The Basingstoke Chronicles Read online

  No sooner had I drifted back outside to survey the rest of my discovery when it vanished again. The thing was a puzzlement, for sure.

  An object only visible from beneath?

  It was time to seriously address the nature of this invisibility. I returned to the object's roof. Poking my head between two of the extensions, I once more discovered I could see the object clearly. My blind guess had in fact been a good one. The blades of a rudimentary whisk, six-inch-wide silver tentacles, converged above me, almost touching, with perfect geometric symmetry. As I drifted back out once again, the transparency resumed. A tickle of triumph danced over me.

  What technology is this? Or whose?

  The secret of its invisibility was a shroud of some kind, draped over the object to mask it on the ocean bed. As I could only see it from inside this boundary, perhaps the invisible fabric had no physical dimension at all. Was it a manipulation of light and electromagnetism, a photonic shield of mind-bending ingenuity? Whatever the origin, I was certain of its connection to the mystery I had sought to solve. After all, the pendant had been left only a few meters away.

  Having first satisfied myself that everything aloft was immovable and unresponsive, I swam back down to its base. This time I swam low through the legs and, reaching the centre of the span, knelt upright for a better position from which to inspect.

  Suddenly, the most extraordinary disorientation I have ever felt began to affect me. My eyes were fixed on the sleek silver hull when the circumference of my torch beam suddenly began to expand. It was as though I was shrinking to an unfathomable state inside some surreptitious snare. I had to look down for fear of wheeling backward. At that moment, I settled with a gentle sigh of relief, for the legs, I realized, were extending. The base was rising slowly from me.

  What did I do?

  Petrified but acutely curious, I stood tall and bit into my plastic mouthpiece. I tied my fate to the science of this enigmatic mechanism. The silver legs finally stopped extending at about nine feet, holding the object steady.

  A few feet above me, a tiny turquoise hole, no bigger than a halfpenny, appeared in the centre of the base. It quickly grew, opening the metal skin as though it were about to give birth. I can't put into words how strangely inviting this gesture was. My mind felt like a steady compass after a violent tremor.

  Inside, a translucent turquoise material walled the vessel from roof to floor. Rising up to enter, I was again surprised. The interior was in fact a chamber of air. Were it not for the seawater cascading from me onto the hard floor, I might have been climbing a lighthouse tower on a clear afternoon in Cornwall.

  I daren't trust this air pocket, though. I retained my own oxygen supply. Even recklessness has its limits. Studying the vessel, I found little with which to grapple--no wheel, no lever, no inkling of its practicality.

  Imagine an elongated dome, which would comfortably hold three standing men, built with a chameleon-like metal shell. What a curious vessel it was. Empty and undecorated except for what appeared to be a strange cipher scribed across a two-by-eight foot panel in the wall opposite. I guessed that if the chamber were located on land, its color would adapt in kind. Its shade of blue suggested a light filter of some kind diffused the outlying pigment of the sea.

  The floor was slightly concave to ensure water was not trapped inside. With its gaping keel, it reminded me of the old-fashioned diving bells used for deep sea exploration. Though one would expect a plethora of theories to emerge, I can honestly say that was not the case. There was only a grim satisfaction, the vindication of a life-long insistence. I had discovered something truly extraordinary and real.

  I had to know more.

  The panel was embedded inside the wall--a remarkable technology--and its symbols were as abstract in matter as they were nonsensical. Neither hieroglyphs or any form of writing I had seen, they had to be responsible for the vessel's locomotion. Of that much I was certain, partly because there was nothing else, partly because I wished it be so.

  Twenty-three symbols lined the panel, side by side. Each was unique, yet all remained elusive as though on the bed of a pond. Above and below these pictorials were smaller crescent shapes, identical except for the ones above being concave and the ones below being convex. It seems absurd now but at the time it made perfect sense--the sequence appeared so elementary and I reckoned a little experimenting would soon capture me this enigma. In my haste, or perhaps in the off-putting torchlight, I quite overlooked the fact that one of the symbols was lit more brightly than the rest.

  The fifth symbol from the right caught my attention instead. It closely resembled the tentacles I had seen affixed to the roof. What arrogance made me match our own methods of propulsion with this utterly alien discovery I can only guess. My excuse, I suppose, is that caution is often thwarted by moments of exuberance. In any event, I pressed the concave shape above--to take me up to the surface.

  A slight yet noticeable vibration tickled my feet through the rubber flippers.

  Ah...movement!

  After a few seconds, the turquoise interior began to fluctuate in tone, darkening and then returning to its normal shade in uneven spurts. The commotion lasted no longer than a dozen seconds.

  Though curious to learn what I had achieved, I caught a glimpse of my wrist watch. Only a few minutes of oxygen remained. Scrambling through the keel hole, I was disappointed to find the vessel had not budged.

  After all that, I thought, noting the exact geographical whereabouts of my discovery, even though I could again no longer see it. I vowed to return immediately with a fresh cylinder. The excitement grew to a nervous energy as I approached the surface.

  Right! Sam, Ethel and Rodrigo I can trust, but no one else is getting their paws on this. I'll kill them first. We have to keep it under wraps, literally.

  On the surface, I removed my mouthpiece to breathe freely once again. The air was crisp and the sun less intense, as though a spot of inclement weather was approaching. The Moncado and the Aquitaine floated side by side a hundred yards away.

  Maybe they've found something too, I thought, relishing the opportunity to compare our mornings of discovery. In a matter of minutes, I reached Rodrigo's yacht and climbed aboard, but had to wait a good twenty minutes on deck for him to re-surface. He paused as he noticed me, before hurtling up the steel ladder and almost wrenching his mask from his head in excitement.

  "Jesus, Baz, you sonofabitch. We thought you were dead!"

  "Well, I did cut it a little fine, I have to admit. Just a minute or so left."

  "A minute or so? What the hell are you talking about?" he snapped. "You've been missing for over a week!"

  Chapter 4

  How can one understand time travel? I had skipped over eight rotations of the earth. An entire week of my life that should have been, never was. Not in the sense of being unconscious. That would have at least included me in the chaos equation--an entity both acting upon and being acted upon by the laws of physics. No, I had been whisked away from those mechanics. A bystander to a cruelly accelerated world. And nothing could atone for that time stolen away.

  Missing for over a week.

  Rodrigo chose not to follow up his statement. He stared instead, no doubt waiting for an explanation that he felt I owed him, one that I, too, waited for. The moment was excruciating. I was the butt of an awful, temporal joke.

  As I stuttered through my telling of the events that now spun like an out-of-control whirligig, familiar objects aboard the Moncado blurred in and out of déjà vu. Where had I been for the last eight days? Had I lost or gained through the anomaly? If so, what had I gained or lost? Is time a fabric man was not meant to fashion?

  Rodrigo's scowl of concentration furrowed his brow.

  "Well, say something, man!" I insisted.

  "It's not that I don't believe your story, Baz, it's just... Well, I can't quite swallow what happened at the beginning, or the end, or any other part for that matter. I mean, Jesus, what do you expect?"
/>   That Rodrigo, the ultimate yarn-spinner in bars and hotel lounges across Cuba, had resisted my account, was enough to leave me doubting even the spin of the earth. But like an innocent man about to suffer an interminable incarceration, I clung to my story while all else crumbled about me. Common sense was on his side; far-fetched logic on mine.

  "All right, how else could I have survived for so long underwater without gills or some secret stash of oxygen? Why would I want to? Is it that hard to believe, considering the reason we came here in the first place? A nine thousand year old fabric, woven a few years ago? Do the math!"

  "But a time machine, Baz!" He groaned.

  And who can blame him? I would almost certainly have mocked such an explanation if the roles had been reversed. He had every right to laugh it off.

  As I was about to suggest the only sure method of persuasion available to me--actually taking him down to see the blasted thing, first hand--a sweet, soaring voice interrupted. "Henry? Henry!"

  Ethel scrambled up the metal ladder and made her way toward me, the deck awash in her wake. Without removing a single item of scuba gear, she threw her arms around me. I tried desperately to imagine the re-union from her perspective -a close friend thought lost to the deep suddenly appearing after so long--but to no avail. We had been apart only a matter of hours. My perception could not bend from that experience.

  "You've no miracles left any more, Henry Basingstoke," she whispered. "This was the last one. So tell me, what unbelievable tale is waiting for me to believe?"

  I badly needed her reassurance. Slowly, as the streams of water from her hair and wetsuit eased to heavy trickles, a strange syntax formed in my mind, as though the drips inked blank pages of my memory in the pools about our feet. I looked at the phenomenon matter-of-factly. Ethel wanted to believe. I was not alone in this, and nor was it beyond my capacity to believe.

  "You might want to get changed," I replied, softly, "before I answer that question."

  Sam and Dumitrescu surfaced soon after Ethel. Needless to say, they were stunned. The Romanian had intended to rendezvous with us all a few days earlier, and when he had arrived to news of my disappearance, he insisted the original search go on. Rodrigo later told me how Sam and Ethel had wanted to return home, only for Dumitrescu to persuade them otherwise. All four had taken turns diving together.

  "He would have wanted you to see it through, to solve the mystery for him," the Romanian had insisted on my behalf.

  The expedition had thus become a two-fold search in my absence, my friends keeping one eye open for the supposed sunken boat, the other for signs of what had become of me. Rodrigo had wanted to recover my body if at all possible. After the chances of me being found alive on the surface were exhausted to the satisfaction of the Coast Guard rescue team, my friends had taken it upon themselves to organize their own underwater search radius. My return was in the nick of time, too. They had nearly completed the full circle.

  Grey clouds gathered overhead in the forty minutes it took for everyone to assemble and hear out my tale. The atmosphere below deck was mercurial; fingers of the impending storm inched coldly over us. We sat around the Moncado's fixed wooden dining table, each pondering, in his or her own way, the possibilities of this mystery.

  At least there was no feasible theory with which they could contradict my story.

  "You say the cycle of this thing lasted only a few seconds?" asked Sam.

  "No more than a dozen," I replied. "The light and dark pulses must have been night flickering to day and vice-versa, at tremendous velocity."

  "If that button reduces a week to mere seconds, imagine what the others can do?" Ethel said.

  Sam was now animated. "Exactly! Maybe it's an incremental scale--minutes, days, years, thousands of years. I'm betting the functions above and below the symbols are like you supposed, Henry, only for forward and reverse in the truest sense--through time. At least, that's how I might design such a display."

  "Makes perfect sense to me," said Dumitrescu.

  "Me too," agreed Ethel. "I'm just glad you didn't wind up nine thousand years from now, or nine thousand years ago, for that matter."

  The Romanian seized that thread of logic. "Yes, what if the settings are still configured for that duration of time? All you would need to do is press reverse for the appropriate symbol. The entire mystery would then be yours to unmask."

  "Unmask in the sense of having your face burned off, you mean," Rodrigo replied. "Don't forget, the body you found was a wreck, burned to hell on one side. Right, Baz?"

  I had to agree with my Cuban friend. "Whatever he traveled nine thousand years to escape from isn't exactly something I'd turn the clocks back for."

  "I think what he's trying to say is, you first! And don't forget to pack that fifty-dollar sun block while you're at it," added Ethel, patting the Romanian's head. He seemed to appreciate that in-joke between them and chuckled to himself. She squeezed past us on her way to the kitchen, where she assembled various plates and pans for an early dinner.

  "Keep going, lads," she said. "I'm still listening."

  We heard the rain thrash the deck above us. I reached over to Rodrigo's drinks cabinet to pilfer a re-fill of whisky for my hipflask. An unusual Scandinavian brand caught my eye.

  "OK, let's assume this thing can do everything you say--skim over hundreds of years like a pebble on a pond--what are we really talking about here? When you say time, what forces are we really dealing with?"

  Everyone looked across at Rodrigo. He had just kicked the conversation up a notch. For my own part, having witnessed personally the effects of this so-called skimming across time, and having had a little time to contemplate, I felt confident to answer first, even if I was in the middle of a delicate pouring operation between bottle and flask.

  "I've never had cause to think on it before today, but look: days, minutes, years, seconds, millennia. They strike me as somewhat artificial. We've invented them as a means of measuring evolution, right? The evolution of all things? The universe from beginning to end? Well, where else in the cosmos is change broken down into such neat increments? All right, the earth revolves round the sun, and the earth spins on its axis. But why twenty-four hours, why sixty minutes, over and over again, incrementally? We seem to be attuned to this idea of moving forward through some kind of irrevocable destiny, from left to right along linear time. In my mind, this simply isn't true. I say time, as a separate entity, has no more bearing on our lives than any other abstraction we can conjure.

  "When a change takes place--say a rock falls without warning from a cliff and starts a landslide--we can accredit it to God, or fate, or we can say it was the net result of one or more physical forces acting upon it. Cause and effect, action and reaction. Now, if science can prove these exertions, where does that leave time in the equation? If time is a force unto itself, and everything under its jurisdiction is bound to move forward regardless, then which is responsible for the landslide: physical nature or time? If natural forces hadn't conspired to shift the rock, would time have intervened, supernaturally, in order to ensure its inevitable course? No, it wouldn't.

  "Once you get past the idea that time is set apart as a force above and beyond the physical universe, our awe of it dissolves to a degree, I think. And that it must be tied to causality in some way--as I've said, action and reaction--suggests we're dealing with nothing but the forces of nature set in motion. Therefore, as well as the universe acting upon us, our every choice, in turn, manipulates the universe to some degree. What is time? Intrinsic. There in every action, residual in every reaction. It's embedded in the fabric of cause and effect--the stabilizing factor, if you will."

  I finished there to take a small sip of whisky, quite pleased with my newfangled philosophy.

  "Sorry, Baz, you lost me at the landslide. Correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like you're saying time is some kind of gravity, holding the dimensions in place. And that it can be manipulated, physically, if you know how to find it. That it
might be a preternatural force to us, but it's one that scientists in the future will be able to measure using a pencil and a slide-rule. To them, it will be elementary."

  "You heard me right, Rodrigo," I affirmed. "Maybe not that easy to manipulate, but I get what you mean. Most science fiction is science pending. I don't think any of this is going to help us understand time travel, but at least it brings the concept down from its lofty perch a tad."

  "It's a better explanation than mine would have been," said Dumitrescu.

  "But?" I sensed he was holding something back.

  "Well, it's just that you're trying to put your finger on a pulse that has so far eluded the world's greatest scientists and philosophers. Time is still the same enigma it was when Aristotle was alive. We can but dance round it with words and ideas, for it is a concept as yet out of our grasp to comprehend."

  "Amen!" chimed Ethel, sparking her own mocking tone as she lit the second burner beneath a pan of something spicy. "But we're not going to get very far with that attitude now, are we?"

  Dumitrescu wasted no time. "That's my point exactly. We can talk till death comes knocking, and still we will have found no ingress [into] the enigma of time travel. This time machine, Henry, wields a power with which humanity has no right to interfere."

  "He's right, Henry," agreed Sam. "You've said it yourself, time is an inextricable part of the universe in motion--a stabilizer. Therefore, meddling with time is meddling with the very thing that's holding everything together. We'd be wise not to upset that kind of logic. After all, as Georghe says, we haven't the slightest idea of how it works."

  Rodrigo disapproved. "So what? I don't have a damn clue how my car engine works, but I drive it through a busy town every day, trusting everyone's life, including my own, to whoever built the thing."