Robert Appleton - Prehistoric Clock

Though she’d retrieved the bullet and a tiny fragment of his shirt, he’d contracted a vicious fever. His pale skin dripped with perspiration, and every now and then she dabbed his brow with a damp cloth. The more he muttered insensibly, the clearer she glimpsed her end-the loneliest end imaginable, millions of years from another soul. She’d been a fool to let anyone — even her own men-near Billy or Reardon. If she’d managed it more prudently, where would they be right now? Was the city she’d glimpsed really London? If Reardon was still alive, would he ever come back for them?

There was always a chance.

“If you ever make it to Piccadilly, Tangeni…” she lay Billy’s dinosaur book next to her glass of brandy on the desk, “be sure to buy the boy an ice cream.”

She stared out into prehistory as one confined to its savage isolation forever. If only things had turned out differently. If only.

“ Enda nawa, my friend. Enda nawa. ”

One week later…

An eager easterly breeze prodded the balloons overhead while she paced about A-deck, tracing cables and rails with her fingertips as though it might reawaken precious memories of her adventures in the corps. But the Empress was a ghost ship. Her spirit had departed with Tangeni and the last of the aeronauts. Verity would fly her as far and as long as she was able, and when her gas was spent, the Gannet would slowly rust and crumble with the rest of man’s anachronisms. Bleak, yes, but she had served her purpose. She had kept enough of her crew alive to enable the return trip through time. Whatever else happened, she had at least done that.

“You finished yet?” she called to Embrey, who’d been writing in his blasted journal for hours. Verity had prepared the boiler and secured the water barrels and salted the meat and made enough hydrogen to buoy the balloons for days, and still she waited for him. “You’d better not have writer’s cramp. You’ve a boiler to stoke, Dickens.”

“Has the wind changed, then?” he hollered.

“Changed and sick of waiting for you.”

A clatter and a growl emerged from her cabin, and he appeared from beneath the steps looking trim and handsome in his waistcoat. He rolled up his shirtsleeves. “A hundred million years and still I get no peace. That’s women for you.”

Fists on hips, she glared playfully at him. “If it’s peace you’re after, I can arrange a lasting one. Now haul your backside to the engine room, Marquess.”

“Yes, ma’am. And may I have permission to see you in your cabin later?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what kind of stoking you have in mind.” She blew him a kiss. He caught it and held it against his heart.

When they were airborne, Embrey returned to the quarterdeck wheel and, hand in hand, they both steered the ship ahead of the wind, away from London-that-was, perhaps for the last time. Geyser clouds shrouded the way east, but without the weight of a diving bell and a crew, the Empress quickly rose higher than she’d ever climbed before.

“Quatermain would be proud.” Embrey treated her to a slow, tender kiss that lifted her heavenward. “Although…he never liked to fly.”

“And you?”

His grin eased to a gentle smile, and he gazed reflectively at the horizon. “Didn’t you know? I was high-born to start with.”

She snuggled up to him while they watched the clouds sail by.

“He’s the key to it all, Agnes. I think he always was-the loss of his wife and son turned him against everything and everyone. We’ve seen it time and again, greatness lying dormant until a person is visited by profound adversity. Nothing rouses creativity like a personal challenge. In his case, a challenge from Fate unlocked some deep, miraculous vault in his brain. He may have done it for love or for hate, or for the thing that drives all men to trample his fellow men.”

“What’s that?”

“Power. The power mankind has sought ever since it first began to question its limitations. The power we are destined, ultimately, to achieve, if we survive that long without destroying ourselves. At the moment, God alone possesses it, and we are but the dazzled viewers glimpsing it through His heavenly nickelodeon.”

“Blasphemy!”

“No, Agnes. I don’t believe that. No, I see it as blasphemy to deny man his rightful ascendancy. If the Leviacra stand for anything, it is for the limitlessness of our potential. God himself made us this way, with the gift of evolution. He wants us to rise above our antecedents until we are subject to no law or force beyond our control. We may have only glimpsed the vastness of that potential so far, but I firmly believe we are close to filling that glimpse with an entirely new perception of how the universe works, the way the slenderest beam of light might shine through a crack into an untouched sanctum, illuming little but hinting at immeasurable opportunity. Reardon has lit the torch, Agnes. He must join our ranks, but he must never-”

On the far side of his grogginess, the sound of a key fiddling in its lock suddenly confirmed what Cecil had been wrestling with. He had not died. He was not dead. The notion peeled away several layers of mental skin he’d grown during a forever sleep. How long had he been out? He was too weak to open his eyes. But the voices he’d been listening to in his dream were not from a dream after all. Agnes? Agnes Polperro? Was that harpy standing over him right now, with someone, a high-up in the Council?

“Is he-” Another familiar, male voice began.

“You know, I think he just might be!” The garrulous man kept his reply to a vociferous whisper, but Cecil’s hearing was uncommonly acute, a phenomenon often experienced by those who wake after sleeping for long periods. “Stay with him, Wallingford. As soon as he’s lucid, reassure him. Confide in him. You and Agnes have my full confidence.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man who’d just entered.

“Thank you, sir,” said Miss Polperro.

Quiet footsteps across what sounded like linoleum. The key in the lock. More whispering, this time impossible to discern. Lorne Wallingford, government minister, member of the Whig cabinet? Agnes Polperro, Leviacrum representative, bitch responsible for banishing Embrey and Verity to prehistory? The man who’d just left had spoken like one of those uppity university bods, part scientist, part philosopher, all windbag. But anyone in a position to delegate to Wallingford had serious clout. This had to be somewhere away from public scrutiny, most likely inside the Leviacrum tower itself. Perhaps the infirmary floor.

“Professor Reardon?”

He rolled his head on the pillow, swallowed repeatedly until the saliva gave his dry, flaky throat some semblance of lubrication. The unpleasant metallic taste almost made him retch. He moved his fingers, then the toes in his left foot. His right foot…didn’t respond. He yawned, mashed his eyes closed before opening them with tender, jittery blinks. It took minutes for them to become accustomed to the medium light in the infirmary ward. An empty ward-his was the only bed, and but for handsome landscape paintings adorning the pale blue walls it was a bare, depressing room, far too big for its current one-patient function. He felt marooned somehow, left behind by all that was good in the world. Then a prick of self-importance tickled him, and he recalled the almost reverential manner in which the mysterious overseer had spoken of him to Agnes Polperro.

Yes, he had something they wanted. Wanted badly. The secret to large-scale time travel-a bargaining chip he might use to procure all sorts of things. And then there were his friends…

What happened to Billy? Tangeni? The others? Did they make it to Tromso?