in there to talk to and play with? Earwax could be good alternative company when Teddy was asleep.

  Mrs Smith busied herself at her own workbench, in the kitchen. ‘Oh darling - the Browns have invited us over for cards tomorrow evening. I said that if we hadn’t been annihilated or weren’t holed-up against radioactive fall-out that we’d love to. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Mr Smith hadn’t really been listening, he was sinking back into the newspapers, in his armchair by the French windows to the terrace.

  In the cellar, Raymond eventually decided that it was probably time to do some work, and he picked up a crayon and crossed out the first of the empty days on the first of his stack of twenty-one calendars. He had to admit that it was a little bit scary, travelling through time all on his own, but he was a young Englishman, he could do this. Mummy and Daddy would expect him to behave himself and to not cause a fuss. He filled his nappy again, and in the confined space of the speeding T-Chest he was quite glad of the gas-mask.

  In the regular time-flow Mr Smith changed the family car from a Humber to a Daimler (so much less gauche than a Jaguar) and he and Mrs Smith learned how to weather the madness and chaos that was the nineteen-sixties. The very best thing about “Flower Power” and all of that sort of thing was that they were so very easy to avoid if one kept to the suburbs. BBC Television spoiled itself of course by increasing from just BBC1 to BBC1 and a BBC2, and by extending broadcasting hours. The wireless needed cautious tuning to avoid being blasted by some pirate channel broadcasting from an old trawler in the English Channel. Shops began to be gobbled up by something called “super markets” and dreadful things such as “boil in the bag” curries came to be regarded as quite the norm, while some raved over the new foreign “yoghurts”. Mr and Mrs Smith did the best that they could to survive, and occasionally even managed some semblance of a pre-crisis social life.

  On just one such happy social occasion, their good friends and co-survivors, the Browns and the Greens brought with them a little of the “Martini set” to visit the Smith household. Both wives made an effort to be glamorous and they positively radiated every ounce of style that might be had from heated Carmen rollers. The husbands, suited and tied, looked a little more lived-in and lived-on - both had come from hard days at work, but were still looking forward to some relaxation.

  ‘Canasta?’ ventured Mrs Brown bravely, after a lovely chicken Vesta with saffron rice, a strawberry Angel Delight and two thirds of a bottle of Blue Nun between them.

  Everyone agreed on Canasta. Mr Brown moved what looked like a tea chest into the centre of their ring of chairs. ‘I thought you tw
o moved here years ago. Why the tea-chest still hanging around?’

  ‘Oh - that’s one of Mr Smith’s old experiments’ shouted Mrs Smith from the kitchen. ‘I can’t remember the detail, but it’s something to do with atomic time travel, or the Russians, or something. It’s quite robust - you won’t damage it.’

  ‘Well, I’m using it as a card table for now. Gosh, it’s heavy. It sounds as though there’s something heavy and lumpy rolling around inside it.’

  ‘Oh no problem - there’s a fresh gingham tablecloth in the sideboard, put that over it will you so no-one gets any splinters or anything. We’ll have to get rid of it eventually of course - we’re down-sizing to a little cottage in the country once Mr Smith retires.’

  Mrs Green did the honours with the tablecloth and then Mr Green shuffled the packs and dealt.

  Raymond accepted being turned upside down and having his little viewing slot obstructed by the overhang of the gingham tablecloth without argument. Who was he to question the manner of the passage of time? This too would pass, if only he waited patiently. The machine around him seemed to be still working perfectly, and there had been many similar disturbances in the past. The voices leaking in from the external space-time continuum were always muffled and sometimes distant. He was happy to catch a brief glimpse of the family Bulldog, Boadicea, sniffing under the cloth before being whisked away. The years were being quite kind to the dog, considering, and The Bomb obviously hadn’t gone off yet.

  The card game went on to the early hours, and it was well into the next crossed-off day before the T-Chest was set upright again and moved back into its corner. Something called a “hangover” caused him to be replaced with his little viewing slot facing the blank wall though, so the next few months were quite dull really.

  The next few years passed, punctuated only by Raymond’s giddy, daily excitement of crossing off another day on the calendar. For him the standard-time world outside the T-Chest flashed by in a cascade of unreality and disconnectedness. Occasionally, for some machine-time months, the viewing slot would go dark, quite pitch black as though the device were in some unlit warehouse or storage. On other days there might be a turbulence in the flow of time, such as one might experience on the back of a lorry pounding the ill-maintained roads between one real-world address and some other. Carpets, painted walls and wallpapers came and went, and the Mica of the viewing slot gradually became scratched and more opaque and yellowed. Behind it, Raymond’s eyes blinked wider and wider as he neared the once far-distant future.

  Raymond’s supply of Civil Defence Emergency Ration pills had taken on a significance of their own over the years. Raymond could make consumption of just one stretch for hours, and he tried day after day to break his own record. Whenever there was a little light through the viewing slot Raymond peered into and pored over the volumes of Bradshaw’s 1955 Edition ‘A Complete Guide to The Future’, teaching himself the meaning of the squiggles and assigning his own captions and categories to the diagrams. A year once passed entirely without there being sufficient light for him to read by, but he knew each volume off by heart and he sailed through his teenage years in ways that other boys simply did not.

  In his occasional darker moods, Raymond allowed himself to think that the pace of the T-Chest couldn’t really be described as “blistering” in any language that he’d taught himself. These negative thoughts caused him some guilt and shame - his parents had given up so much to give him this chance of life in the future, away from the sirens and The Bomb and the false alarms and the dystopian nightmare that had surrounded them and ruled all their lives. It was not his place to question or complain! He didn’t really know what his purpose was, but it had to be something to do with surviving no matter what, for some reason or other. To fill the gap where he was almost sure that his purpose should be he intoned the mantras that he had heard his parents live by.

  If it can go wrong it will go wrong. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Nothing’s ever as good as you expect it to be. Nobody does anything for nothing. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Anything worthwhile takes sacrifice. Don’t make waves. The world is a dangerous place.

  Raymond wondered how his parents had fared outside the machine among all of the dangers. Had the atomic balloon gone up? How distant were the echoes of their voices now, how distorted through the time-line? His parents almost sounded like completely different people to the ones he had known. The images through the viewing slot increasingly took on a chaos all of their own, a headlong rush into the unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Ghostly human blurs came and went, Boadicea stopped appearing altogether, and time, endless time, flowed, eddied, occasionally stagnated and sometimes roared in torrents beyond his control. All he knew was the crossing off of the days on his calendars, as he was supposed to.

  In the early years Raymond had tried to anticipate what it would be like when the balloon went up. He would be protected from harm of course, safe inside the T-Chest and moving forwards at V of 1:1 +/- H give or take ATP, but the viewing slot would surely give him some indication. A flash of light perhaps, some buffeting and turbulence and that would be the end of most of the human race including, almost certainly, his parents. He never saw the expected flash and so began to suspect that it must have taken place during one of the “dark” periods when the viewing screen was against a wall, or the whole apparatus inside some windowless box-room. The farther into the future the device took him the more isolated he became from all that had been familiar, the more blurred his memory and the less certain his grasp of meaning and purpose.

  The nearer he got to the final cross on his calendars the more Raymond wondered about the world that would greet him. It would be the twenty-one year distant, far future, certainly, but what kind of future? Surely mankind would have recovered and seen the error of its atomic ways. Technology would have advanced in leaps and bounds, Nature would have been tamed and the human species would surely have had to begin to love itself and consider one another more kindly. There might be flying scooters and cars that could dip into the very edges of space! Houses would be wild structures reaching into the air, completely self-cleaning and with ovens that turned themselves on and off to heat meals ready for when the future people got home from work, if indeed, in the late nineteen-seventies there would still be work to be done as the encyclopaedia described it. Robots would probably do the main share, ironing and weeding the gardens and so forth. What wonderful phoenix of human society would have arisen from the blackened, radioactive ashes of the failure of the nineteen-fifties, the nineteen-sixties and a lot of the nineteen-seventies?

  Raymond became increasingly uncomfortable, both with his lot and with the size of the machine. His yoga routines in particular were becoming stifled by the spatial restrictions, and once he had been stuck for the best part of six slightly panic-stricken weeks when his Kukkutasana had jammed his knees and elbows into four of the more unfamiliar of the machine’s eight available corners. He began to fiddle with the rusting ends of the tacks that held the main access panel in place, working at them daily and stopping each one just shy of actually becoming loose. He reasoned that he may at any time need to make a leap into the unknown, and so ought to be ready to do so.

  Careening down the timeline towards utopia, so near and yet so far, was an increasingly burdensome demand for an enquiring, late-teenage mind. Raymond needed to know everything. What was out there, beyond the safe confines of the T-Chest’s influence? Roadways floating in the air, perpetual motion machines, eternal youth, contact with alien species, strange music, new foods - all of these things and more, surely? Humans themselves - might they have been changed somehow too, physically as well as mentally, perhaps by the atomic fall-out and the scientific developments that would have accompanied the rebuilding of civilisation during the sixties or seventies?

  It became utterly intolerable inside the time machine. For months now the patterns of light beyond the Mica of the viewing slot hadn’t changed except with the diurnal rhythm of
half-light following half-dark. There had been no influx of heating from his environment for the past several winters, and no escape even in the machine from the over-warmth of the summer seasons rushing by. A little stagnant water and a lot of the smell of organic matter had filtered through the time interface, suggesting that possibly the planet had reverted to some phase with nature temporarily in the ascendant.

  Raymond pushed experimentally at some of the tacks holding the access panel in place. What would happen to him when he fell out of the machine into the regular time-stream and into ordinary space at his current velocity? Would he live or would he be vaporised? Either way, it really was time to find out.

  The lid of the T-Chest creaked, splintered at the edges and finally gave way, springing off and landing somewhere nearby. Raymond looked up. Nothing rushed past, no frantic neon strands of the temporal or spatial energies leapt about like some lethal aurora borealis. It was, he thought to himself, quite a disappointment. Raymond’s eyes ached and his neck protested as he raised his head above the sides of the T-Chest and turned to look above and around. After some time and a lot of blinking the domestic time-stream came almost into focus. Raymond’s blood ran cold. But then, Raymond’s blood always ran cold, somehow, even though it remained physically warm - this was a family trait, and he was proud to have inherited it as a memento of his parents.

  What stretched before Raymond was a wasteland, a seagull-populated wasteland from horizon to horizon. The half-dozen humans in view were furtive, scurrying, sick-looking creatures scavenging among the detritus and dodging the manoeuvres of massive yellow machines that looked to be trying to bury them alive! Had huge yellow robots moving on caterpillar tracks taken over the world? Dotted at intervals around the landscape were gas flares burning with a fierce purple-blue flame, sucking on some subterranean gas.

  So, Mankind had finally ruined the planet and had all but destroyed himself along with it. This future was worse than the past!