The Cat Wore Electric Goggles Read online

  The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

  Ian Hutson

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright Ian Hutson 2014

  Published by The Diesel-Electric Elephant Company

  England

  Discover other titles by Ian Hutson at

  DieselElectricElephant.co.uk

  This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only.

  Smoochies.

  CONTENTS

  The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

  One Saturday, Almost 2,000 Years A.D.

  VTC = 1:1 +/- H times ATP

  The Improvement Engine

  One Small Step for Ma’am, One Giant Leap for Ma’amkind

  The Unfortunate Fatal Incident at 7 AU

  Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

  Shall I be Mother?

  The Especial Relevance of Cowpats

  You fools! You fools! You insensible fools!

  The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

  The Almost Omnipresent Omniscient Monks

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author Online

  The Cat Wore Electric Goggles.

  AWOOGAH! AWOOGAH!

  The klaxon seemed to bypass the human ear altogether and to burrow directly into the crew’s stomachs, filling each to capacity with stainless-steel butterflies.

  Turing, the Senior Radio Operator, had his feet jammed under the instrument console so that he could use one hand to hold his microphone and the other to tweak the Bakelite knobs and levers of the communication machinery. Needles in the many dials flicked back and forth or even spun wildly in complete circles, and all was lit by a danger-red glow. Turing had no idea whether his message was even being transmitted, let alone received by Jodrell Bank.

  ‘M’aider m’aider m’aider! This is Her Majesty’s Space Ship Beagle. We have been hit by an electro-magnetic interference. Navigation and helm systems are malfunctioning. We are out of control and heading towards Planet 21ZedNA9. M’aider, m’aider, m’aider...’

  Whereas the crew were just barely hanging on with grim determination, Captain Arthur Faraday somehow managed to stride with dignity across the bridge to his chair. His reappearance there brought with it some assurance, and also the odd sensation in the officers that impressing the captain was every bit as important as just surviving the emergency.

  ‘Somebody shut that ruddy klaxon off - I think we’re all aware that this is serious.’

  HMSS Beagle ducked and dived as she plummeted towards exactly the planet in exactly the system that they had been sent out to investigate - in exactly the manner that they had hoped not to arrive. One moment her sleek metallic nose-cone was aimed at the planet - a body that had been sending out odd radio-energy waves - and the next moment she pointed out to the cold black of space. Tumbling, seemingly randomly, her manoeuvring thrusters and blasting rocket motors were quite unable to restore her former grace and poise. Scarlet red and emerald green navigation lights left twisted trails in the ionised gases as the ship hit the planet’s atmosphere and continued her dive.

  ‘Engineer - report!’

  The Chief Engineer tried to stand to attention, to salute and to hang on to a cross-beam all at the same time.

  ‘Captain, we’re somehow stuck in the electro-magnetic radiations emanating from the planet. The navigation computer is inoperative; every capacitor, every potentiometer has been burned out. Helm is attempting to control our flight manually but the turbulence is almost tearing us apart.’

  Beagle took an especially violent swing, and slide-rules, set-squares, protractors and paper star-charts were thrown from the tables. The ship’s cat, Mr Babbage, sent a fingernail-on-blackboard screech through everyone’s ouch-bones as he was flung from port side to starboard side and the deck plates shone like new where his claws had left desperate tramlines. The moment the ship paused briefly in her aerobatics he resumed the aloof manner of a cat that had intended to slide arse foremost across the bridge and slam up against a bulkhead. When the captain ordered “brace for impact” Mr Babbage decided that his cat-igloo was the place to be, and that he would also just incidentally take a nap in the foetal position with his paws over his eyes. He had six and a half good lives left and he didn’t intend to waste one here if at all possible.

  Mr Babbage regained cat-consciousness with his brain reporting an odd concerto of ghastly silences on the outside of his skull overlaid with a painfully loud twelve kilohertz hum on the inside. His vision seemed less sensitive than it ought to be and focus was a manual process requiring not some little blinking. In short; nothing that couldn’t be cured by a productive visit to his litter tray and then sticking one hind leg in the air for a damned good tongue-bath.

  The human crew later found themselves to be in similar states of health, although their diagnoses also included cuts, bruises, the odd broken bone and a diminished confidence in the crash-protection efficacy of sticking their backsides in the air and covering their eyes (one or two of them had woken in positions where they appeared to have tried it).

  Captain Faraday, exercising the privileges of rank, was the first of the commissioned crew to see the light of day at the end of the concussion tunnel - and he was dismayed to do so through a gash in the fuselage through which he could also plainly see alien sky. It seemed that the more usual atmospheric safety tests before opening the outer hatch were now rendered superfluous. The Captain’s nostrils twitched and registered nothing unusual, except perhaps for a certain extra-meaty aroma drifting over from the ship’s cat’s upturned and litterless litter tray. Mr Babbage appeared to be straining cross-eyed in some feline yoga stance involving all four paws in close formation, and a certain amount of tottering about was involved as his centre of gravity was upset by the movement of a significant proportion of his overall starting mass.

  Faraday took advantage of his early recovery to adjust his uniform, slick down his Brylcreem comb-over and generally dust himself off - the better to greet his groggy and dishevelled crew while also intimating that mere crash landings were no cause for medical or sartorial disturbance in a truly professional serviceman. By the time the lower ranks had begun to recover Captain Faraday was settled at his desk on the bridge, screwing the top back on his fountain pen after updating the ship’s log with a single, pithy entry: ‘The Beagle has landed.’

  Planet 21ZedNA9 looked about as welcoming as an open-cast uranium mine. It was a rock covered in smaller rocks, with some of the rocks piled up into hills. Gravel made from broken rocks rounded off the corners. To be fair, some of the rocks were slightly different shades of the colour of rock and a river, of sorts, ran through the shallow valley. It was all a very drab affair indeed. If there were a sentient spark to be found here, thought Faraday, then it would be life but probably not as Mr Darwin had ever known it.

  Mr Babbage stepped off his litter tray like a duke stepping down from a carriage, and he greeted the Captain’s now conscious ankles with a head butt and a purr. Then he pranced out through the gash in the hull to investigate the scenery. Nothing ate him immediately so he sought higher ground where he might undertake his post-poop wash and watch the antics of his crew.

  HMSS Beagle’s hitherto elegant nose-cone had been concertinaed against a particularly large rock, and a shower of smaller rocks ranging in size from a Morris Oxford to a Bird’s Eye frozen pea had been thrown over the main cylinder of the vessel. Her landing struts had collapsed in the impact, flattening one of her four fins and lozenging one of the stern jet cones into an oval maw. Wisps of steam and smoke were issuing from vents on the engineering deck and, as dusk fell, the lights behind the rows of portholes continued to flicker long after the new-fangled fluorescent tubes should ordinaril
y have warmed up and stopped clanking.

  Mr Babbage glanced to his left, disturbed by the flickering half-light of a shadow, and decided to go back onboard to see if the tin-opener had survived the crash. Twice on the short journey to HMSS Beagle Mr Babbage hunkered down, hissed and spat at the shadows. Tragically, it seemed that the tin-opener was in sick bay with a broken something or other. However, it only took a little wildly inspired ankle-worship and a plaintive meow to discover a healthy alternative who knew the neat trick with the wonderful tins of “Space-Kat” chomp-chomp chow. Better yet, this less experienced tin-opener had no sense of portion-control and erred on the generous side.

  Repair crews bustled and the gangways were filled with hobnail booted footfall. Glaring torches and work-lights cast shadows everywhere, confusing the eye and upsetting the collective primal hindbrain in its constant quest to spot predators.

  Twice Captain Faraday turned from his desk only to find no-one actually standing behind him. The Medical Officer was summoned on the respect-preserving pretext of hand-delivering a report of crew injuries. Discreet checks for the effects of concussion were then elicited behind a closed cabin door. The Captain’s skull was pronounced to be anatomically similar to that of a heavy-set bull-elephant, and to be wholly intact and quite uninjured. The entire crew was a little bit jittery according to the M.O.’s summation, but that was to be expected following the crash - nerves had been jangled.

  Mr Babbage, finding the Captain’s cabin door closed, leaned to one side as though accepting a pretend tickle from some kindly, unseen soul and then bounded away down the deck, on a mission.

  Captain Faraday’s steward, carrying a supper of Cheddar cheese and Branston Pickle sandwiches, wished that he could be so easily amused by imaginary petting and pretend rodents. As he knocked and waited his eyes flicked to the end of the corridor, attracted by movement that wasn’t there. He silently prescribed himself another Aspirin, to be administered as soon as he could get to the crew bar for an ale with which to wash it down.

  As the lights in operational parts of the ship turned red one hour later for the ship’s night watches Mr Babbage tired of all the pretend attention he was receiving and retreated to his padded cat-igloo on the bridge.

  Halfway through the night Captain Faraday woke in a sweat and a panic, forcing himself to reach out from the safety of his bunk into the pitch-black for a light switch, knowing that illumination would be the only thing to chase away his silly nightmare. In his dream he had been lying on his bunk, unable to lift so much as a finger and surrounded at close range by faces staring down at him, somehow draining the energy and the life from his flesh and bones. Only under the greatest exercise of will within his dream had he been able to force his eyelids to open, expecting to come face to face with someone or some thing. He swung his legs over the side of his bunk, glanced involuntarily at the shadows cast by the desk light, and held his head in his hands. Then he did something that he hadn’t done since childhood - he checked under the bunk, peering into the shadows there for he knew not what. Possibly for some lurking remnant of his dream.

  Faraday dressed and walked out onto the bridge, disturbing the night watch and causing them to snap to attention. It seemed that all was well, considering, although the whole crew remained jumpy and unsettled. The Computing Officers were reported to be still deep inside the machinery room replacing the burned out thermionic valves and some of the wiring. Even so, navigation systems would be ready to be warmed up and back on-line within the hour. The Captain noticed that the Officer of the Watch had moved his chair so that it now backed against a wall instead of being open to the various doors leading onto the bridge. Faraday’s experienced eyes also saw that such junior officers as there were on duty gravitated towards the bulkheads, eschewing their more customary positions in the centre of the deck and commuting back and forth when tasked.

  Sensing the arrival of the Captain’s senior ankles and privilege-conferring lap Mr Babbage emerged from his igloo and began to stroll over. Half-way on his sashay to the Captain, tail in the air, he suddenly hunkered down, spat, hissed and decided on a change of scenery, chasing an imaginary something out into the corridor. Faraday tried but couldn’t remember if the cat was one of those cross-eyed ones - its hiss had seemed to be directed into open space rather than at anyone present.

  Captain Faraday decided to amble down to the Science Deck to see what progress had been made on identifying the odd radiations that had brought them to this system initially and had then brought them to their knees at the last by burning out the computer. Mr Babbage caught up and tagged along. Who knew? The Captain might one day suddenly display the admirable skills of an Able Tin-Opener First Class, or some other really useful rank. As they walked through the ship she somehow felt busier than she ought to be in this off-watch, even given the emergency. Half of the vessel was still on jury-rigged lighting though, and that is never pleasant - all harsh glare and darkness.

  The Science Deck, behind its latched and pressurised quarantine airlock doors, presented an odd combination of smells, sights and sounds. Liquids gurgled in laboratory glassware over hissing Bunsen burners as the pulverised remnants of large rocks, medium rocks and small rocks from the brutally-furnished planet were analysed. The unspeakably moist, over-intimate aromas of the previous planetfall’s biological investigations still hung about the atmosphere as a reminder that one of life’s primary indicators is to consume, to process and to then discard organic matter. The sadly non-sentient aboriginal “chimpansheep” of their previous encounter had proven especially adept at processing and then rather aggressively discarding organic matter. Such was first contact - a messy, hit and miss affair.

  Thick wooden benches bore ugly stains as reminders that they had been soaked in the very juices of alien existence. Cream-enamelled laboratory clocks ticked away the duration of obscure investigations and, at the far end of the room, sat Dr Newton, hunched over the half-ton mass of the ship’s portable atomic microscope. Newton turned to check behind himself as though expecting someone to be there, and yet was surprised to see the Captain. He almost left his skin behind as he jumped from one startle to quite another.

  ‘Oh - there is somebody there. May I help you, Captain?’

  ‘Yes - you can draw me some ruddy scientific conclusions about this planet, and you can start by telling me why this bloody cat has taken to staring into corners, hissing at nothing and purring as though it’s being tickled by ghosts. The whole crew’s unsettled and when the crew is unsettled, so am I.’

  Newton thought for a moment and decided against offering the results of the chemical analysis of the rocks. He brought his thought processes even further down, to the level of the almost totally non-scientific mind. Mr Babbage, the “bloody cat” in question, was throwing some figment into the air, watching as it “landed” and then “re-capturing” it. Newton hitched up his white lab-coat and crouched down, the better to peer.

  ‘Domesticated felis silvestrus catis, a small furry, carnivorous mammal. Seems physically healthy and not to have been damaged in the recent uncontrolled landing exercise. Appears to be acting out classic post-hunting behaviour, pretending to play with its prey - the usual cruelty prior to consumption raw.’

  Newton held out various nifty scientific probes towards Mr Babbage who, being slightly offended by the examination, ignored him completely.

  ‘Radioactivity - nominal, allowing for the proximity of the engines. Temperature... oh that’s odd. There’s a steep gradient in a small volume in front of the cat. I’ve lost it - got it again - look, it appears to be moving as though the damned cat’s actually playing with it! Remarkable!’

  Newton waved the probes around but he was no match for the cat’s antics and couldn’t keep pace. He slipped an electro-spectral magnetometer from his lab-coat pocket and panned it across the floor, causing a high-pitched whine such as that given off by a metal-detector running over a buried Roman coin. Then he set the apparatus on the floor - the pitch rose
and fell as the cat repeatedly threw something into the air and then caught it.

  ‘He’s got a ruddy mouse! An invisible mouse! I swear it.’ Newton stood and put his chin in his hand; the classic scientist’s pose signifying both “worthy of interest” and “damnably odd”. ‘Captain - in the locker behind you. The ground-survey backpacks, the electric goggles. Would you?’

  Faraday opened the locker, reached in with both hands and passed one heavy backpack to Newton. Then he slipped into another backpack himself, pulled the goggles down over his eyes and pumped the priming-lever at his side. There was a delay of some few seconds and a slight hum as the circuitry warmed up and the goggles began to come online.

  ‘Give it a moment Captain. This is delicate apparatus.’

  The eyepieces began to give off a bilious green glow and to feed highly processed data from the special cameras directly into the two men’s ocular organs.

  Captain Faraday fell backwards and scrabbled a little to distance himself. Newton slammed into a cupboard on his side of the gangway, causing his ‘delicate apparatus’ backpack to whine and re-set.

  Mr Babbage, when viewed in the electro-magnetic spectra, could plainly be seen to be playing with something best described as an unholy cross between the ghost of a mouse and a scorpion. It apparently had the social dispositions and attitudes of a dockyard rat. A glowing outline representation in the goggles, the “mouse” arched its tail overhead and jabbed repeatedly in the direction of the cat.

  Newton was fascinated. ‘Fascinating’ said Newton as though recording aloud the results of an experiment. ‘I think it’s spitting electro-magnetic poison at the cat!’ He tuned his own goggles to further-advanced technical settings unsuitable for civilians or even for ship’s captains.

  The Captain seemed less than amused. He lifted his goggles and set about lighting his “serious thinking” pipe. ‘What about the analysis of the signals that brought us here in the first place. Any more detail on that?’