Robert Appleton - Prehistoric Clock

Time travel.

As a concept, it was quickly out of the regular man’s grasp.

But it was here now, a force as real as gravity, and he’d better start getting to grips with it if he had any hope of solving this shocking turn of events.

Was this a freak accident? Or had someone, somewhere managed to deduce the physical science behind time travel, that elusive action hitherto confined to dreams and the recalling of memories? Someone from the Leviacrum? The lilac explosion had mushroomed from the riverside factory. Was that some secret test facility licenced by the Council? And this horrific transplanting of Westminster and Whitehall was the collateral damage from some official experiment gone awry? This reeked of Leviacrum scientific meddling. Umpteen airship crashes over the years had been traced back to their reckless prototype innovations, including the big crash of ’98, which had partly demolished Buckingham Palace. Then there was the lunar rocket debacle of ’03; seven crewmen had died at take-off because components of the propulsion system had been replaced at the last minute without sufficient testing. Imprudence and ambition, never the jolliest of bedfellows, were the Leviacrum’s overriding legacy. The Council was so bent on its own pre-eminence, nothing and no one could ever be permitted to steal its thunder.

Yes, they gambled, often at great cost. He shuddered as the mist’s unseasonal tinge, something akin to freshly cut grass, pervaded his nostrils.

Steal their thunder? Thunder… If he was right, he and any other survivors here were orphans of the storm-a temporal storm-cast away into the mist of time. He knew he should be furious, but as yet there was nothing on which to vent his fury, no villain, no certain origin of this disaster. For now, the poor lad in his charge was all that mattered.

He spied a group of bedraggled survivors huddled together in the middle of Parliament Street. Two women and about a dozen men. One of the women thumped her fist on her palm and barked like a riled headmistress. She barely seemed to notice him pass and nor was he in the mood to engage a sergeant-major in petticoats.

Bemused middle-aged and elderly gentlemen began filing out of the gentlemen’s club, one or two putting their top hats on as though ready for a carefree promenade walk in the bright sunshine. One man with exceptionally large silver sideburns staggered drunkenly off the kerb, but he was not drunk, at least not only drunk-blood gushed from his knee. His colleagues carried him back inside. One of them claimed to be a doctor.

At the far end of the road, where London ended half way along Whitehall, a steam-powered car had wrapped around a lamp post. Embrey could see no sign of the driver and he assumed the flash flood had swept him away onto the grassland to the west.

“Is anybody out there? Anybody alive?” he yelled repeatedly to the smashed factories to his right and the quaglike plain to his left. The general dimensions of the phenomenon appeared to be circular-the perimeter curvature had cut through buildings, roads and river alike. It had sliced the back off Big Ben, bisected a Whitehall terrace, and piled a significant volume of Thames water against the interloping escarpment, precipitating the flood. The cool air of storm-battered London would have been sucked beneath this new, warmer air, dragging the airship down with it.

He veered toward a faint reply from high up in the first, least damaged factory. It was a man’s voice. But as Embrey waded along a flooded pathway leading behind the terraced buildings of Parliament Street toward the railway track, he frowned. The factory he was making for, if his theory proved correct, would be the central location of the displacement-the phenomenon’s epicentre.

A shortish, slightly overweight, middle-aged fellow waving a maroon dinner jacket splashed his way through the flooded foyer entrance. He didn’t appear to be hurt. His shock of silver hair resembled an upended, petrified mop and emphasized his thin, square-jawed face and receding hairline.

“What happened out here?” A note of concern, rather than shock, sharpened the man’s bass voice. “How big was the radius? Is anyone hurt? Good Lord, the burst was massive.”

“I’d say roughly a square quarter of a mile,” Embrey replied. “Whatever it was, it ripped the heart out of London. Some are dead. I’m on my way to find survivors.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll come with you. A quarter mile-my word! The ionization spread like wildfire. It must have been the storm. Water is conducive to ionised psammeticum-however else could the blast have reached so far but through the raindrops? They were charged before the explosion.”

Radius? Ionization? Raindrops? “Who are you, sir? What do you know about all this?”

As though the question had defused his mania, the man stopped, his gaze frozen on the little boy. He offered his hand to Embrey. “Cecil Reardon. Unwitting architect of this fiasco, I’m afraid. I’ll explain everything later. But first, we must do what we can.”

So he’s the reckless…

“Lord Garrett Embrey. Considering which way best to murder you, you pompous son of a bitch!” With his free hand, he drew his steam-pistol and thrust it in Reardon’s white face. “Do you realize what you’ve done? This is Leviacrum work, isn’t it? Those evil-”

“No, old boy. It is most assuredly not.” Reardon neither flinched nor batted an eyelid at the eight inches of brass trained on his temple. His calm words unnerved Embrey. “I meant no harm to anyone, and I mean none now. This was all an accident beyond my control.”

“Time travel? What madness-”

“Mine and mine alone. And God willing, if my machine has not suffered too much damage, this madness may yet be undone. Embrey-” the lunatic lowered the barrel with his finger, “-this can wait. Let us help the injured.”

Clearly mad-he didn’t seem fazed by the weapon or the cataclysmic events around him-Reardon also had to be the most disarming fellow Embrey had ever met. Pomp without passion, reserve without fear, manners without guile. It was as though he’d jettisoned all but the most skeletal qualities of what made an English gentleman and then spread his own persona thin over the emptiness inside. The result was distant but oddly endearing. Embrey reckoned that if he didn’t owe the man a bullet, he might grow to like Reardon. At the very least, the fellow had kept a cool head, and that was nothing to sneeze at in such a dire situation.

“Come with me.” Embrey holstered his pistol and began picking his way through the fallen bricks at the north side of the factory. “And by the way, you managed to bring down an airship,” he shot back. “I seriously doubt you can undo that. ”

“Doubt needs no blusher-” Reardon tripped but kept his balance, “-to leave the race red-faced.”

Embrey rolled his eyes and fingered his holster. Don’t tempt me, lunatic.

White steam columned from the ruined eastern portion of Reardon’s factory. The area grew hot as they clambered over the collapsed bricks and girders. “This section was a steelworks.” Reardon shielded his face from the heat. “It adjoins a larger set-up in the next building. I tell you, the steam cloud-it almost cooked me when the floodwater hit the molten steel. You’ve never heard a racket like it.”

“What exactly do you do, Reardon?” Embrey spied several dark-skinned men busying about the airship’s deck. The vessel had to have flown in from Africa.

“I own a few industrial properties in London, one in Liverpool.” The man caught up and tossed his dinner jacket around the boy. “There. That’ll help keep him dry.”

Embrey removed it, handed it back. “The sun will dry him quickest.”

White, stencilled letters on the iron airship’s bow read Empress Matilda. One of the massive twin balloons flew well enough but its sister bobbed low on its rigging, perhaps suffering a slow puncture. The vessel itself lay beached in the mud, a section of the stone embankment having collapsed onto its starboard side, pinning it down. It would not be difficult to free, however. With a little elbow grease and provided the crew could repair and refill the sagging envelope, the airship should be able to fly again.