The Cat Wore Electric Goggles Read online

  The child’s name was Raymond.

  Mr Smith, the father of Raymond and husband to Mrs Smith, worked for the government in the secret laboratory just outside town - the one with the armed soldier on duty day and night in the gatehouse. What he did at the laboratory nobody locally knew, but each morning he drove there in his Humber saloon and each evening he drove back to his dinner and his rest at number fifty-three. He almost always wore the same tweed jacket with elbow-patches, and almost always had the air of a man deep in the thoughts of high science even before he reached his car. Mr Smith was a man who automatically considered the ambient temperature, humidity and period since last use when adjusting the choke to start his car.

  Mrs Smith, mother of Raymond and wife to Mr Smith, like most of the ladies thereabouts, shopped daily and she did so by walking to the High Street, pushing the young Raymond in the big Silver Cross pram. Vegetables from the grocer’s shop would be weighed and then scooped, mud and all, into a strong dark-tartan shopping bag. Sliced meats and sausages from the butcher’s shop would be wrapped in somewhat ineffectual greaseproof paper and somehow carefully, by unseen hand, would maintain their position at the top of the shopping bag. Bread from the baker’s shop would have a token sheet of tissue paper wrapped around it, carefully leaving the warm, white crusts poking out of either end and ripe for the guilty picking on the way home. Mrs Smith was careful to always leave one end-crust intact in the loaf, because Mr Smith liked his crusts too.

  On Tuesdays and Fridays Mrs Smith and young Raymond called at the fishmongers for a little bit of skate or some haddock or two pairs of smoked kippers. On Saturdays both Mr and Mrs Smith walked into town and they paid for their delivered newspapers and did some window shopping, occasionally buying something from the tailors or from the dress shop, and once in a while indulged in something cheerful from the toy shop. After each visit they would return to the pavement, check that Raymond was still sleeping in his pram and then carefully tuck their purchases into the rack underneath. Usually after a stroll around the boating lake or the duck pond and ten minutes sitting on one of the benches to catch some medicinally fresh air, Mr Smith was itching to get back home to his private laboratory and Mrs Smith was anxious to get home to either change Raymond’s nappy or to begin cooking the evening meal, or sometimes both, in a flurry of domestic excitement.

  Twice a month Mr Smith took time out from his office hours at the official lab to call at the bank to cash a cheque, and he usually took the opportunity to fill up the Humber with leaded four-star at the local garage. At each visit he also took time to top up the oil with a pint or two of Duckhams finest and to shoot a squirt Redex into the tank.

  Life in number fifty-three Testimonial Avenue was terrifying.

  Mr Smith was a big-wig research scientist, and Mrs Smith was a Colonel in the Civil Defence Corps. England lay in the shadow cast between the trigger-happy über-communist, rabidly-secular Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics, and the trigger-happy über-capitalist, rabidly-religious United State of Americans. Missile silos were scattered about the globe like flea-droppings on a stray dog and military fingers hovered so close to big red firing buttons that it would only take one unexpected bad cough or a sneeze to start the end to end all ends.

  Four times a month on average Mr and Mrs Smith spent several candle-lit days and nights in the inner refuge of their fall-out room, id est, Mr Smith’s private laboratory in the cellar. There they listened to the sonorous tones of Patrick Allen on the wireless explaining how to tie toe-tags onto elderly relatives. Whenever the neighbourhood “Four Minute Warning” sirens sounded Mr and Mrs Smith and child followed a careful routine of isolating the mains gas, electricity and water supplies, of closing all windows and drawing all curtains, and then retreating down the stone steps to safety. Mr Smith, being a practical, technical chap, had rigged up lead-acid batteries and an aerial extension so that the wireless still worked and they could listen to the BBC’s emergency broadcasts.

  ‘... radioactive fall-out is invisible, and can kill ... if you or a member of your family should die whilst in the shelter, put them outside - but remember to tag them first for identification purposes ...’

  For such a cold, slow, war the false alarms came thick and they came fast. By the time baby Raymond was walking he knew the routine - sirens; fetch teddy bear; grab comfort blanket; toddle to cellar; go back to sleep. While baby Raymond slept, Mr and Mrs Smith passed their quality sheltering time discussing life, the universe and whether there would be a future at all for any of them.

  Valiant, Vulcan and the new Victor nuclear bombers scrambled and roared about in hair-trigger response to blips on radar and to Russian trawlers that had strayed from the defined fishing grounds. The United State of Americans set their chins defiantly over the Atlantic and gestured very rudely at the Union of Soviet Socialistics, who in their turn drove their mobile missile launchers up and down the arse-end of Europe in a Zaz and Volga badged belligerence. It was all most unseemly.

  Boadicea, the Smith family’s pet Bulldog, also knew the routine as well as Raymond did. Whenever the sirens wailed she watched the humans disappearing below-ground behind sand-bagged doors and her place was, according to the instructions in the Civil Defence leaflets, to remain outside the shelter for fear of being a drain on resources better served to humans alone. It is testament to the love of a dog that she was always still happy to see and greet them when the “All Clear” went and they emerged, pale and bleary-eyed. In her darkest of days during the longest of crises her most pithy of expressions of opinion on her exclusion ran only to maybe taking a slightly nuclear dump on the hall floor, or perhaps rebelliously sleeping on the settee in the posh lounge.

  Then came that fateful day one June, when Raymond was but a year or so old and he had spent half of that time below-ground listening to the tick of the global annihilation clock as it threatened black midnight. Mr Smith’s Humber, still polished and well-serviced, was on that day abandoned half-way across the neatly mown front lawn. The sirens had sounded while he was at the local garage, filling the tank. Mrs Smith’s latest load of washing was abandoned and soggy in the electric twin-tub. Boadicea, somehow sensing the heightened insanity flooding the control rooms of so many missile silos, this time scrabbled at the cellar door, quite anxious to gain entry and shelter along with her humans. Raymond, tearful and unhappy, was playing with one of several thousands of tins of food that he had come to value as toys. You’re never more safe than when underground and in a fort built from tins of SPAM, Libby’s Tropical Fruit Salad, and Heinz Baked Beanz.

  Mrs Smith, rather over-demonstrably tucking a stray lock of hair back into place, indicated to Mr Smith that she considered that they really could not continue in quite this manner, if only for the sake of the child.

  Mr Smith, wondering whether he had left the engine of the Humber running or not when he abandoned it, found himself forced to agree, and he said as much to Mrs Smith in a wild flurry of conversation.

  Their home would have been better built with the cellar above-ground and with the rooms for human habitation sunk deep below the level of the garden. Every house in the land was in fact effectively thus upside down. The trouble with international brinkmanship was that it did rather require everyone to repeatedly approach and test the brink, broken nose to nose, bloodshot eyeball to eyeball, and that grew very wearisome after a few years. Every far-distant dramatic cloud formation over England, however natural to the season, caused worry and consternation.

  Mr Smith lit his pipe and considered Mrs Smith’s possible reactions to the suggestion that he was about to make. She would be emotional, certainly, and there would be a certain feeling of loss involved but also, he hoped, a sense of triumph and of outwitting cold atomic adversity. He made up his mind what was to be done and walked across the cellar to remove the dust-sheets from the project he had been working on, all this by way of introducing the subject.

  ‘Gosh, that looks complicated dear - whatever is it?’ ask
ed Mrs Smith.

  ‘Mrs Smith, would you sit down please? There’s a course of action I’d like to suggest to you.’

  Mrs Smith sat down at the lemon-yellow Formica table and listened intently, asking questions whenever technical terms or more than basic science was involved.

  ‘So this mechanism of yours, it’s really just a time machine?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly!’ Mr Smith patted the device and then re-filled his pipe with Salty Pre-Rubbed Shag from his favourite tobacconist.

  The mechanism was a cube of about a yard length on each side and it had been constructed with a deal frame, plywood panels and thin metal reinforcements at the corners. It looked rather like a tea-chest, and indeed several of the panels bore stencilled lettering to that effect, placed there by Typhoo. At rest on its test-bed the machine was hooked up to several coiled cables, a bank of VU meters and an annotated A4 calendar with a fresh, gaily-coloured scene of the Cotswolds shown for each month.

  ‘Does it work?’ asked Mrs Smith, yet to be convinced.

  Mr Smith gave his wife a withering look. ‘Of course it works, dear. At the moment it is unidirectional though; we may only send things into the future. These are early days for this technology.’

  Mrs Smith was nothing if not a pragmatic woman. ‘Well, that’s no great loss - we’ve all been to the past, and a lot of good it did us. So, how does it work exactly?’

  Mr Smith admitted that he had little idea beyond his basic temporal formulae. It just did.

  ‘And it has been tested thoroughly?’ Mrs Smith always erred on the side of safety, especially where her child was concerned. Raymond’s Silver Cross pram was the only such to use both handbrake and wheel-chocks when parked alongside the duck pond in the park, just in case, better to be safe than to be sorry.

  Mr Smith showed Mrs Smith a clipboard loaded with tables of test results. Every single thing that they had sent forward through time in the “T-Chest” as it had been dubbed it had made the journey forward very successfully.

  Mrs Smith was warming to the idea, and she beginning to see the possibilities. ‘Look dear - if we do this then how long a trip are we talking about? How long will it take the human species to get through this Cold War madness? Is there any way to predict the date of the onset of the next stable Utopian Era, in England at least?’

  Mr Smith had been considering just that very problem. His best guess was at least two decades. Twenty long years was his estimate, and if the human species hadn’t come to its senses by then, well - would it ever? No, he was certain that the atomic madness would be contained and tamed within that time-frame. It had to be, otherwise surely the damage would be permanent and the decline and fall of civilisation would be inevitable and irreversible. Mrs Smith was inclined to agree. In fact, she was also inclined against one wall of the cellar, resting her weary back and considering the options. She couldn’t see any. This, she became convinced, was not only the best possible start they might give Raymond, but also probably the only way to save him. If the mushrooms didn’t get them all soon then the fall-out surely would. He had to be sent beyond all of that nonsense.

  Mr Smith’s private workbench ran the full length of the cellar wall and, as well as the “T-Chest”, it held apparatus and machinery ranging from press-drills to vices, from car batteries connected in series to a small area dedicated to electro-chemical analysis, complete with a powerful bench-mounted microscope. When Mr Smith did something, he did it properly. Above the working area, rows of analogue clocks such as those you sometimes see in international banks or financial institutions showed an array of current time and also time at key points in the future. The clock that had been set for exactly ten years hence had stopped, probably - hopefully - just with a loose battery wire rather than being symptomatic of Armageddon, but the clock that had been set at twenty years hence was ticking like a healthy metronome.

  In two decades or so, at the end of the far-distant nineteen-seventies, Mr and Mrs Smith were as convinced as very well-educated folk could be that the world and human society would be a much better place indeed. If World War III did come about then it would come about in their own regional time-frame, and by the end of the nineteen-seventies there would have been plenty of opportunity to rebuild, for the radiation to have subsided and to have reconstructed a better world. If war didn’t come about then what wonders would take place in the space of twenty years! They both briefly speculated on wholly-automated farming, personal hover-cars, futuristic tower-living and an English colony on the Moon or even Mars.

  The decision was made.

  Mrs Smith wondered what to dress Raymond in for his journey. She didn’t want to send him forward dressed like some ancient anachronism. The nappy alone seemed to have been the universal constant, the one unchanging item of human apparel throughout history. She chose a fresh, brand-new Terry towel nappy and decided that the future would judge him less harshly were he to arrive in that, ready to be kitted out in whatever people would be wearing in the future - fantastic new fibres and high-collared cloaks of invisibility or whatever.

  Mr Smith lifted Raymond carefully into the T-Chest. There was so little room in the machine! What should one prioritise and send along with a child who may arrive in any circumstance ranging from needing to lead the human species through a post-atomic return to nature, right through to arriving in a technologically advanced, balanced and sane world of peace and harmony and love and understanding?

  Raymond looked out at them once they had finished loading him. He was quiet and not at all certain what was going on. The T-Chest about him was half-full of compact Civil Defence Emergency Ration Packs and Raymond had been plonked on top. He had been dressed in a fresh nappy and a frilly cotton sun-bonnet, under which he was sucking on a baby-blue dummy behind his khaki-coloured gas mask. Stacked to one side of him were the fourteen volumes of the 1955 edition of Bradshaw’s ‘A Complete Guide to The Future’, and on his other side was his favourite teddy bear, name of ‘Teddy’. Through the circular eye-pieces his eyes looked a little watery, but he was holding up quite well, considering. Baby Raymond already had a stiff upper lip to make them proud!

  Mr Smith tacked the lid onto the device and then shone a torch in through the yellowish Mica of the “Viewing Hatch”. Raymond was clearly already well on his way to the future in a completely disconnected and discrete time-flow.

  Mrs Smith held back her tears and crossed her arms in the very nearest that the English get to an emotional hug. ‘How long will it take for Raymond to reach safety? I don’t know the correct scientific terms. Is it right to refer to the speed of time travel or should it be the velocity? How fast will Raymond be travelling now?’

  Mr Smith looked thoughtful and re-lit his pipe, sending blue smoke signals up to the painted ceiling.

  ‘Well dear, because of the uncertainties referred to by Mr Heisenberg, and the interference errors of measurement we can never know exactly. I estimate from the results so far that it is roughly a ratio of 1:1. For every twenty-four hours that the machine is operating, whatever is inside it is transported damned near twenty-four hours into the future. This almost perfect dynamic temporal balance is probably why the machinery is so reliable. That, and the total absence of machinery.’

  In his headlong rush into the future inside the T-Chest, Raymond took an especially hard suck on his dummy, and slipped a finger under his gas mask in order to pick his nose.

  As he spoke Mr Smith continued to stencil highly technical data onto the plywood exterior of the T-Chest. He brushed several arrow and wineglass symbols above the legend “This way up”, and he thoughtfully added “Do not stack”.

  Mrs Smith stepped in to use turpentine and a cloth to clean the stencils after Mr Smith had finished this work. ‘Remind me again, dear - what are “interference errors” when in re measurements?’

  ‘Whenever a measurement is made the simple act of the measuring itself has an unknown effect on whatever is being measured, so the measurement can never be truly ac
curate. This is especially so in the case of a device designed to deliberately change state, such as time machinery. To be correct, the velocity of the T-Chest at its maximum should be referred to as being on the order of 1:1 +/- hysteresis combined with the accuracy of the timepiece used. VTC = 1:1 +/- HC times ATP.’

  ‘What if the power should be interrupted?’

  ‘The device is completely power-independent - it doesn’t seem, as far as we can tell, to use any energy at all. Certainly, not energy as we know it, anyway. My theory is that the T-Chest somehow taps into energy from the space-time vortex and converts it with one hundred percent efficiency.’

  Mrs Smith suddenly had a thought. ‘Can the device be moved or must it be kept undisturbed in situ down here?’

  Mr Smith reassured his wife. ‘Oh it seems to be unaffected by external factors such as spatial movement by third-party during the time-travel process. We could move the device anywhere you liked and the mechanism would not be affected.’

  ‘How does one set the duration of the travel?’

  ‘Well, there are no fine controls as such externally. As far as I can tell the device is either wholly on or wholly off, full-speed of time travel at 1:1+/- when sealed or perfectly synchronised with local time-flow when open. It’s an incredible piece of technology. So simple and reliable, and yet so powerful. I am thinking of working on ways of varying the speed of its operation.’

  ‘And you are sure that it can’t run backwards? There’s no danger of Raymond ending up in the Stone Age or something?’

  ‘Not as far as we can tell, although that may be a capability lost in the measurement interference errors I mentioned earlier - we are, after all, observing the device from our own place in this forward-speeding time-space continuum. We simply may not be able to know for sure from where and when we’re standing, so to speak, whether it can travel backwards. It just hasn’t done so thus far in development and testing.’