The Basingstoke Chronicles Read online

  "Yes, but from past experience you know the car to be safe enough to permit that risk," Dumitrescu argued.

  "And the same goes for this time machine," replied the Cuban. "Think on it. I count at least two journeys made already. Starting from when it was built--let's say the very distant future--it had to have traveled back through time to seven thousand BCE, where the new occupant must have used it to escape a fiery end, hurling himself forward through time to 1979. Two journeys--one back and one forward. I'd say that makes for a pretty successful test of time travel."

  Rodrigo was a man after my own heart. The tiniest hint that he might survive a foray into the unknown was all the permission he needed to pack his rucksack and begin the trek. Though he was only a few years younger than I, he was far more confident, and seemed to regard boldness as a matter of duty. To me, it was always more of a challenge.

  "That's the most reckless statement I've ever--" Sam said.

  "Sshh!" Ethel motioned towards something outside? "Can anyone else hear that?"

  The deluge had ceased, leaving us in complete silence below deck. We heard it straight away, the soft whirr of a vessel on the starboard side. To our surprise, it seemed to be approaching.

  Sam and Rodrigo leapt up immediately and rushed to the deck. The rest of us followed. I was more curious than alarmed; after what I had just experienced, I could afford to take a few things in my stride.

  A warm gust dispelled the lingering chill as the five of us stood, bunched, to observe the vessel. A dense fog bank rolled in from the north, concealing the strange boat completely. Would she steer close enough for us to identify her at all? A hundred yards apart is a thousand leagues astray in the grip of an impenetrable sea mist.

  "Best not take any chances," said Sam to Rodrigo.

  "Sí," replied the Cuban, making immediately for his cabin, from where he delivered a double blast of the yacht's horn. There was no reply. Again, he made our presence known. No reply. On the first boom of the third call, however, a slightly higher-pitched echo overlapped, prompting us to listen more carefully. After a few seconds, a loud reply volleyed through the fog.

  "Well, at least she knows where we are," Sam explained.

  No sooner had he finished when Dumitrescu pointed through the mist.

  "Yes!" he said, guiding our eyes to a trail of light which seeped through the edge of the bank. "There she is!"

  Sam Croft, ever wont to take the initiative, cupped his hands over his mouth to deliver a second course of maritime etiquette. "Ahoy!"

  A deep, accented voice responded in kind from across the gulf. I winced as I recognized the awful timbre, and the man to match. It was none other than my Highland colleague, MacDuff.

  "Oh, boy," Ethel mumbled, "we've got some explaining to do."

  "What do you mean?" I replied.

  "He's been sniffing around for the past five days or so, diving at a none-too-discreet distance, though we haven't seen him for a while. No doubt he heard about your disappearance. Who knows, perhaps he's just been waiting for us to leave. But something tells me he won't swallow your resurrection without a dose of skepticism. What shall we say?"

  "Whatever it is, there's no accounting for me being here, at the very place where I vanished. Not after eight days."

  The yacht drew nearer and I could think of no viable story. Dumitrescu then stepped in. "Let me handle this."

  As the Scotsman maneuvered his vessel alongside ours, Dumitrescu leapt across with great agility.

  The Romanian spent a good ten minutes aboard with MacDuff, and though out of earshot I felt I could translate every tick and turn of their interactions, so much importance had I attached to the Scotsman's presence.

  Had I left the time machine for him to find? Had I interfered with its camouflage somehow, rendering it more visible?

  Might his party have the same urge I had had--to wander down for a closer inspection of the sea bed?

  Could I risk him discovering it? I thought not. But what could any of us do if he stayed in the vicinity, or even chose to dive there and then?

  Whatever Dumitrescu told him, I could not afford to leave the time machine unguarded. Not for another moment.

  Suddenly, the hairs on my neck bristled with excitement. I gasped and, studying my friends in turn, tried to figure which of them might participate, that night, in an impromptu getaway... Through time...

  Chapter 5

  Dumitrescu, ever the diplomat, neither smiled nor frowned as he jumped back aboard. I was surprised to see MacDuff wave to us as he disengaged; to my knowledge, the gesture was a new one in his repertoire. Despite waving back, I was unmoved.

  "You see, even a snake can be charmed," whispered Sam.

  "But the venom can't," replied Ethel.

  "I don't like it," I said. "He suspects something."

  Dumitrescu nodded. "I told him how you had drifted too far after being injured, and were lucky to happen upon a fishing boat that second day, and how they barely managed to revive you. Then, just as you said, he enquired as to why you would be out here again, at this same spot."

  "You're a born liar, sir," quipped Rodrigo.

  "Why, thank you, Senor Quintas. I then explained how Henry had wanted to join us for the final leg of the expedition, stubborn as he is."

  "Did he believe you?" I asked.

  "I couldn't be certain, but he is diving tomorrow morning, whether we like it or not."

  "In that case..." I waited until the faces of my four friends turned to me with quizzical expressions. "...tonight it is, then."

  Rodrigo shook my hand enthusiastically, while the others, after silent deliberation, gave merely noncommittal nods.

  "You don't share my urgency?" I asked.

  "Not at all," replied Sam. "But we know how much this means to you. You've always said you want to experience something unequivocal. Well, we're not about to stand in your way now. That would be rather unsporting of us, old boy."

  Ethel put her arms round her husband then said to me, "Go get 'em, tiger."

  * * * *

  The fidgety slumber of the ocean tossed moonlight fragments over the entire midnight expanse. Three black shapes shrank as they drifted away from us, toward the submerged machine. Sublimely camouflaged, they were my friends and guarantors: Dumitrescu, Rodrigo and Sam.

  Ethel opened my water-tight plastic carrier and dropped something inside. It was wrapped in a small towel.

  "You'll thank me for this, I promise," she said, pulling the cord tight and handing me the now heavier bag.

  I strained to find the right words. "You're sure you don't want to come?" was the best I could muster.

  She kissed me on each cheek, before ruffling my hair. "I'm sure. Don't worry, you'll find what you're looking for someday, Lord Basingstoke."

  I climbed down the steel ladder at the boat's stern, blew her a final kiss goodbye and slipped into the cool ocean. I glimpsed Ethel, barely distinguishable from the enveloping night, as I took my last unfiltered breath of 1979. Was that what she saw me as--a lonely figure, without any real definition?

  Perhaps she understood what I did not.

  The four of us were careful not to switch on our torches until we were well underwater. Stealth was our ally. I led the descent, closely followed by Rodrigo, who readied a fistful of flares at my signal. The topography had etched itself onto my memory. We were very close to our destination. Indeed, the first flare vanished for a moment and then spun into a new trajectory as it fell.

  Bullseye!

  Rodrigo needed no further instruction. Ensuring each of his flares fell at a comfortable distance from the anomaly, he soon arranged a perimeter of light around the site of sand and flat rock.

  As much as I love diving, it can be an immensely frustrating experience. I wanted to talk my friends through each step of my discovery, but I could not say a word. They were mesmerized--who wouldn't be--but I would have given anything to hear what they were thinking.

  One by one, they traced the stream
lined exterior, negotiated their way through the legs of the craft and followed my lead into its belly. Gone was the turquoise pigment which had lit my earlier meddling. In its place, a faint amber skirt enwrapped the lower half of the chamber.

  It is hard to imagine how we must have looked, huddled together in the time machine, pouring over the indecipherable panel of functions by torchlight. We hardly moved for twenty-five minutes. None of us dared risk breathing the unknown pocket of atmosphere; all of us were transfixed by this otherworldly creation in its tactile glory. Yet, what chance had we to adjust, literally standing in the future, by way of the past?

  Sam switched off his torch and bade us do the same. The flares had long since expired. We were in utter darkness. A power cut at home can't compare, as the sensation is usually grounded by a familiarity with one's surroundings. Here not even the air could be trusted.

  It quickly became clear what Sam had done. Glancing down to the panel, I noticed a faint aqua-blue glow highlighting two of the symbols. One was the function I had already activated; the other, located on the far left, depicted a pyramid of interlocking circles. It was as cryptic as the others, but telling all the same.

  If a symbol is highlighted upon touch, then the second symbol must also have been activated recently.

  Dumitrescu was right. From whenever the mystery passenger had traveled, his journey had to have been measured by this function.

  An incremental scale? I recalled Sam's hypothesis. Obviously not decimal, each symbol bore no resemblance to any other. Perhaps they were more akin to Roman numerology, in which not all increments are derived from a set pool of digits. I'd seen insanely elaborate combinations before; perhaps we were dealing with the same fundamental principles.

  Despite what some would say, I do have quite a logical mind at my disposal, which, on occasion, I can put to good use.

  Common logic would prescribe the shortest route from A to B to be the most efficient methodology. Could this panel denote the simplest way of categorizing time travel, as opposed to just time? Don't forget, jumping through time is breaking all the rules as we know them.

  Rodrigo flicked on his torch and, pointing to his wrist watch, signaled we couldn't afford to dally any longer. The silent tour was over. As I shook hands with Sam and Dumitrescu, excitement surged through me.

  One after the other, they vanished beneath the hull. I saw the faintest outline of their torch beams on the chamber wall outside. Had they stopped to observe? The remainder of the interior was black. Whatever the material, it did not reflect, even dimly, the light from our own torches. Rodrigo and I looked at one other, crossing beams to see what each might say with his body language. To my surprise and in contrast to how I felt, he appeared cool and collected--a responsible mind-frame through which to embark.

  He motioned toward the panel, inviting me to take the initiative. In the darkness, he must have misjudged his distance from the display, and struck it with his hand. I pulled him away immediately. But it was too late. The vibration began. We flashed our torch lights feverishly about the chamber. After a few seconds it was hard to distinguish them from the turquoise flickers whose frequency soon accelerated exponentially. The vibration, too, sped up beneath our feet. It quickly became so fast as to be smooth in a kind of oscillatory dissolve. I felt a wonderful pins-and-needles sensation seep across my shins.

  A dark blue replaced the alternating turquoise and black. We were obviously tearing through time at a tremendous clip, but how far and in which direction? Inspecting the panel, I found that Rodrigo had activated the symbol farthest left. More specifically, its function beneath.

  Christ! The largest possible step backwards.

  I shuddered. About to reverse the command by touching the upper function, I suddenly recoiled. It was a good thing I did, too. For as we had not reached our new destination, any fresh calculation would have been from our current position in time. It would therefore not have returned us to 1979 at all. Instead, it may have lost us to some incalculable future date. The folly might easily have ruined our chances of ever seeing home again.

  Every breath we inhaled was akin to real time slipping away. I began to doubt if the thing would ever choose to stop. Finally it did, and by the same shift in vibration, only in reverse, we eased to a graceful rest.

  All right, where the hell are we? I thought, as I replied to Rodrigo's thumbs up in kind.

  Everything appeared exactly as it had at our time of departure, and for a second I thought we hadn't moved at all.

  There was something odd, though. Shining my torch around the chamber, I saw no discrepancy, but when I focused on the portal, our only observation and access point to the sea, I gasped.

  We both stood over the dark hole and peered through. Brilliant specks of light lay scattered about the otherwise completely black environment. Yet, our beams could not illuminate anything outside: not a stray fish, a coral configuration or even a bed of sand. The discovery was problematical...until I followed our time travel paradigm to its logical extreme.

  If we traveled far enough into history...

  The answer was awe-inspiring and terrible. I focused on an attractive formation of specks and, breathless, realized we could be staring at nothing other than a celestial constellation. The time machine had thrown us to a time before the earth itself, before our planet had been formed. Our spectacular window was to the heart of deepest space, unfiltered, unparalleled and unnerving.

  My perception of scuba divers being the astronauts of the ocean was suddenly the most gut-wrenching of ironies. It is hard to translate that sense of isolation. I was in a black sea with no bottom and no surface. Life itself did not yet exist, nor did its womb--Mother Earth. I wanted to tear myself away from the view but couldn't. No one else had ever glimpsed the universe like this. Perhaps these were some of the first stars born out of the Big Bang. I couldn't recognize a single constellation. Cold now, having to steady my breathing as my heart pounded, I felt the most alone that any human being had ever been in the cosmos.

  The more I focused on the stars, the more they seemed to skew from their axes. My mind couldn't help but roll with them. If Rodrigo had not been there to steady me, I would have toppled headlong into the abyss.

  As he yanked me to safety, I gripped his arm and felt clarity in my senses again. We both watched in horror as my torch fell from my grasp, slid over the brink and floated, majestically, into the infant cosmos.

  I shuffled quickly over to the panel and touched the correct function to undo this awful detour. Waiting on my knees, face to face with those symbols until the five minutes or so had elapsed, I swore to start my plan afresh.

  As I couldn't let MacDuff or anyone else get their hands on the time machine, I determined our return to 1979 was to be short-lived, perhaps a matter of moments. Our proposed journey, then, to retrace the dead time traveler's passage through time, to find out who he was and how he died, had to be now.

  First, I assured myself that the scale was indeed incremental--rising from right to left--and then touched the reverse function beneath a symbol located directly to the left of the very first I had pressed. Did that symbol denote weeks or months? I couldn't be sure. But the nine-thousand year leap loomed, and I planned to arrive with sufficient time to predict and evade whatever disaster befell the previous occupant.

  Twenty seconds later, the fresh cycle eased to a stand-still. From my reckoning, we were some time before our original starting point in 1979--about a month, I hoped.

  So far so good, I thought.

  Rodrigo must have trusted me completely, as he did not once interfere. More likely, he did not trust himself after our startling mishap.

  Next, I concentrated fully to ensure there was no error. I pressed reverse beneath the pyramid of interlocking circles, hoping to trace back the giant step of the deceased time-traveler--nine thousand years, at least.

  So, forgetting Rodrigo's accident, we ought to wind up exactly where the time machine began its journey to us, p
lus the value of my additional increment...let's say a month or so beyond.

  The oscillations barely reached their critical dissolve when the cycle began to slow. I would say less than a minute had elapsed in transit. Again, the vessel stopped as if no change had ever taken place. I opened my eyes and was relieved to find the chamber beautifully lit. A far brighter, greener pigment seeped through its filtered walls.

  Aqua-blue! I almost shouted aloud, damn near choking on my mouthpiece.

  I felt a gentle current of relaxation as I untangled my flippers and rose to my feet.

  Rodrigo placed a firm hand on my shoulder and pointed to the keel hole. It was majestic! A giant sea turtle, grey-skinned, possessing a wonderfully dark green, ornamental shell, swam across a bronzed coral reef. The gentle push of its strokes through the water epitomized the care-free nature of his species in our own time, and we were at once given a wry reminder of the sea's serenity through which our time travels had, so far, stumbled.

  An ebullient curiosity welled up inside me. There was also a sense of catharsis in knowing that Rodrigo and I, of the exhausted twentieth century, had achieved something without precedent.

  I checked my wristwatch. We had used fifty minute's worth of oxygen. Our escape to the surface could not wait. I grabbed Rodrigo by his arm and signaled for our departure. Easing myself into the tepid water, I glanced over our vessel one last time, on tenterhooks, before completely submerging.

  An endless, shallow coral reef stretched out in front. Brilliantly colored, it teemed with exotic marine life. To a true oceanographer, this sight alone would have made the trip worthwhile. Rodrigo and I instead turned our attentions to what lay behind.

  An incredible land mass barred our underwater view for what seemed like miles across. As it was too far away to adequately survey and the ocean itself was no more than forty feet deep where we swam, Rodrigo started after our new reptilian friend, the turtle, who rose diagonally toward the surface, carefree, oblivious to the strange new creatures he guided.