by Brian Hughes
Mickey Brewster -- there was a name that’d take some getting used to -- looked up from his Beano, a comic he was reading upside down.
Conrad grinned.
Mickey snuffled disdainfully. “Watcha doin’ with Davros, Conrad?”
“Spotty!” If there was one thing worse than having Mickey Tomkins as an enemy, it was having him as a brother. “This is Professor Hawkins, holder of Newton’s Chair.”
“That’s Newton’s chair is it? Looks like a spaz chariot t’ me!” The comic was thrown onto the coffee table. “’Ere, Mr Hawkeye, I’ve got a good ’un for you! ’Ow do you stop a cripple from drownin’?”
Conrad felt the fillings in his teeth spark as he ground them together.
“Michael! I’d like to have a private conversation with Mr Hawkins, if you don’t mind?”
“Ooh…” That was one of those patronising noises that children make the whole world over. “Not got much of a sense of humour then, has it? No, don’t get up!”
Affronted, Mickey stomped out of the room, pausing briefly to prod one wheel with the toe of his boot.
The door slammed shut.
Eventually Professor Hawkins spoke.
“Good afternoon, Mr Brewster. I would like to discuss your Temporal Lobe Modifier (Pat. Brewster June 23rd, 1999) with you.”
There was a creak and the living room door inched opened again. Mickey’s head appeared round the jamb obviously impressed by the electronic voice.
“Say hello to Dr. Strangelove for me, won’t y’ Mr Hawkins? Y’ know, your boyfriend?”
A shutter squealed open on the arm of the chair.
A missile bearing the logo: ‘Give my regards to Saddam’ whistled from it, smoking excessively. (Editor: This is just a reminder that the Professor Hawkins in our story bears no relation to any other quantum physicist, living or dead!)
The explosion was just enough to lift the hedgehog from Mickey’s head, turn his face into a blackened daisy and throw him across the hall.
“Now, Mr Brewster. We were discussing your contraption.”
The wheelchair trundled over the rug and stopped in front of the collection of pottery shire horses.
“I assume that by this point your theory has already worked.”
“It must have done, I suppose.” Conrad settled himself down on a collection of divorce papers heaped around the hearth. “In my original time line I only wrote the letter to you yesterday. By rights you shouldn’t have received it yet.”
“Oddly enough, I’ve been working on the same theory myself, Mr Brewster.”
Another panel opened with a grind of pulleys. An arm constructed from Meccano appeared.
“In the wrong hands the Temporal Lobe Modifier (Pat. Brewster June 23rd, 1999) could be extremely dangerous! Just imagine Conrad if the Third Reich were brought into our present time line from another dimension.”
Conrad tried to imagine such a thing. It was difficult, because he’d no idea what the Third Reich was.
A box on the end of the arm nudged his shoulder.
“However, you seem well adjusted, Mr Brewster. That’s why I’ve brought you a present.”
Conrad took the box and studied it closely.
“Mr Hawkins, there is one thing I’ve always wanted to ask? How’s your voice box work? I mean, you can’t move any muscles or anything. And you don’t have one of those prodder things on the top of your head.”
For a moment Conrad suspected he’d overstepped the boundaries of etiquette.
Then the professor’s voice suddenly buzzed back into life.
“You are obviously more intelligent than we thought, Mr Brewster. Perhaps it’s time to finally reveal the truth!”
(Editor: We cannot emphasise enough at this point that Stephen Hawking is a wonderful man with an excellent sense of humour. Just thought we’d point that out to our readers.)
There was a buzz followed by the smell of burning sulphur.
And finally the noise that a popgun would make if fired under water.
Two strange warty creatures were suddenly squatting on the back of the chair.
The larger one brought a dainty fist up to its lips and genteelly coughed.
“We control Professor Hawkins, Mr Brewster.” The creature’s slavering mouth moved with all the realism of a Jim Henson creation. “I’m afraid that what you see before you is in fact a corpse.”
(Editor: Thank goodness this is an invented character. It would be an outcry if the author had made that claim about a living person. Well, wouldn’t it?)
“We come from a distant part of the Great Neural Time Net,” announced the smaller of the aliens. “We’re somewhat sad, pathetic creatures really and our arms are on wires.”
In the way that Kermit the Frog would have had a seizure, both time-travelling animals waved their arms above their heads to illustrate this point.
“And our genitals are incredibly tiny! Iddy biddy worthless little…”
“Please accept our gift!” interjected the larger with a degree of alacrity. “We’re sure that you will know how to use it. Not abuse it!”
He thought about that aphorism for a moment.
“That was rather good, don’t you think Horace?”
Chapter Seven: Approaching the Great Divide
November 1st, 3.35 p.m. It was a typical autumn afternoon. Streaks of grey sky separated the primrose-yellow clouds. The smell of churned earth and bonfires filled the nostrils.
Conrad’s heels bounced against the vandalised roundabout, cakes of wet moss hanging from his soles.
Next to Conrad, creating a crew cut of his fingernails, sat his recently appropriated brother. The penknife he was using had already chiselled graffiti all over the playground. Slogans such as: “Pythagoras’ Theorem of Sex - The angle in the dangle is directly proportional to the throb in the knob” and “Beware the Sly Sheep” now occupied various surfaces.
“W’at’s it actually do then, Specky?” Mickey Brewster, nee Mickey Tomkins, made a grab for the machine.
Conrad snatched it to the safety of his dufflecoat and fastened his toggles.
“If y’ must know, Spotty, it’s a New Improved Temporal Lobe Modifier (Pat. Brewster, June 23rd 1999)! Not that you’d understand about such things!”
Keeping his scarf between the box and his antagonist, Conrad took a peek at the controls.
“This version sends electrical impulses straight along the arm. It does away with the earphones and allows more than one person to move sideways in time.”
“Yeah, right…”
Spotty pulled an expression that had it been verbal would have been made up of four letter words.
With a grunt he pulled his sock up to act as a stole to his scabrous knee.
“You’re a sad git, aren’t y’, Four Eyes?” Removing a bogey from one nostril he studied it carefully then gingerly tasted it. “Frankenstein’s given y’ a remote control for an old telly, ’asn’t ‘ee? ’Ow much did ’ee charge for that ’eap o’ junk?”
“They…he didn’t charge ’owt!” Conrad brought the Isolated Temporal Modifier (Pat. Julian & Horace Gnart, September 1998) back out into the daylight. “An’ it’s not a heap of junk! This improved machine will now allow me to travel to any time line I want. It’ll transport me to the nearest significant Alternative Event. Well, it should do, so long as Horace and Julian have already mapped it.”
“Horace and Julian?”
Conrad leant closer to his dysfunctional brother. He allowed him a quick glimpse of the liquid crystal display. The readout was flashing: “Nazi’s win the Second World War.”
“And if y’ don’t mind,” Conrad continued. “I want to go home now.”
“Give us a go, y’ sad twat!
Suddenly Spotty’s arm was wrapped round Conrad’s head.
Conrad curled up, desperately trying to protect the machine.
Both cranial hedgehogs snarled at one another.
“Give us a go, or I’ll tell Mum!”
&
nbsp; “Geddoff me, Spotty.” He could feel the ball of his brother’s thumb pressing into his stomach. “I wanna go ’ome!”
Chapter Eight: CLICHÉ! Clunk! Whirrrrrrrr….
November 1st, 3.38 p.m. It was similar to watching ink corkscrewing round in a jar of water. Only on a much grander scale! The purple heavens sagged, their ghastly gussets stained with yellow bruises. Scarlet smudges brought the billowing smoke into bass relief. From the humpbacked roofs of the town flames roared, spitting charcoaled insects of paint into the air.
Greyminster had been plunged into war.
“Wow, cool!” Mickey stuffed his fists in his pockets. In the tradition of schoolboys everywhere he grabbed hold of a certain part of his anatomy with growing excitement.
“This is excellent, Four Eyes! It’s like one of Dad’s old videos!”
From the upper eastern firmament a glistening blade tore through the clouds. Shrieking loudly the Spitfire ploughed across the sky.
It disappeared behind the town hall.
What resembled a brain of exploding petrol mushroomed up.
The shock wave undulated along the terraces bringing the guttering into the streets.
Conrad held the box up to his shattered spectacles and tried to figure out what he ought to do next.
So many buttons!
So many dials!
And no instruction leaflet!
“We’ve got to get out of here, Spotty!”
He punched a key at random.
“Apparently,” he continued, squinting at the LCD. “The Greyminster Underground Movement is rebelling against the oppressors.”
From the rubble Albert Brasswick emerged in obvious panic.
Smoke twisted up from his grime-stained pinafore.
The butcher waddled across the cobbles, his bloodstained hands resembling sausages bound together at the wrists.
“Get out of ’ere, Boys! Those bloody ’ooligans ’ave got their ’ands on a nuclear bomb!”
“I’m impressed!” Mickey slapped his palms together as a telescopic sight winked from the debris of Cornwall Walk. “This is better than my Nintendo 64!”
The corner of Wattling Lane looked as though some gargantuan animal had taken a bite from it. From behind an outcrop of black bricks, Constable Took thrust the barrel of his rifle.
Took was dressed in unusual clothes for a Greyminster bobby. They were very similar to the costume Spotty had worn to the Halloween Ball. The crack of gunshot shattered off the walls. Brasswick hit the cobbles attached to an umbilical cord of blood. His skull burst open dramatically with the odiousness of a melon being stabbed.
“Give it ’ere, Specky!” Another tussle broke out. This time a tad more violent. “W’at else can it do? I wanna see Hawthorn get his gnadgers torn off!”
“Geddoff me, Spotty!” Conrad punched Mickey in the small of his back. “You’ll break the buggerin’ thing!”
“Listen Dork, I’m the eldest member of this family!”
He was also the largest. And, to make matters worse, he had Conrad in a headlock that brought the elastic of his underpants unpleasantly close.
“An’ if I say ‘Give it to me’, then I mean ‘GIVE IT TO ME!’”
Conrad grabbed the underpants and gave them a wrench.
“You’re not my brother! You’re just a fat ugly bastard! Now sod off!”
Chapter Nine: Chudder, Stumble and Grind…
(Editor: This is not the name of a law firm. It’s an approximation of the noise that having your temporal lobes massaged by a knackered machine might have made.)
Stepping sideways through time was like being stuck in a washing machine.
Colours blured in the cylindrical drum, tumbling round until your intestines wanted to throttle your larynx.
Then, all of sudden, the ground opened up and out you’d topple, head over heels, landing with a bump on whatever happened to break your fall.
This time it was more of a slop!
Wherever they were it stank of Danish Blue cheese soused in cabbage water.
“W’at’s that stench?”
The darkness made the confined space all the more restrictive. Something disgusting hung down from above, spattering in toxic, dribbling swathes.
It crushed their heads together beneath its weight.
“Where are we, Tosser? What’ve you done with Greyminster?”
“What’ve you done with it, you mean?” One advantage of having Mickey as a brother was that Conrad could argue with him without having his teeth stoved in. “I can’t see a thing in here. Y’ haven’t got a light, have you, Spotty?”
“Actually, I ’ave! An’ if y’ call me Spotty again I’m goin’ t’ tear off your CENSORED and stuff ’em up y’r CENSORED!” (Editor: It is not our intention to offend the more immature readers of this adventure. And I suspect that makes up the majority.)
The sound of rustling, the grind of a thumb against a clapped-out lighter wheel, the flicker of light and the soggy walls span into view.
To their bewilderment, Conrad and Mickey found themselves in a puddle of bile, huge promontories of flesh crammed against their faces.
“I’ve just worked out what the smell is.” Conrad pulled a disagreeable expression. “I think we’re inside something’s stomach. It smells like methane!”
(Editor: For those not chemically minded, methane and lighters are not renowned for their sophisticated company!)
The explosion was magnificent!
Hot air balloons of smoke held together by ropes of soot bulged around the terrace. (With more buoyancy, it ought to be said, than Richard Branson had ever achieved.)
It could also have been described as horrific!
Especially from Mickey and Conrad’s perspective.
Smouldering lethargically, their school uniforms now in tatters, the two children stumbled groggily into the barbecued street.
Across the walls dandelions of canker outlined the blast radius.
Joints of meat, still spitting and crackling, slapped onto the cobbles. Sizzling sausages tumbled along the roof tiles, hanging from the gutters like Christmas decorations.
Shaking the concussion from his head, Conrad wiped the lard from the display of the Isolated Temporal Modifier (Pat. Julian & Horace Gnart, September 1998).
Barely visible beneath the cracks he could make out the words: “Meteorite Misses the Earth.”
Static danced around the edge of the box, earthing into Conrad’s fingertips.
“I can’t be sure but I think that in this time line the dinosaurs survived!” His backside hit the pavement with a weary thump. “I’m sitting in a road designed by evolved reptiles with minuscule brains!”
Above his head the sky turned suddenly dark.
A crescent of silhouettes closed in from all directions.
Scaly brown creatures in Edwardian suits surrounded them menacingly.
The tallest dinosaur removed the monocle from its beady eye and brought Mickey a sharp crack round his skull with a shooting stick.
Then it revealed its hungry, pointed teeth in a grin.
“Press a button, Toe-rag! Press a button for cryin’ out loud!”
“I can’t! The buggerin’ thing’s broken!”
A spark broke loose from the antenna of the Temporal Lobe Modifier.
It leapt into Conrad’s knee and sent his calf into spasm.
“Let me ’ave a go, y’ buggerin’ cretin! That lizard’s givin’ me the diggers!”
Chapter Ten: The Realm of the Miserable Losers
Nov 1st, 5.03 p.m. A circular portal opened in the fabric of time. Behind it, the narrow Greyminster thoroughfare resembled a reflection on a midsummer pond.
Two screaming children, who looked as though they’d just spent four months in the company of Fagin, tumbled through it.
There was the sound of rushing wind and soggy leaves being spun into a frenzy. As the shouting died away, their descent was broken by something pliable and soft.
Whatever it was
it must have been human because it let out a grunt accompanied by a snap.
Barely able to look Conrad opened one eye. A black leather strap studded with rusted metal greeted him.
On closer inspection it became apparent that the strap belonged to a revealing tunic. The sort of costume that’s usually accompanied by peaked leather caps on Channel Four documentaries.
This particular item of clothing was being worn by an elderly gentleman. He lay across the cobbles with Mickey’s heel in one ear. His whiskered chin bobbed up and down as he tried to force the youngsters off his back.
“What the Hell do you think you’re playing at?”
From up above a nasal voice pierced the gloomy atmosphere. Conrad looked round and was confronted by the spokes of a horse-drawn carriage. Perched on a wooden seat an overweight man with a bald head and acne displayed his Bermuda Shirt to them.
“Where are we, Specky?” Mickey struggled to his feet.
“I don’t know! The Isolated Temporal Modifier (Pat. Julian & Horace Gnart, September 1998)’s completely buggered.”
The machine gave out a dispirited wheeze, then sputtered sadly.
“Wherever it is, it isn’t home! I don’t remember sex-slaves being beaten down the streets of Greyminster before!”
“Have you any idea who I am?” The arrogant voice from overhead peeled down once more. This time it was accompanied by the crack of an attention-grabbing whip. “I happen to be CENSORED, part-time book critic. I work for CENSORED magazine. I’m also the author of several Dr. CENSORED books!”
Conrad struggled upright, using the wheel arch as a means of resurrection.
He brushed the worse of the damage off his rags, then cocked his face at an argumentative angle.
“I don’t care who you are, Mister! Y’ stink like a Taiwanese Fish Market!” He screwed up his nose in an attempt to blot out the stench. “And y’ve got the most ’orrible infestation of boils CENSORED!”
An Apology…
(Editor: That’s it I’m afraid! Unfortunately this is where our adventure ends.
On the advice of our lawyers, although the final chapter was accurate in every detail, we thought it best to close this adventure whilst the going was good. Pity really, it was just getting interesting.