Ever since I have enjoyed more and more imaginative freedom by making more and more conduct automatic. This meant deliberately learning the fewest words and actions that satisfy employers, after which I could forget and perform them in perfect intellectual freedom because I was truly living elsewhere in daydreams I absolutely controlled. At first their geography was banal and escapist with ancient castles, Oriental cities, Pacific islands, Tarzan jungles and Sherwood forests peopled by ruthless kings, mad scientists, American crime bosses and women who wore very little clothing. Between rising in the morning and undressing for bed at night, the minutes when I noticed what others thought reality added up to less than an hour, and only happened when occasional accidents required me to show initiative. I easily passed school examinations, automatically absorbing and regurgitating formulas I was given. Students who failed had either bad memories or a habit of thinking for themselves.
Life since then has been the maintenance of intellectual freedom through work needing no intelligent initiative. I found less than might have been expected in the army, when boys of eighteen were conscripted for two years of National Service. Obeying military rule and orders came easily to me. I must have been robust in those days because I hardly noticed the square-bashing that afterwards left other squaddies exhausted and cursing. This made me unpopular because they thought my indifference to what they most resented was a display of social superiority. Word got about that my father was a senior army officer I had quarrelled with, and that after this spell in the ranks I would enrol for Sandhurst. I became victim of practical jokes too painful to ignore. They stopped after I had thrashed two of the worst bullies. After that I was unpopular but generally ignored, however the continual forced intimacy of barrack life was often hard to shut out. One day I was summoned to an interview with an officer who suggested I apply for an officers’ training course. I told him that giving orders would distract me far more than receiving them, and I would be as unwelcome in an officers’ mess as I was among privates because I did not want friends to distract me. “Distract you from what?” he asked. He obviously meant well and seemed intelligent, so I explained the scope of my imaginary worlds at that time — a cluster of planets combining ideas got from H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon and Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, along with some of my own. He listened carefully then passed me to an army psychiatrist who discharged me as unfit for military service.
I then trained as an engineer, mistakenly thinking that those who design machines can also work mechanically. This was partly true at the lowest drawing-board level where the main distraction was office camaraderie. I managed to ignore that, achieving a smooth efficiency that soon led to promotion. In the headquarters of a firm making hydraulic engines I found myself discussing with three others the best design for a casing that must (1) be securely attached by screws and brackets that would not interfere with an interior motor, (2) be easily opened when the motor needed serviced, (3) be easily cleaned, (4) and look good. The discussion of how to satisfy all these requirements was so trivial, boring and endless that I muttered, “Use a tough transparent plastic bubble. Stick it on with polymonochloropolytetrafluroethyline adhesive. When necessary the operator can smash it off with a hammer and stick on a cheap replacement.”
I was joking so they laughed until the boss said, “Excellent! Our entire approach has been out of date. Your idea obviously needs refining but you are due for further promotion, my son.”
So I left that firm and went north to Aberdeen and the oil rigs. Another mistake. Safety is impossible on these structures if you don’t keep looking out for potential accidents. The only industrial jobs I found that paid steady wages for truly mindless toil were on assembly lines. The best was at a belt carrying chocolate biscuits out of a slot to where I tapped them with a little rod, changing their position so that they passed easily through another slot. A newer machine made that job redundant. For years I attached windscreen wipers in a car factory assembly line that eventually closed like every other productive Scottish business. And then I did what I should have done at first: trained as a teacher.
The subject I chose was Careers Guidance, for I thought my previous experience of several different jobs would be helpful. Wrong again. Everyone else on the course had entered straight from secondary school and were learning Careers Guidance without knowing any other career. But at last I have found the social haven I always wanted. It is a small office in a vast secondary school serving a fifth of Glasgow. Single pupils arrive at twenty-minute intervals throughout the day, each leaving at least five minutes before the next. I ask automatic questions provoking predictable answers that I record by ticking boxes in a standard form. The outcome is always one of seventeen suggestions because there are only seventeen courses possible for people leaving this school. My desk contains a small larder and electric kettle so I need not visit a staff room during tea-breaks and the lunch hour, so apart from the Headmaster and his secretary hardly anyone else in the staff here knows I exist. I will tell you a secret. There is a cupboard in this office to which only I have a key. I have cut down a mattress to exactly cover the floor, where I can now sleep comfortably curled in a foetal position. Since travel to and from the office became pointless I gave up my lodgings, got rid of everything but a few essentials, brought these here and have since never left. I have keys that let me leave and return once a week with essential shopping. The janitor suspects I am here at unauthorised times but pretends not to know because I tip him well. Nothing — not even hostile applicants for careers guidance — interfere with my work of preventing old-fashioned catastrophes.
Many years ago, sick of fictional fantasy, my imaginary worlds became wholly shaped by real history and biography. I now know enough to travel back in time and, using no magic or miracles but my knowledge of the future and some basic physical science, give a few key people enough knowledge to prevent disease and warfare. Using freak tempests and tampering with his compass I stopped Columbus crossing the Atlantic and brought him to the coast of China, which he had set out to find. Europe learned of America in the following century when I had prepared the Mexican and Aztec civilizations to resist conquest by acquainting them with firearms and domesticated horses and vaccines that immunized them against European diseases. The rulers, alas, continued using human sacrifice as a means of limiting their populations, but no Native Americans were exterminated by foreigners and African slaves were never brought to the New World. I am currently preventing the miseries of the British Industrial Revolution by helping James Watt’s son (a hitherto neglected historical figure who favoured the French Revolution) to develop clean hydro-electric power so efficiently that by 1850 coal furnaces, steam engines, gas lightings and black Satanic mills were banished from Britain. I have no time to say more about this, except that I am free to enter any room at any time in the past through any door I choose, and I am always welcomed as an entertaining and useful friend by many splendid people, mostly still famous nowadays.