Time Travelling with a Hamster

by Ross Welford

  It was a short walk from Macca’s house, and the high railings that surround the school now – by which I mean in real time – are absent: just a gate and a low wall that we get over easily. Some kids are playing in one of the distant fields, but they pay us no attention.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I say, but Pye just gives his little nod like Dad. “Done it loads of times.”

  I’m still carrying the litter tray, the black box, the wires and the battery, and the laptop has stopped dripping at least.

  At the back of the first building, and shielded from the neighbouring houses by a clump of trees, is a rusty blue metal door in a large, windowless wall. A thick iron bolt, secured with a massive padlock, keeps it shut.

  Pye puts the laptop down on the concrete path and uses his fingers to pull a brick out of its place, low down in the wall near the ground. Reaching into the hole, he takes out a key and holds it up. “I’m the only one that knows about this,” he grins. “Well, me and Mr Hutson the caretaker. I saw him come out one day and do it.” He pops open the padlock and slides back the heavy bolt.

  Inside, there’s a storeroom full of caretaker’s stuff: cleaning fluid, metal buckets, tarpaulins, stacks of heavy stage weights to prop up school-play scenery, tools of every kind, all on shelves in rows. At the end of the storeroom, opposite the door we came in by, is another door, which opens on to a school corridor.

  I follow Pye with my tray until we arrive at the technical lab – a stuffy, darkish room with tables running along the sides, and a large one in the middle with stools underneath.

  Three big old computers sit on the central table, linked with a jumble of multicoloured cables.

  “My Big Experiment,” says Pye, like it’s an announcement. “Linking up all six computers. I’ve devised my own program to boost the processing power of each microchip so that instead of doubling when you link two computers together, it quadruples it, then quadruples it again, and again. Once we get to six, it’ll be unbelievably powerful!”

  I look at the three computers doubtfully.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve only done the first three. The problem is the chips themselves, they’re kind of limited and I have to be—”

  “Silicon.”

  Pye furrows his brow and shakes his head. “What?”

  “That’s what you need. Silicon chips. Much more stable, able to hold more information. I think someone’s working on it. America probably,” I add. But Pye is not really listening. He’s tugging at a fridge to pull it away from the wall.

  “Here, give me a hand.”

  We pull the fridge away from the wall just enough so that we can wedge the upside-down V of the laptop between it and the wall. The heat from the back of the fridge is just gentle enough, Pye reckons, to give us the best chance of drying out the laptop. Too fast and the evaporating water could cause further damage, apparently. For good measure, I prop the cat litter tray by the heat source as well. The black box and wires I put down on the table, where Pye peers at them.

  “So what’s this bit for, then?”

  “I think it’s, erm … an additional, er … hard drive?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Dunno. Just came with it. I don’t think you’re supposed to open it,” I add quickly as Pye’s fingers move towards the metal catches.

  “Blimey, what a mess. Doesn’t look as slick as the rest. That’s the problem with Apple. Design.” And then he asks the question that I know he’s been dying to ask. “So how come all this lot ended up in Macca’s bunker?”

  “Safekeeping,” I say with as much confidence as I can summon. “Like I say, my mum and dad looked at the house a while back. I knew there was this underground, like, den and I figured no one would find it there.” Even to me, it sounds like a stupid story. It is a stupid story. But it’s the best I can think of. “It’s very valuable,” I add, but Pye’s not buying it.

  “So you broke into his garage …”

  “I didn’t break in, it was open.”

  “Well, all right then. But even so …”

  “I didn’t know Macca lived there.”

  “Obviously not. It’s just, I dunno … weird.” I think he might have left it there, but then I hear myself saying, “My hamster’s there too!” and immediately wish I hadn’t.

  Pye wrinkles his brow and curls his lip and generally adopts an expression of utter bewilderment and disbelief.

  I shrug and say, “That’s how I roll.”

  “That’s how you what?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s do this Big Experiment.”

  Listen, I don’t mean to be condescending but I don’t suppose you’ve ever linked computers together before, using cables and stuff?

  It’s not that I don’t think you could. You totally could. It’s just that most people don’t bother. Why would you? I mean, you can link computers up on a home network as easy as pie, but doing it physically, with extra bits and bobs, and a motherboard (two actually), connecting all the other bits – the CPU, the hard drive and what not …

  Well, all I can say is that I couldn’t do it, but Pye makes it look easy.

  Not that I’m concentrating much. Nor would you if you were stuck in a past dimension of spacetime and your only way back was currently drying out over the back of a fridge or covered in used cat-litter. I keep going over to it and lifting it up and looking at it, as if it would make any difference.

  “Mr Melling, the tech teacher? He lets me in here at lunchtimes during term, and he lent me all the stuff to make my own computer,” Pye is saying as I watch him use a soldering iron to attach a long wire to a printed circuit board. He nods towards the corner of the room. There’s a TV screen, a keyboard and a metal tray with all the insides of a computer revealed.

  “It’s like a computer’s died and that’s the post-mortem,” I say.

  Pye laughs. “Yeah, but this one lives! Look.” He goes over to it, plugs in a cable and switches it on. A few seconds later, the screen lights up with the words ‘ZZZZZAP!! BY PYE CHAUDHURY’ in blocky letters.

  “Wanna game?”

  “You invented a game?”

  “It’s not all that good, there’s a few glitches, like when you get a new high score, you go back to zero which I haven’t worked out how to fix yet, but –” he gives a shy half-smile – “yeah. I wrote the code for it. Took me ages!”

  In fact, the idea is pretty good: using the left, right, up and down keys on the keyboard you have to move your cursor around to dodge this random creature that looks like a bear with a big mouth, and at the same time pick up boxes with points in them. OK, compared even with simple stuff like Donkey Kong, ZZZZZAP!! is rubbish, but of course I don’t tell Pye that, and in truth it’s pretty good fun, although Pye totally beats me because – as he eventually admits – he has a good idea where the bear is coming from next because he hasn’t got the random bit working completely.

  “Randomness – like, proper randomness – is really hard to program.”

  Still, he made it himself. The guy is a genius.

  After about ten minutes of this, Pye turns back to the main table. As he turns, his elbow catches my backpack, which falls, spilling the contents on the floor.

  “Hey – sorry,” he says, and he starts picking the stuff up and then stops. He stands up holding the family photo I grabbed from my bedside table.

  “This your mum and dad?” he asks looking at it closely. My mouth goes dry. “They look nice. What are they called?”

  I have thought about this, but – so far – reached no conclusion. The thing is, I just can’t decide. I’ve had this debate going on in the back of my head for days.

  Tell Pye he is my father, that I am from 30 years in the future, and that I’m using a primitive time machine that he designed in order to save his life. I know. Mind-melt or what? What’s more, in telling him this, I could be fundamentally altering what happens in the future. If I tell him he designs a time machine, then he may end up making it, I don�
�t know, ten years earlier, or later, or I don’t know – it could just change a lot of things.

  Don’t tell him. Well, that’s only half-knowing someone isn’t it? It’s like I’m keeping a big secret from a friend, and I’d really like to hang out more with Pye, and yes, I know it’s all a bit strange and I suppose if I do tell him he won’t believe me, or if he does, he’ll be weirded out. I know I would be.

  So for now, I reply, “Albert. Like me. And my mum is Sarah.”

  He stares at the picture very closely, then smiles. “He looks just like my dad. They could be brothers, in fact.”

  “Like us.”

  “Hey – maybe they are! Separated at birth and their parents never told them about each other …”

  “No,” I say, quickly, “that can’t be true. Besides, they speak with different accents.”

  “Well, one could have come to Britain before … hang on, how do you know how my dad speaks?”

  Whoops.

  “Just guessing. Does he have an Indian accent?”

  “Yeah. But we’re not allowed to speak Punjabi at home. He says, ‘Dat is de language of another time, another life, Pythagoras. Ve are British now.’” Pye wobbles his head like Grandpa Byron does, and I’m suddenly filled with regret at how we parted.

  I know it would be wrong, it could threaten everything, but I blurt out, “Can I meet your dad? He sounds great!”

  “Of course you can. He’s working late tonight, but you can come round tomorrow after we’ve been on my go-kart. I mean, if you want to. And we’ve still got this to finish,” he adds, pointing at the central table with five of the six computers now linked up.

  “Your go-kart?” Of course, I know all about this, but I’m doing pretty well at not showing it, I think.

  “Yeah. I built it with my dad. It’s not a real go-kart, it’s just a bogie, but it’s completely ace!”

  I’m back at the fridge now, looking at my laptop. Outside the sky has begun to darken earlier than usual with a big black cloud looking grim and threatening.

  “I’d leave it overnight, if I were you. Looks like it’s gonna rain. We should be getting back.”

  Pye puts the key back in the brick hole. We hop over the low wall and he turns to me, hunching his shoulders as the rain begins to fall.

  “You go that way, I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Um, Al? I’ve had a really good time today. Thanks for, um …” he tails off, and I let him take his time. He chews his lip and looks down, like he’s searching for the right words on the ground.

  “I don’t … I don’t really have many … look, Macca? He’s not much of a friend, you’re right, but, well, it was better than nobody.” There’s a long pause then he adds, “Till now.” And he gives his shy half-smile again and walks away quickly. Ten metres later, he turns back. “See you right here tomorrow?”

  I decide to risk something. “With The Lean Mean Green Machine?”

  A broad grin splits his face. “How the …? Yeah!” And then he adds, “And I still want to meet your hamster!”

  I wait till he’s gone, then turn back and run back to the rusty blue door, letting myself in with the key and shaking the rain off my hair.

  Alan Shearer, Alan Shearer, Alan Shearer. How am I going to get him back?

  I look around the tech lab. This will be my bed for the night. Half a packet of biscuits and an apple later, it’s beginning to get dark and I’m dozing off and then …

  It’s a thunderclap that wakes me, the boom making the school windows rattle and I think, as I often do when the weather’s bad at night, how lucky I am to be human and indoors and not an animal outside. Or indeed a hamster in a drawer in an underground bunker.

  I take a long breath, as I realise something: I’m not going to sleep again until I have rescued Alan Shearer.

  I have to go back to Macca’s house.

  How Thunder Works

  My dad used to tell me that thunder is the noise that the rain clouds make when they bump together, then they crack and all the rain spills out.

  I believed him for ages.

  In truth, thunder is lightning. At any rate, it’s the noise of lightning. It’s just that lightning travels at the speed of light, so you see it pretty much as soon as it flashes.

  The sound of the lightning – thunder – travels much, much slower, so you hear it afterwards.

  When you see lightning, start counting slowly until you hear the thunder. Then divide the number you get by three. That’s how many kilometres away the storm is.

  If the number gets smaller then the storm is getting closer.

  Ten minutes later I’m back outside Macca’s house, soaking wet and contemplating my third break-in of what I think of as the recent past.

  I’ve never had to break into this garage before. And it’s properly shut. This is not a case of just edging my fingers in the gap and pulling: that won’t be possible for thirty years.

  In my hand is a steel crowbar, filched from the janitor’s store.

  When I left the school, I counted thirty seconds between a lightning flash and the thunder. So the storm was ten kilometres away. Now, as I’m standing outside the house, I can only count to five. The storm will be right on top of me soon.

  When it comes, the thunder is a growl like a billion angry dogs, followed by a long, deafening crack that hurts my ears. I take my chance and jam the crowbar into the space where the two garage doors join, and push. The door splinters and creaks and bursts open just as the sound of the thunder fades away and I know that the noise has not been heard over the storm. Seconds later I’m inside the garage, shivering. The planks are stacked up against the wall, and I descend the steps to open the circular door, but I already have a sinking feeling that something won’t be right.

  Alan Shearer’s not in his drawer. The sides are about 15cm high, and impossible for a hamster to climb out. Still I hunt around the bunker desperately, saying softly, “Alan Shearer! Alan? Come on …”

  But he’s not there. I slump into the swivel office chair and fight back tears, because I know that Macca has him, and I know what might happen to him in Macca’s hands.

  It’s no use. The tears, when they come, are hot and angry and I cry for my pet, and for myself, stranded in a year where I don’t belong, and for my dad, who died too early, and for Pye, whose new friend – me – is not what he seems. And now I’ve started, I can’t stop, because I’m thinking of Grandpa Byron on the ladder seeing his only grandson disappear in front of him, and my mum who must be so, so worried.

  And it’s no good just setting the return time earlier, as if that makes what has happened somehow un-happen, because it doesn’t. I might be able to return and somehow stop Dad meddling with spacetime, so I never receive the letter from my dad, and don’t ever time travel, or go off on a spree of moped thefts and break-ins. But those things have definitely happened, somewhere in the vast infinity of the universe. They happened to me. And somewhere in that vast infinity there will always be a Grandpa Byron and a mum broken-hearted for a lost Al, a me that one day just disappeared.

  What was I thinking of? How could I have taken such an insane risk?

  The tears and sobs have exhausted me, and I flop down on the bunk bed and sleep and dream of nothing. Nothing at all.

  Sticking my head out from the garage the next morning, I can tell it’s really early but that’s about it. The storm has passed, but it’s still warm and blustery, and the sky is pure white cloud.

  Nobody is about in Chesterton Road, except for a small open-sided van humming along slowly and tinkling as if it’s carrying glass bottles.

  Minutes later and I’m back in the school’s tech lab. My heart is pounding and I’m actually finding it a bit hard to breathe because I’m so nervous.

  It’s August 1st. Today is the day that Dad comes off his go-kart, breaks his teeth and gets a metal splinter up his nose that will give him headaches for years and that will kill him twenty-seven years later. And I have to s
top that happening, without radically altering anything else.

  So. The Plan For Today is save my dad’s life and get back to my own time having found Alan Shearer. That’ll keep me busy.

  My hands are shaking as I slot the laptop battery back into position and screw the cover back on.

  I can’t bring myself to press the ‘on’ button, I just can’t.

  I walk around the room once. Twice.

  I’m about to go a third time but instead I reach out and press the button firmly once, kind of taking myself by surprise.

  One second.

  Two seconds.

  You must have listened to a laptop starting up? It takes a couple of seconds, and then …

  A soft ping.

  I feel like crying again, this time with relief. The screen flickers, and lights up. And then …

  just …

  stops.

  No. Please no.

  The start-up screen is there, but there’s nothing on it. No documents, no folders. There’s no whirring sound of the hard disk. The clock is blinking 02:13, which must be the correct time somewhere in the universe. The battery indicator says 65%. Yet there’s no cursor. I rub the touchpad desperately, begging the cursor to appear. I hit keys randomly.

  Nothing.

  I slump forward, head on my arms and I’m just numb. I hit the keypad again, then restart the laptop, but still – the folder with all the data on it is not there.

  I’m just washed over with a sense of total weariness, and I slam the laptop closed.

  And then I open it again slowly, chewing my bottom lip. If this works, then I may be in with a chance.

  Again, I stare at the lit-up screen, and I pull my key ring from my pocket. Attached is my memory stick and I push it into the USB slot at the side of the laptop. The laptop might not read the hard disc properly, and can’t perform many functions, but there’s still a chance it can read a memory stick.

  Its little blue light flashes, and an icon blinks to life on the screen. With no cursor, I have no choice but to hit ‘enter’ and it works – the document opens, revealing page after page of numbers and symbols: Dad’s code for the time travel program.