The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

by Ian Hutson

  Where Raymond’s sense of shock and loss and horror should have been he could feel only an un-named void, a blankness, a disconnection. Civilisation had been wiped away, and all Raymond could summon was detached observation, disapproval and a lack of surprise. He knew from reading his reference books that he should have been weeping and wailing and gnashing his teeth, but it just wasn’t in him. He was his parents’ son.

  The realisation that neither this ruined world nor the world that had been were - or ever would be - his to live in as others lived thundered through Raymond’s psyche like a diesel locomotive. Even this train-wreck left no imprint in his mind. It came as no surprise and he didn’t feel as though there were anything he could or should do about it, it just was. You can’t lose what you didn’t think you’d ever had, and there’s no point in wishing for something meant only for other people. Raymond was alive and well and it was only the wholly separate human society that had been swept away by The Bomb. He hadn’t even been included in Armageddon - and even that didn’t surprise him.

  The T-Chest lay at a slight angle next to a wrecked bicycle frame, an old washing machine and a tangled mass of paper and material and crushed tins and broken bottles. There was no sign that even at the last his parents - or anyone - had beaten a path to his door, figuratively or otherwise. Frozen out of time in the machine he had become an utter irrelevance to the flow of universal activity and reality. He remained mentally and physically slightly to one side of everything and thus utterly safe from harm of almost any external kind, material or emotional. Life; a life lived at V 1:1 +/- H and give or take ATP.

  Home was gone and he hadn’t even noticed the passing of the bricks and mortar around him. His parents had presumably perished with it or in what must surely have been a succession of long, nuclear winter years rising out of the madness. An odd sensation lurked near that thought - he should have felt some mix of grief and gratitude, felt it rather than just recognised it. Grief at their passing, gratitude at their machinations to keep him safe from harm. It was awkward that he acknowledged both but felt neither. He had no purpose, no point to his existence as it had run parallel to the great flow of humankind - he could no more be demonstrative about his existence than could some unclaimed, inanimate box of parts on a factory shelf. All that Raymond was, was just Raymond.

  Raymond stood, adjusted his nappy and looked around himself three hundred and sixty degrees, changing position a couple of times while the sun, the faithful sun, fell and rose. He could have no sense of whether the days and nights ran slow or fast - his only comparison was with his waiting in the T-Chest.

  In some pathological way, the view warranted a belly-laugh, but since only Raymond was present he just listened instead to the laughter in his mind, let a restrained snort filter through to his facial expression and concentrated on savouring the oddness of the exterior situation. The post-apocalyptic landscape was supposed to have been a smoking, blasted, radio-active, bare ruin with trees burned to charcoal and with all but the most minute traces of Mankind erased from the planet. Instead, the post-apocalyptic environment was knee-deep in domestic rubbish. Humans, it seemed, couldn’t even organise a neat and tidy extinction event.

  Raymond knew that he should have been crippled by sadness at the passing of his species into these last days of hungry scavenging and base descent, but there was nothing in him. There was no heavy lead weight in his heart any more than there was bubbling joy in his soul. He had no ownership of the world, no involvement, no connection with which to mourn or with which to feel responsible.

  Looking at the microscopic contagion and the radioactive flies feeding off the warm, wet, offal of his species Raymond’s mind simply ambled off to one side to wonder if his experience of living equated to that of the non-sentients; the spiders, the worms, all of plant-life. Was this utter disconnection what it meant to be one of those species?

  Was it ordinary for absolutely everything that happened anywhere from his nose to the far edges of infinity to be real only in that sparking train of thought inside his mind? Were all humans such as this on the inside and just better behaved than he, or was Raymond the only one? It seemed arrogant and illogical to think himself the only one, and yet he had seen and heard the evidence; the others were all quite, quite different in all respects. They communicated and they talked in huddles and they worked together and attached importance to plans and futures and to friendships and to being involved in all things, whereas Raymond simply was. He existed, and that was all.

  The sparking train of thought in his mind, busy doing whatever it was that it did in there, flagged a question with him as a speeding Royal Mail train might drop off a sack of overnight letters in a trackside net. Did it matter that he existed?

  Yes and no was Raymond’s answer - total balance and total division, as with all things. To decide yes or no in relation to happiness and sadness or even whether his existence mattered required some emotional imbalance, some assigning of values, some care, and Raymond had none of these. He was blank. Everything was just words, observations, history happening and Raymond didn’t belong to or own any of it.

  Yes, his existence was interesting in some small way, whether travelling in the T-Chest or whether standing alone in this post-apocalyptic ruin, and he supposed that it did no harm to anything other than himself. However, his existence did no good either, it affected nothing and no-one, so the equation relating to whether it mattered that he existed balanced out to zero, another blank where some solid emotional thing probably ought to be.

  If nothing else though, zero was at least a very neat number. A person might multiply or divide by zero, might add or subtract zero and do no harm, leave no trace.

  The sparking train of thought running around Raymond’s mind flagged up yet another question. What now then? Whither Raymond?

  What now and whither indeed, thought the part of Raymond’s mind that talked to the sparking train of thought. What should there be after a few days of standing still and looking around at the ruins? If he stood still for too long he was in danger of becoming part of something simply by default, and that would be presumptuous, and would limit the neat blankness of his future. That would be writing on his life before he was certain about everything, and that would not do at all. Encyclopaedia and calendars were only actually printed when they facts were known, not when speculation and indecision ruled. To somehow publish a Raymond before it had been properly written would be folly.

  A great hero of some kind would no doubt stride about, take charge and rebuild human society in new and better ways. Raymond couldn’t think for the life of him what would really make that future any better than the one that would come if he just did nothing. A planet with humans versus a planet without humans? Surely that decision had already been made, and anyway, both solutions were perfectly valid in the great flow of things. Nothing mattered in the end. The universe would still deflate and re-inflate without Mankind so why not save people the bother?

  Would it be cowardly or wrong somehow to look upon this new world and to then turn his back, disinterested? Everything was vanilla and blank. No peaks that mattered, no troughs that mattered, que sera sera and whatever will be, well be, the future’s not Raymond’s to see, to see, the voice in his head sang to him, like an ear-worm that wouldn’t go away until it realised that he was no longer listening.

  A newspaper flapped in the light breeze and its pages collected at Raymond’s feet and ankles. It confirmed that he had indeed travelled into the nineteen-eighties! From its pages he saw that the few scavengers were not the only population remaining in England - there had to be thousands more! Thousands of miners, thrown out of the mines and rioting - was coal, primitive, dirty coal still in such recent use? Hundreds of leaders, arguing and fighting, and one in particular - a self-styled Boadicea with added bitch, taking the people into wars with foreign tribes, and smashing all that resisted her as she led from the rear. Diseases ran riot - if you had sex, you died, and you died slowly and horri
bly! Police in some militaristic riot gear, hiding behind heavy shields as Molotov cocktails and rubble rained down upon them in ruined city streets. The Fire Brigade - replaced by an Army with ancient fire engines! Hospitals - closed or filthy and under-staffed! Some few, rich beyond belief, nested in an enclave in the heart of old London while all others relied on charity or lived from day to day. So this was what had become of the world. Had The Atomic Bomb gone off? It was difficult to tell.

  Raymond regarded with furrowed brow the machine his father had built. The T-Chest had no electric circuits to tinker with, no cogs, no valves, no levers - no machinery of any description. It had utterly defied investigation while he had first travelled in it and it now lay disassembled about him as six slightly warped plywood panels, the makings of a light deal frame and a number of rusting tin-tacks. There was nothing save wood and the form itself. A light bulb went on in Raymond’s head, that for the moment resembled a dark-grey room with a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, and was finally devoid of musical ear-worms singing demented, buggered-about lyrics to half-remembered tunes. He had clarity, however briefly.

  Raymond remembered something, a phrase buried so deep that it can only have been uttered by his mother, perhaps during one of those long spells building castles among the tins of SPAM and pineapple chunks and baked beans in the bomb shelter, or perhaps during one of those periods of despair that she and Father hid from each other but didn’t realise - or care - that Raymond could see.

  ‘When you have eliminated the inedible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be lunch’ said the little voice of his memory. The imaginary bare light-bulb in Raymond’s dark-grey mind was unmoved, but Raymond somehow knew that the kernel of the phrase was important. He must work with the ingredients that he had available.

  Well, all that was left of the T-Chest was the basic form itself. That must then be the “lunch” referred to. Was the cube’s secret really just its own shape? Did it function in the same many-dimensional geometry as did the great pyramids of Giza, Volume 8, pages 1,123 to 1,127 including plates 1,123a to 1,123c? It seemed a giant leap from ancient massive stone structures to plywood T-Chest, but stranger things had happened, Volume 11, pages 313 to 427.

  Raymond reassembled the T-Chest with all of the panels reversed to face inwards. Where once the outside world had seen “This Way Up” and “MOCKBA by Surface Mail Only - No Return” it now saw Raymond’s ticking off of the days and his line portraits, all bearing the inscription “My Teddy Bear; Teddy”, and some miscellaneous domestic staining attendant on twenty years’ use by a growing lad.

  Would it work? It had to work!

  Where the machine had once defined the space within, forcing it to somehow hurtle into the future, the panels now defined the space without and that, surely, would cause it to hurtle back to the past! It was a simple theory, and simple theories were the best.

  Raymond held the lid over his head and took one final, wide-eyed look around at the future. That final panel would need to be fitted quickly, the last thing that Raymond did in this time-frame, and it would have to be fitted from inside. Raymond clambered in, folding his limbs carefully, and pulled the panel into place over his head, holding onto it with grim and desperate determination. It could only be a matter of time then before he began to accelerate backwards to safer, more sane days.

  Using his toes, Raymond grabbed a crayon and blocked in the day on the calendar. He would need to count carefully, and would have to calculate his journey manually if he were to retreat permanently back to the days before the T-Chest, back to when he was warm and fed and comfortable in his big, safe, Silver Cross pram. It wouldn’t do to overshoot!

  A light but persistent drizzle began to fall over the Corporation land-fill tip, and the scavengers slunk away to sit and wait for the sun to come out and shine again. The man from the dark and distant past had arrived, looked around, thrown out an extremely well-used Terry-towel nappy and then got back into his machine. How odd some people are.

  #####

  The Improvement Engine.

  Morning dew kept the young blades of meadow grass bowed in deep sleep. This left them quite unprepared for the lumberings of the bleary-eyed woolly mammoth that staggered, stiff-limbed, to splash water on their faces at the river. A fresh, pale, cream-yellow sun made preparations to take over the running of things for a while and an almost transparent moon lingered, as though uncertain that her shift had ended. Like a cat sharing the sky with a dog, the Moon has never quite trusted the Sun. Night’s chill began to withdraw to make way for warmth, and naked apes, vigilant and nervous, ventured to the entrances of their caves, kicking at the smouldering ashes of their wood fires.

  England was waking up, and what a day it would prove to be.

  Six shallow oblate spheroids of the classic form appeared, flying in out of the east. The burnished copper, brass and bronze of their hull-plates gleamed and their curves were punctuated by round portholes that were glazed with dazzling cobalt blue, cochineal red, malachite green, dove grey and - most lavishly of all to alien eyes - beige. The craft landed in an achingly neat hexagonal formation on the valley floor and they vented oily steam, and sundry noxious vapours. Hydraulic landing legs, once settled, immediately covered themselves decently in a velvet drape to maintain social decorum and propriety.

  The saucers then extended screaming drill and grinding screw into the substrate, seeking and finding carboniferous fuels and other useful matters necessary to the employment of the machinery within. Wet and dry wastes from the journey were given final rest among the trees and foliage nearby, out of sight and thus, quite out of alien mind. In a final flurry of activity, sensors built from sparking Jacob’s Ladders rose into the air, deep listening dishes unfurled like other-worldly fly-catchers, and lighting beams far beyond the Sol daylight spectrum extended from the domes. Cunning machinery was set into motion and efficient, self-actualising automata began the process of planetary survey and of feasibility study, their function subject only to the restrictions of the One Law.

  ‘A machine shall faithfully serve its Master.’ Six plaques in each of the six saucers reminded the machines of the One Law.

  Decently isolated, each within the withdrawing or personal chambers of their craft, the six Masters of this expeditionary party readied themselves for their always-onerous task of assessment and decision. Some took galvanic baths to ease the surface tensions of their body-coverings, others preferred the inhalation of the combustion gases of opiates and one or two indulged in the ingestion of refined sugars to assist with and to fuel the high reasonings of their brain-glands. All was well with their world, and presently it would be time to see what they could do with this world in order to establish yet another outpost of civilisation.

  Buzzing, crackling, Bakelite-insulated metal aerials on each craft turned, found their counterparts and linked the hexagon via the electrical portions of the very aether itself. The party held their opening conference of the expedition. Formations of six six-dimensional displays in each craft displayed rolling data feeds and the other explorers, each nestling in the favoured ferns and heavy drapery of their public rooms.

  ‘This system is thin gruel - only this one planet among them has potential, and it grows wild.’

  ‘All the more important then that we improve what we can, where we can, when we can.’

  ‘It is indeed a poor workman who blames his raw materials - we must overcome the many shortfalls here.’

  ‘Agreed. If we can make this barren system bloom then our glory will be the greater for it.’

  ‘We cannot pass by - our success lies in making the attempt.’

  ‘Any failure of conclusion will not be ours.’

  ‘Agreed. Our obligation is strongest where the need is greatest. This system is much in need.’

  ‘The light that shines from our work here will illuminate us.’

  ‘Our effort shall be its own reward.’

  ‘Our profits just and fair.’


  ‘It is our duty to improve. Our position as superiors carries many responsibilities.’

  ‘Nature is running riot on this planet, as is her wont. She must be brought under some control.’

  ‘It is offensive to see life not fulfilling life’s full potential.’

  ‘A planet without industry is a planet without respect - a wasteful thing.’

  ‘Agreed. Proceed each with your personal endeavours and we shall reconvene when the planet has turned five times more.’

  On the sixth day of their labours data had been gathered from all corners of the land and many reports had been created and weighed. The challenges they found were within their capabilities. The world was offensive, but not beyond salvation. The chief disappointment lay in finding that the squabbling apes that they had seen around and about were the zenith of the planet’s offerings.

  ‘Consider the lilies of this particular field; they toil not neither do they spin.’

  ‘Resources lay idle.’

  ‘Chaos reigns and all is disorder and waste.’

  ‘Life recumbent in abundance thrives without consideration.’

  ‘Life without abundance seeks it not. This is madness.’

  ‘Nothing has been written upon the face of this planet. There is no mark to thank creation for its provision.’

  ‘They live in isolation from meaning. The sciences are unknown to them.’

  ‘This is a blank world. It is our duty to write upon it.’

  ‘Purpose and duty and dominion must be given to some.’

  ‘Service and labour and charity given to the lesser things.’

  ‘Order must be imposed.’

  ‘Since they have not chosen among themselves we must make the choosing for them.’

  ‘What say the reports then? Among which species shall we consider?’

  ‘We choose here from among the hominidae. Nature has at least done this much for us.’