Prehistoric Clock

by Robert Appleton

  No response. Still the Thames water trickled in, and Embrey raised his mouth another inch, barely above it. “You sell ice creams with your father? Well, my daughter loves ice creams. If you don’t fetch my gun right now, she’s never going to see me again. Son, I’m going to die. I’ve got one breath left. If you don’t help me by the time it runs out, I’ll be dead. And you’ll have—” No, he couldn’t lay that on the boy. “Look at me, son. Look—”

  His elbow slipped and he went under before he’d saved a breath. Oh, Christ, please don’t let this be the end. I’m not ready—

  A deep rumble, dark slipstreams and the rush of bubbles up his nostrils answered his prayer. The boy rummaged frantically underwater. His boots whacked Embrey’s chin again and again, making him grimace. Embrey knew his lungs held reserves of oxygen beyond his brain’s estimation, but not much. On the verge of panic, he shut his eyes and focused on the reflection he’d seen in the painting earlier that evening. He was the son of a proud and noble family. He had his mother’s looks and his father’s stubborn resolve. The might of the empire wanted him dead but…the young son of an ice-cream seller would get to make that call. A broiling anti-breath choked him from inside. It thickened like soot clogging a chimney. The bitter temptation to breathe water for the first time since the womb subsumed him and spread wide. He gave a silent scream.

  A muffled thud answered.

  The water emptied from the car in moments as if it had been sucked out. Embrey gasped for life and found that he could move freely. The shattered window had released the twisted dash from his hip. He coughed until his heart burned, then he slowly crawled free from the wreckage.

  It was a brilliant summer’s day…in a world he no longer recognised.

  The boy scampered out after him, thrusting the steam-pistol hither and thither as ungodly sounds haunted the derelict remains of Whitehall and Westminster. Embrey pried the gun from the lad’s hands, scooped him up and held him tight. “I’ve got you, chief. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. It’s all over now. We’re safe, you and I. Safe as can be.” The boy clung to his neck, sobbing.

  They were standing at the epicentre of a cataclysmic event. For roughly two hundred yards ahead and to his left, London appeared more or less as it should be, geographically. Westminster station house, the gentleman’s club behind that, the row of factories lining Victoria Embankment—all had partially collapsed but were at least recognisable. Behind him to the south, across Bridge Street, filthy Thames water swamped Speaker’s Green at the foot of Big Ben, while the rear section of the clock tower itself appeared to be missing! Its roof and spire had crumbled away and it was a miracle the edifice stood at all. Worse still, Westminster Palace had vanished completely. In its place, a fifty-foot-wide gorge swallowed the last of the Thames-that-was.

  To his right, Westminster Pier and a fraction of Westminster Bridge were raised against a shallow rocky escarpment. A crashed airship lay listed to one side against Victoria Embankment, its two giant blue, bullet-shaped balloons trying to tug it upright. Beyond the bounds of this city slice, grassland and a peculiar forest formed a kind of circumjacent barrier, about three miles in diameter, from the rest of the world. The only gap in the tree line occurred beyond the airship to the northeast, where the escarpment fell away to a sloping valley. As his nostrils cleared, Embrey reckoned he could smell a strange sea air.

  He put the boy down while he took off his tail coat and threw it over the poor driver’s lacerated body. The lad shouldn’t have to see that. He hooked his arm around the youngster as they walked back toward Bridge Street, where a half dozen policeman and horses—his pursuers—lay crushed under rubble from the collapsed station house wall. Distant shouts and screams seemed to be coming from the ruins beyond. Though his brow and hip were cut and his clothes sopping, there might be others in far worse shape, trapped, in need of rescue. He would do all he could.

  “W-where are we?” the boy murmured.

  “I don’t know, chief. I just…don’t know. But wherever it is, it ain’t quite London.”

  While he traversed Bridge Street, wandering through a mist no doubt caused by the sudden meeting of cold and warm air from different times, theories explaining this startling phenomenon jostled in his mind. Rumblings of advanced science, no, meta-science being enacted in the Leviacrum tower had been rife since he was a boy. Scaremongering, he’d always thought. The tabloids and penny dreadfuls had so exhaustively exploited those rumours for ghoulish readers that the ideas themselves—reanimating corpses, the hybridization of man and animal species, eternal youth, invisibility—had long become jaded urban myths. No one took them for real any more than they did the gods of Mount Olympus.

  Yet, at least one of them had just reached forth from the margins of cheap fiction and, without warning, smote the doubting heart of London.

  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, d
ragging 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.

  “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, old boy, then yes, we ought to have ourselves a nice little surveillance bird before long.” Reardon retrieved a pipe from his breast pocket and began filling it. “Anything they lack, we will undoubtedly find here in the factories.”

  “If it ain’t all wrecked,” the boy argued in a broad Lancashire brogue. Embrey kept a reassuring hand on the youngster’s shoulder.

  “Sharp lad. You’ll go far,” the professor said. But that notion made Embrey shiver coldly. Unless they could reverse this awful happening, neither the youngster nor anyone else in fractured London would be going far at all. At least not in society. Perhaps…in lieu of an official criminal sentence, some malign supernatural force had incarcerated Embrey here instead, a place so remote that no telegram or ship-in-a-bottle might ever reach another soul.

  His face ached from an incessant scowl. He adopted his severest tone. “Reardon, when is this? How far have you flung us, and in which direction?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Good God, man. How can we find out?”

  “With observation and deduction.”

  “And you’re certain you can undo this thing?”

  “Not certain, no, but my machine will have stopped on the last differential sequence. It might not have located 1901, but I have finally found the chronometric settings to enable large scale time travel. My dear Embrey, this is, however heinous the pun, a watershed event for science. Many have died, yes, but consider the import of this misstep. I have conquered time, and without the Leviacrum’s meddling. We have done this ourselves, myself and those before me upon whose work I owe a debt. This is—”

  “Before you start polishing your laurels, professor, I must remind you that we are survivors, not pioneers. These people will not consider themselves privileged—however you spin it—and nor do I. So tread softly, sir. For the love of God, tread softly. If anything should happen to you, we’ll be stuck here.” Embrey glanced behind him. “And Big Ben will never strike again. You understand?”

  “Completely, old boy. I shan’t break the news until things have settled.”

  “See to it.”

  The African aeronauts lowered a steel ladder for Embrey and his companions to climb on deck. It was a fairly big ship, about a-hundred-and-twenty feet long, with large metal tail fins mounted on each of the four rudder propellers at the stern. A diligent, athletic officer who introduced himself as Tangeni gave the orders. Personnel to and froed between the central, arched-fore-to-aft storehouse and a makeshift hospital area at the bow. Over a dozen men and women in blue British Air Corps uniforms were being treated for injuries. Among them, unconscious on a generous bed of windproof jackets, lay a striking redhead. She was Caucasian, around twenty-five and wore a midshipman’s uniform. Her damp strawberry hair, cropped to little more than a bob, made her look somewhat tomboyish, and the baggy clothes certainly didn’t do her figure any favours.

  Embrey cocked his head to one side as he gazed at her, and asked Tangeni, “Who is she?”

  “Who? Eembu? She is captain of the Empress Matilda. Everyone on board owes his life to her. She and I, we make promise to eat ice creams on Piccadilly after the storm. That was�
�before God stepped in.”

  “Captain, eh?” He’d never have guessed it. Eembu more resembled a stowaway cabin girl than a Gannet skipper.

  “What are your names, gentlemen?” Tangeni removed his tunic and shirt, revealing a wiry, muscular body bearing many scars. He splashed his face with fresh water from the drinking cask.

  “I am Lord Garrett Embrey, this fellow is Cecil Reardon, Professor, and our young friend here—well, I don’t believe I heard—”

  “Billy Ransdell.”

  Embrey smiled to himself and ruffled the lad’s hair.

  “Any of you know what happened?” Tangeni asked.

  “As much as you, I’m afraid, old boy.” Embrey had always had a strong poker face, and he put it to good use under the African’s scrutiny.

  Tangeni nodded, threw Billy a wink and then motioned across the deck. “You must stay aboard the Empress, of course. From what I see, it is the safest place in London.” He tossed one of his crewmen a length of cable. “Until Eembu wakes, I am in charge and you are my guests. But she is not badly injured.”

  “And when she wakes?” Reardon asked.

  The acting skipper shrugged.

  “We understand.” Embrey offered his hand and Tangeni shook it firmly. “Thank you for your hospitality. Where might we find something to eat? I heard Billy’s stomach rumble a moment ago.”

  “On the deck below. Ask for Djimon. Tell him you are friends of Tangeni.”

  “Much obliged. Oh, and one more thing—” Embrey eyed the intriguing redhead again, “—what does Eembu mean?”