Robert Appleton: Prehistoric Clock

She grinned cruelly. “You mean like trying to conquer fate in order to bring back one’s deceased wife and son?”

Cecil’s blood flamed. He jabbed a forefinger at her. “If you ever mention them again, I’ll finish what I started in the factory.” He thrust out his chin and began to rub it tauntingly. “You’d best stay out of my way from now on, Gorgon. I’m warning you.”

“Enough!” Wallingford stepped between them, raised his hands in the manner of a traffic policeman. “I shall make all the arrangements you asked for, Professor. In the meantime, are you satisfied with our disclosure?”

“For now.”

“Very well. We shall leave you to rest. Good day.” He escorted his chunnering colleague out of the room, quietly berating her.

Cecil knew he’d won a victory. Why not gloat a little? “By the way,” he called after them, “I’d like a full English breakfast, eggs over-easy, plenty of toast. Throw in a couple of hash browns, as well. See to it, will you?”

He laughed at Miss Polperro’s snarl, then lay back against his pillow and surveyed his empty room. He thought of young Billy and Tangeni heading northward to Tromso, and Verity and Embrey wandering the deadly wilds of the Cretaceous, marooned forever unless he could somehow use his newfound influence and figure out how to reach them.

Until then, he could never truly rest, for he would be as much a prisoner as they.

One week later…

An arrowhead formation of geese flying in from the coast reminded Cecil of the first time he’d seen the Hatzegopteryx, high amid the clouds. They’d appeared no bigger than ordinary seabirds.

All life is about perspective, he thought. Dozens of airships littered the sky, and London city below seemed quiet, restful, oblivious.

He pulled the main gear lever on the side of his clockwork knee joint to its zero tension setting, rendering it limp. Reclining on a deck chair on the eighty-first floor balcony outside his quarters, Cecil gave a contented sigh. It was the first sunny day since his incarceration in the tower and he was determined to make the most of it. He put on his spectrometer goggles and set the lenses to medium tint. A cool glass of sarsaparilla perspired on the stool next to him. First he opened yesterday’s morning edition of the Daily First, one of the few newspapers that reported overseas news as thoroughly as events at home. He longed for news of Billy and his African aeronaut friends.

Killer Dinosaur To Be Displayed In London Museum

That front page headline struck him as the closing of a significant chapter in his life. The wild and indomitable baryonyx, master of its own world, was here a showpiece in a museum. Nothing now remained of his terrible adventure except in his mind. He skimmed through the article until he came to:

“…it cut a swathe of destruction across Southern England for three days and nights. The rampaging beast reached as far as Winchester before it was finally shelled by artillery during its slaughter of dozens of men and women engaged in a traditional countryside hunt.

“‘The baryonyx was the apex predator of its time,’ said Miss Agnes Polperro, representative of the Leviacrum Council and one of the few survivors of the Westminster catastrophe. ‘Its brief acquaintance with mankind is smeared with tragedy…for man and beast. It is fitting that everyone be allowed to see this great hunter in its original, ferocious glory, for as we are masters of the twentieth century, so too did he rule over prehistory. He is one of our great predecessors.’”

And yet, Embrey and Verity still had his kind to contend with. Would that Cecil had a second factory all to himself, where he could reproduce his time machine and bring them back post haste. But that secret he must keep indefinitely. The Council was looking over his shoulder at every turn, and they must not gain control of time travel. The five-past-eight phenomenon had already revealed the damage this meta-science, still in its infancy, could wreak upon the natural order of time.

“Professor, these just arrived for you.” His personal assistant handed him a telegram and a slender package about fifteen inches by eight in size.

“Thank you.”

“Can I get you anything else, sir?”

“No thank you. That will be all.”

His assistant nodded and left. Cecil immediately retrieved the telegram from its already-opened envelope-those security stuffed shirts never let anything pass unmolested. The note read,

PROFESSOR R HOPE YOU ARE WELL THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO RESUME OUR LUNCHTIME GAME YOU WERE ON TOP OF BIGGEST LADDER STOP ROLLED FIVE PUTS ME BELOW YOU ON SQUARE DIRECTLY ABOVE THE BROWN SNAKE STOP YOUR TURN PROFESSOR

He leapt up in his seat and ripped the packaging off what had to be a Snakes and Ladders board. “Billy!”

But who had helped the lad send a telegram? Tangeni? Sorensen? This had to be some sort of cryptic message. Yet there was nothing unusual about the squares they’d indicated on the board. He checked the back. The only inscription, made in handwritten silver ink, read, Property of Ebony Eyes Bookstore.

It’s a puzzle. Nothing to do with the actual board itself? All right, then it must be a code of some kind.

He scrutinized each and every word, paying particular attention to those that might appear normal to anyone else but unusual to him. Lunch, biggest ladder, below you, directly above the brown snake, ebony eyes. There were two brown snakes on the board. “The” brown snake had to have some other meaning. A literal one? What might that signify to Billy, Tangeni and himself? Snake? Dinosaur? Brown dinosaur? The baryonyx on display in the British Museum!

Directly above that? He wasn’t allowed outside the tower and they must already know that. Above the museum itself then? That seemed to fit. He was on the tallest ladder-the Leviacrum tower-and they wanted him to look below, to the top of the British museum. Where? The roof? An airship hovering over it?

Excitedly, he pressed the lever in his knee joint to its walking gear, and the clickety-click signalled it was ready. He limped to the edge of the balcony and gazed down, instantly finding the large white-grey building he sought. He twisted the tiny wheels on the sides of his goggles, cycling through the different lenses until he had binocular vision. He adjusted the focus knob minutely, soon gaining a clear view of the museum roof. But there was no airship hovering overhead, and no sign of anyone or anything out of the ordinary atop the structure.

Frustrated, he fetched the telegram and studied it again.

Lunchtime game? It was yet a little after ten in the morning, a couple of hours shy of twelve noon.

He paced about the balcony impatiently, observing the museum roof every few minutes. The two hours seemed to last for days, but during that time he resolved that the handwritten silver name, Ebony Eyes Bookstore, had to be significant. The telegram code had been too intricate, too clever to leave any extraneous information, and the silver lettering stood out on the dark green cardboard backing like moonbeams on a duck pond.

Ebony eyes-dark eyes-sunglasses? Tinted spectrometer goggles?

If they were to send some sort of Morse Code message using flashes of light, one way to disguise it from prying eyes would be to emit light from a different spectrum, one undetectable by human vision. Infrared perhaps? Ultraviolet? He would try every lens in the goggles’ cycle.

Twelve o’clock arrived and his nerves were already shredded with anticipation. He gazed down at the museum roof, fully expecting to see someone crouched atop it.

No one. Nothing. Had he misinterpreted the message?

Directly above the brown snake. He lifted his gaze higher and higher until he spied a small dirigible floating there, its propellers motionless. Several figures manned the deck, two of whom stood facing him against the port bulwark. They were too far away for him to recognise but he swore one of them was dark-skinned. Tangeni?