Robert Appleton: Prehistoric Clock

He carefully cycled through his spectrometer lenses, cursing his luck whenever one failed to produce the result he pined for. He was ready to rush inside his quarters and retrieve an oil lamp, start waving that to at least let his friends know he’d understood the telegram when, through his penultimate lens, the ocular Cavendish, he caught a blinding flash.

“Oh my God, of course! They’re speaking the language of my machine-psammeticum refraction!”

It was indeed Morse Code, emitted with clarity and precision. They repeated the entire message twice more.

Professor, all is well. Hope you like your new leg. Billy, Tangeni and friends are safe with me. Have made tremendous progress with your temporal differentiator. Working on plan to rescue you. Difficult though. Spies are everywhere. Will return here at same time once a week. Hold tight. Wave if you understand. Sorensen.

He didn’t wave right away. He wanted to prolong this wonderful moment-an illicit communication for his eyes only, from friends willing to brave the wrath of the Council itself. True friends. When he finally did wave, the two figures standing against the bulwark responded in kind.

As he watched the ship leave, a rousing warmth in the pit of his stomach rose to his throat and his eyes and ears, drawing glad tears. His heart lifted and remained afloat for hours. He barely ate that day and all the next. And despite the enormous responsibilities and the world-altering disclosures heaped upon him by the Council, the only thing he truly cared about that week was obtaining two coloured counters and a single die.

He and Billy had a game to play. Snakes and Ladders. As when he’d waited indefinitely atop the rickety walkway above his great machine, Cecil was back to rolling his figurative die, hoping for an intervention. This time, it was not only Lisa and Edmond he must save but Verity and Embrey too.

He opened the board and set the pieces onto square one. The ups and downs were all ahead of him once more, but at least during this wait, he was not alone.

A small house spider scurried across the board, raising a smirk on Cecil’s lips. So miracles do happen.

He considered how the game might end, if indeed it could ever end once it had begun. “Well, here goes.” He slid the red counter forward.

He checked the telegram. The lad had just rolled a five…

To whomever braves time to find this,

Come and seek us out! At the attached coordinates, you will discover the ruins of the only land-based Leviacrum tower left standing on this continent. We explore constantly, but that edifice is the closest we have to a home in prehistory. Yet it is not sufficient to keep us safe. The deadly creatures that reign over the outside world have made it imperative for us to delve underground, into the stupendous network of manmade tunnels fanning out from those coordinates. There is evidence of a technologically advanced civilization we believe may still exist deep within the bowels of this prehistoric realm. Might it hold the key to our salvation, to our return through time? Though we have unearthed a few of its secrets, we know not how or why it came to exist so far back in time. Even as I write this letter, the great towers rust and crumble. They will one day pass out of all human knowledge unless time is breached again and the breacher returns home. I therefore bequeath this mystery to you, dear traveller, in the event of our death. For we are captives here, driven beneath this vast, unconquered wilderness red in tooth and claw.

I am Lord Garrett Embrey, exile from the year 1908. Two years have passed since Professor Cecil Reardon, inventor of time travel, disappeared through time with two dozen others. We know nothing of their fates. Of the original survivors of our freak time jump, only I and one other remain. She is Verity Champlain, Captain of the Gannet airship, Empress Matilda, and I love her with all my heart. That she returns those feelings is the solace that sustains me.

I am securing this letter to the base of Big Ben in hope rather than expectation. We shall not return. Verity and I left these ruins because the area is too dangerous, but I suspect an errant time traveller would not happen upon this specific age by chance, and would therefore already know of the disappearance of Westminster. Let this be the start of your quest, then, dear traveller, and may we meet soon.

Be wary of the sound of thunder: the giant baryonyx roam these coasts; of sudden shadows: look up to the Hatzegopteryx, cruel kings of the skies; and venture across the lakes at your peril. As the decrepit Leviacrum towers illustrate, dinosaurs and man can never co-exist. Perhaps our erstwhile enemy, Agnes Polperro, was right and Nature only suffers interlopers-in time, in fate, in the food chain-temporarily before expelling them in its own subtle ways. Sooner or later, if Nature is governed by balance, the ebb and flow of time may swallow all man’s attempts to change its course.

Our airship’s next flight will be its last, as we have almost exhausted the hydrogen reserves. Verity and I will soon begin our next great adventure. For today, as the sun reached its zenith, we joined hands at the foot of Big Ben, a hallowed place where twentieth century grass still grows and time no longer chimes. While the sun’s corona haloed the clock, we turned our faces toward heaven and plighted our troth beneath the eyes of God.

We live during the infancy of flowers, and she is my rose, the first and only one I shall ever love. We are without flag, without country, without sure means of survival. But we have each other, and that is more than enough.

What lies in store for us, I wonder.

Hopefully,

Garrett R. J. Embrey

Verity M. Embrey

1916

The howl of the wind outside his single porthole window kept Cecil awake, but barely. The days had grown long, interminable over the past several months without word from outside. Even the meagre telegrams that had arrived with clockwork regularity for many years, each containing but one number-the result of Billy’s die roll for their epic games of Snakes and Ladders-had ceased. At least in his old quarters he’d been able to gaze out across London from his balcony, to pretend he was still a part of the world below. Here, on the 112^th floor, he was nothing but a rusty old cog in the monotonous grind of a soulless machine.

His bushy beard was silver-white and reached down to his chest. His sore fingers, the prints worn away by too many cuts and abrasions during his obsessive fiddling with sharp edges and brittle lenses, hurt all day until he rested them in bed under his pillow. He slept more and more these days. No one seemed to complain, though, as his sharpness in the lab had long begun to wane. Truth be told, the scraps he’d fed the Council during his first few years spent in the tower, and his utter failure to reproduce his great machine-a deliberate failure-had relegated him to a kind of twilight position within the establishment. They treated him with benign neglect, neither resisting nor rewarding his small breakthroughs in other fields, despite his continued propensity for hard work.

It was genius they wanted-time travel or nothing-and he had let them down.

He’d slept peacefully each and every night with that knowledge.

The shadowy walls of his quarters slithered to life as he conjured, bittersweetly, his great adventure in prehistory. Airships swooped amid flying reptiles, diving bells plumbed the depths of a sea teeming with monstrous creatures, his friends fought with him and for him against impossible odds, and he grew to love them over time.

Ah, would that I were a young man again. I’d never go near a blasted laboratory. The world outside is much too interesting as it is. Am I right, Lisa? Am I right, Edmond?