Prehistoric Clock (18 page)

“Tried and tested or not, it’s repugnant. Not to mention evil.”

“If you can come up with a better way, Professor, be my guest.”

Cecil narrowed his eyes at the little bastard. “Just give me that chance.”

Miss Polperro’s angry scoff only redoubled his grit. “Why not appoint yourself Prime Minister while you’re at it.” She paced to the far wall, chunnering to herself.

“Ha! And thirdly, I want you two to summarize for me, here and now, the grand purpose behind these godforsaken towers that reach for the clouds for no apparent reason.” He glared at Wallingford, who sniffled and checked his pocketwatch. “Is that too much to ask?” He filled those words with as much scorn as he could manage—not as much as he’d hoped, for curiosity had got the better of him. He’d longed to know the answer to this riddle for most of his life. He’d even worked in the tower for many years without having so much as an inkling as to why it had been built in the first place.

Wallingford blinked rapidly, no doubt considering all the angles before formulating his response, as all political creatures are wont to do. “Very well, Professor. A brief summary you shall have. I’m quite certain the other Council members would not begrudge you that
if
you accede to our request.” His sharp glance across to his schoolmarm colleague met with a bitter, resigned shrug.

Well, well. How the tables have turned. It seems I do have the winning hand after all.

“How much do you know of the Atlas comets?” Wallingford asked.

“Little except the name.”
Comets? Whatever next?

“They are three comets of varying mass, whose wide, unusual orbits around our sun occasionally bring them within close proximity to the earth.”

“Yes, I saw a painting once,” Cecil said. “The 1714 comet shower—lit the western sky with brilliant blue sparks for a full day and night.”

“Correct, but do you know what the blue sparks actually were?”

“Hmm, I’ll hazard a guess at highly concentrated psammeticum in either solid or gaseous form.”

“Very good, Professor.” Miss Polperro unhooked the clock from his wall and hurled it against the skirting board, sending clockwork innards and glass smithereens all across the floor. The crash spun Wallingford around. A moment later he began to chuckle, and Miss Polperro grinned at him. Some kind of private joke they shared, one Cecil would rather not be in on.

And she called me mentally unstable!

“Three comets, two imminent encounters with the earth,” she said. Her little colleague bowed in acquiescence to her scientific expertise. “The next encounter, in two years’ time, will be similar to that of 1714. We plan to channel a significant amount of psammeticum directly into the tower, at high altitude. Its gaseous form is diluted in a high oxygen atmosphere, so by the time it reaches the earth’s surface, it has lost much of its potency. By collecting it in a slightly thinner air, we will conserve an enormous amount of psammeticum energy.”

“Yes, I know
that.
The spire receptor has been gathering it for years.”

“Only the cosmic trickle—trifling amounts.”

“So how much are we talking about? These comets you speak of?”

“That’s classified.” She glanced at Wallingford, who merely rolled his eyes. “The comets’ second close pass, in a decade’s time, will shower the earth with approximately five times that amount,” she said. “By then, our towers will be significantly higher, our storage units more sophisticated. We will be able to stockpile an extraordinary volume of psammeticum, approximately a trillion times that which we currently collect from the meagre cosmic trickle. So you see, Professor, why these great edifices reach for the sky.”

He scrubbed his face with weak, aching hands. “Admirable, but why all the secrecy?”

“Why, exclusivity of course. If our enemies got wind of it, they might try to steal our thunder as it were. Or even scupper our operation. No, it is best they think of the Leviacra as eccentric British follies. In a decade’s time, they will learn the truth soon enough. A new age of science will be upon us.”

Such grand ideas and yet Cecil cringed at the thought of anyone wanting to amass that much energy. A volatile thing like psammeticum stored in tanks, sent through pipes like natural gas? The potential for devastation was incalculable. He’d already witnessed its unpredictability during the first time jump. But if that was their intent, at least it wasn’t as sinister as most of the theories he’d heard over the years. At its heart, it was a scientific endeavour—a frightening and megalomaniacal one, but scientific nonetheless. And until he could figure out a way to escape his prison, he would aid them to that end, if only to help make the collection process safer for the men and women working on the project. Scientists all.

“And the towers we found in prehistoric Europe?” He began to fill in the gaps. “A large-scale attempt to harvest some invaluable comet-stuff brouhaha across time?”

“From what we have ascertained through geological study, several pieces of the largest Atlas comet broke off and hit the earth in the early Cretaceous Period. The comets themselves skimmed our atmosphere. The sublimation that occurred filled an entire hemisphere for months. When we first found the collapsed towers, I was as puzzled as you, Professor Reardon. But now it makes perfect sense. We are destined to achieve large-scale time travel, and our future successors in this endeavour will be even more ambitious than we have dreamed.”

“Maybe, but they failed, didn’t they? The towers were empty and decrepit. The dream you speak of seems fraught with more dangers than anyone can predict. Is there such a thing as too much ambition?”

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:

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,

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?

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!”