Robert Appleton - Prehistoric Clock

She whispered, “Pinch me, Embrey. This can’t be real.”

He didn’t respond. He, too, was lost between worlds. For no other sight could have struck with such awe or such portentousness.

The farthest reached the clouds. The nearest was rusted and decrepit; it had crumbled and broken in two, its collapsed section lying half out of the water, touching the shore. In her own time, wars had been fought over them.

They were Leviacrum towers, and they had been put here long ago.

By the time they’d dragged the carcasses to Kibo’s vehicle and were making back for camp, the temperature plummeted. Heavy grey clouds blanketed the sky. Embrey had suffered enough British winters to recognise the clouds were laden with snow. Sure enough, before the party reached London, a blizzard swept over the field.

Every remaining man and woman helped hoist the carcasses onto the Empress, while news of the shocking discovery on the lake spread quicker than snow covering the dry deck. Embrey was only vaguely responsive to questions and events around him. A periodic lucidity jabbed at him, reminded him to put on a warm jacket, now see to Billy, now get up, now obey Verity’s summons to her cabin.

He didn’t appear to be the only one afflicted by this fractured state of mind either, as both Kibo and Reardon succumbed to long bouts of silence while the women talked. Verity’s cabin seemed as alien to him as everything else in this limbo between past and present. At least Billy was safe on B-deck with Tangeni watching over him.

“And it was how old, if you had to guess?” Miss Polperro leaned forward on her elbow, enthused by the discovery.

Verity stopped biting her nails long enough to swig another mouthful of her brandy. “Ancient-the metalwork had mostly rusted away. I’d guess at hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. And the height of the thing, if it was still erect, would be far taller than the London Leviacrum we know. Maybe twice as tall.” She paused, glancing at each of her guests in turn. “What do you suppose it all means, gentlemen? When are we?”

“Professor Reardon? Do you have a theory, sir?” Agnes Polperro hadn’t addressed anyone so politely since Embrey had met her. She rested her chin on her fist, and gave the professor her full attention. What about this revelation had perked her spirits so?

Reardon sat up as if from a daze, cleared his throat and then swabbed the spittle from his chin with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry. Did you address me?”

“She was wondering if you’d solved the riddle, old boy,” Embrey now spoke for the first time, himself wanting, needing some thread of logic with which to untangle the knot in his brain. “If not the Cretaceous, when the deuce are we?”

“Of course we’re in the Cretaceous, always have been.” The professor, suddenly animated, gesticulated with his hands as though he’d supped a full pot of coffee. “Briory’s observations of the plant life proved that, as well as the geology. If you are all suspecting this is the distant future, and that dinosaurs have been reintroduced at some point-perhaps as some kind of time travelling zoo-think again. There is no evidence here of a former civilisation, apart from the old Leviacrum towers.”

“Actually,” Verity interrupted, “Embrey and I discovered a metal panel on the lake bed, miles away from the collapsed towers.”

“A current could have moved it that distance, or a storm,” Embrey replied.

“True enough.” She resumed her nail-biting.

Elbows on his chair arms, Reardon formed a pensive V-shape with his forearms and touching fingertips under his chin. “No, my theory has the more straightforward logic, but its ramifications may be very disturbing indeed. It is obvious that sometime in the future-our future from a twentieth century perspective-the Leviacrum Council will harness time travel on a massive scale. Entire towers will be sent back through time. For what purpose I don’t know. Perhaps giant mineral deposits were found in the past, almighty quantities of gold, or even diamond geodes begging to be mined. Maybe we have happened upon the ruins of this cross-temporal industry.

“But for whatever reason, it did not endure. They may have exhausted the resources, or this epoch red in tooth and claw got the better of them. The point is that they scarred prehistory in a major way, and in doing so changed it irrevocably.” He shook his head, a grim smile of disbelief quivering his rectangular chin. “Think on it-by leaping back to precede all mankind had achieved, they altered it. Civilisation as we know it in the twentieth century, everything from ice cream cones to advanced steam technology, might not have come to pass but for that meddling millions of years before. Perhaps the influences were subtle, like the thriving of a species of crustacean on the Leviacrum’s warm exterior around the boilers. Before the tower appeared in prehistory, that species was doomed to extinction. But now it becomes hardier and spreads, supplanting other species and changing the ecological system forever. The knock-on effect of that influence over millions of years might become the difference between sperm whales existing and not existing. Ponder the import of that result for man and marine life. The world is not the same place.

“My friends, we are living proof of history revised. All that we are may not be all we were meant to be.”

“Or perhaps this was all meant to be,” Miss Polperro argued. “What if the Maker resews fate around those frays, and ensures things return to His initial plan for us? We make these changes by travelling through time, but the Lord unmakes them in equally subtle ways. Nature’s forces are all about balance. Maybe time has an underlying, reshaping force as well-the way a mountain rises and falls by the same subterranean forces. Over time, what is done is also undone. What we do here may ultimately have no more effect on 1908 than a fistful of salt thrown into the sea. Time and the sea will have dissolved the change, the addition. It only seems far-reaching to us because we perceive ourselves as the centre of the universe, when in fact we’re inconsequential in the grand scheme. Nature is patient and resourceful, like the meandering river. She will resume her intended course because God’s design is not so fickle as ours.”

“Yes, but over millions of years, we’re not a fistful of salt, we’re a bloody great landslide!” Reardon wagged his finger at her, and Embrey felt himself ebbing and flowing on the convictions of these two learned scientists. “Nature isn’t going to simply erase the legacy of those Leviacrum towers merely because they erode and eventually disappear. I tell you they have changed the face of the planet, and we are their progeny. Orphans, that’s what we are-orphans of a temporal storm that’s been raging for millions of years. And we knew nothing about it…until now.”

Embrey’s mind clicked into gear. “What about the other anomalies-the perfect web and Billy’s influence on time travel? Could they have been caused by all this meddling with time? Has all this tampering with history damaged the very underlying forces Miss Polperro predicts? And time is simply springing leaks?”

They all pondered that for a while, until Kibo, who hadn’t yet said a word, cleared his throat. “Professors, that is all fascinating, but can you please answer me this? If we return to 1908, will it be the same as when we left?”

Miss Polperro sat up. “Yes, I am certain of it. By whatever means, I believe those elements of time and fate will reconvene for us. You’ll see.”

“I wish I knew, friend.” Reardon glanced at Kibo, then looked gravely at the carpet. “I wish I knew.”