The Basingstoke Chronicles (4 page)

I had to know more.

The panel was embedded
inside
the wall--a remarkable technology--and its
symbols were as abstract in matter as they were nonsensical. Neither hieroglyphs or any form of
writing I had seen, they had to be responsible for the vessel's locomotion. Of that much I was
certain, partly because there was nothing else, partly because I wished it be so.

Twenty-three symbols lined the panel, side by side. Each was unique, yet all remained
elusive as though on the bed of a pond. Above and below these pictorials were smaller crescent
shapes, identical except for the ones above being concave and the ones below being convex. It
seems absurd now but at the time it made perfect sense--the sequence appeared so elementary and
I reckoned a little experimenting would soon capture me this enigma. In my haste, or perhaps in
the off-putting torchlight, I quite overlooked the fact that one of the symbols was lit more
brightly than the rest.

The fifth symbol from the right caught my attention instead. It closely resembled the
tentacles I had seen affixed to the roof. What arrogance made me match our own methods of
propulsion with this utterly alien discovery I can only guess. My excuse, I suppose, is that
caution is often thwarted by moments of exuberance. In any event, I pressed the concave shape
above
--to take me up to the surface.

A slight yet noticeable vibration tickled my feet through the rubber flippers.

Ah...movement!

After a few seconds, the turquoise interior began to fluctuate in tone, darkening and then
returning to its normal shade in uneven spurts. The commotion lasted no longer than a dozen
seconds.

Though curious to learn what I had achieved, I caught a glimpse of my wrist watch. Only
a few minutes of oxygen remained. Scrambling through the keel hole, I was disappointed to find
the vessel had not budged.

After all that,
I thought, noting the exact geographical whereabouts of my
discovery, even though I could again no longer see it. I vowed to return immediately with a fresh
cylinder. The excitement grew to a nervous energy as I approached the surface.

Right! Sam, Ethel and Rodrigo I can trust, but no one else is getting their paws on
this. I'll kill them first. We have to keep it under wraps, literally.

On the surface, I removed my mouthpiece to breathe freely once again. The air was
crisp and the sun less intense, as though a spot of inclement weather was approaching. The
Moncado
and the
Aquitaine
floated side by side a hundred yards away.

Maybe they've found something too,
I thought, relishing the opportunity to
compare our mornings of discovery. In a matter of minutes, I reached Rodrigo's yacht and
climbed aboard, but had to wait a good twenty minutes on deck for him to re-surface. He paused
as he noticed me, before hurtling up the steel ladder and almost wrenching his mask from his
head in excitement.

"Jesus, Baz, you sonofabitch. We thought you were dead!"

"Well, I did cut it a little fine, I have to admit. Just a minute or so left."

"A minute or so? What the hell are you talking about?" he snapped. "You've been
missing for over a week!"

How
can
one understand time travel? I had skipped over eight rotations of the
earth. An entire week of my life that should have been, never was. Not in the sense of being
unconscious. That would have at least included me in the chaos equation--an entity both acting
upon and being acted upon by the laws of physics. No, I had been whisked away from those
mechanics. A bystander to a cruelly accelerated world. And nothing could atone for that time
stolen away.

Missing for over a week.

Rodrigo chose not to follow up his statement. He stared instead, no doubt waiting for an
explanation that he felt I owed him, one that I, too, waited for. The moment was excruciating. I
was the butt of an awful, temporal joke.

As I stuttered through my telling of the events that now spun like an out-of-control
whirligig, familiar objects aboard the
Moncado
blurred in and out of
déjà vu
. Where had I been for the last eight days? Had I lost or gained
through the anomaly? If so, what had I gained or lost? Is time a fabric man was not meant to
fashion?

Rodrigo's scowl of concentration furrowed his brow.

"Well, say something, man!" I insisted.

"It's not that I don't believe your story, Baz, it's just... Well, I can't quite swallow what
happened at the beginning, or the end, or any other part for that matter. I mean,
Jesus
,
what do you expect?"

That
Rodrigo
, the ultimate yarn-spinner in bars and hotel lounges across Cuba,
had resisted my account, was enough to leave me doubting even the spin of the earth. But like an
innocent man about to suffer an interminable incarceration, I clung to my story while all else
crumbled about me. Common sense was on his side; far-fetched logic on mine.

"All right, how else could I have survived for so long underwater without gills or some
secret stash of oxygen? Why would I want to? Is it
that
hard to believe, considering the
reason we came here in the first place? A nine thousand year old fabric, woven a few years ago?
Do the math!"

"But a
time machine
, Baz!" He groaned.

And who can blame him? I would almost certainly have mocked such an explanation if
the roles had been reversed. He had every right to laugh it off.

As I was about to suggest the only sure method of persuasion available to me--actually
taking him down to see the blasted thing, first hand--a sweet, soaring voice interrupted. "Henry?
Henry!
"

Ethel scrambled up the metal ladder and made her way toward me, the deck awash in her
wake. Without removing a single item of scuba gear, she threw her arms around me. I tried
desperately to imagine the re-union from her perspective -a close friend thought lost to the deep
suddenly appearing after so long--but to no avail. We had been apart only a matter of hours. My
perception could not bend from that experience.

"You've no miracles left any more, Henry Basingstoke," she whispered. "This was the
last one. So tell me, what unbelievable tale is waiting for me to believe?"

I badly needed her reassurance. Slowly, as the streams of water from her hair and wetsuit
eased to heavy trickles, a strange syntax formed in my mind, as though the drips inked blank
pages of my memory in the pools about our feet. I looked at the phenomenon matter-of-factly.
Ethel
wanted
to believe. I was not alone in this, and nor was it beyond
my
capacity to believe.

"You might want to get changed," I replied, softly, "before I answer that question."

Sam and Dumitrescu surfaced soon after Ethel. Needless to say, they were stunned. The
Romanian had intended to rendezvous with us all a few days earlier, and when he had arrived to
news of my disappearance, he insisted the original search go on. Rodrigo later told me how Sam
and Ethel had wanted to return home, only for Dumitrescu to persuade them otherwise. All four
had taken turns diving together.

"He would have wanted you to see it through, to solve the mystery for him," the
Romanian had insisted on my behalf.

The expedition had thus become a two-fold search in my absence, my friends keeping
one eye open for the supposed sunken boat, the other for signs of what had become of me.
Rodrigo had wanted to recover my body if at all possible. After the chances of me being found
alive on the surface were exhausted to the satisfaction of the Coast Guard rescue team, my friends
had taken it upon themselves to organize their own underwater search radius. My return was in
the nick of time, too. They had nearly completed the full circle.

Grey clouds gathered overhead in the forty minutes it took for everyone to assemble and
hear out my tale. The atmosphere below deck was mercurial; fingers of the impending storm
inched coldly over us. We sat around the
Moncado's
fixed wooden dining table, each
pondering, in his or her own way, the possibilities of this mystery.

At least there was no feasible theory with which they could contradict my story.

"You say the cycle of this thing lasted only a few seconds?" asked Sam.

"No more than a dozen," I replied. "The light and dark pulses must have been night
flickering to day and vice-versa, at tremendous velocity."

"If
that
button reduces a week to mere seconds, imagine what the others can
do?" Ethel said.

Sam was now animated. "Exactly! Maybe it's an incremental scale--minutes, days, years,
thousands of years. I'm betting the functions above and below the symbols are like you supposed,
Henry, only for forward and reverse in the truest sense--through time. At least, that's how I might
design such a display."

"Makes perfect sense to me," said Dumitrescu.

"Me too," agreed Ethel. "I'm just glad you didn't wind up nine thousand years from now,
or nine thousand years ago, for that matter."

The Romanian seized that thread of logic. "Yes, what if the settings are still configured
for that duration of time? All you would need to do is press reverse for the appropriate symbol.
The entire mystery would then be yours to unmask."

"Unmask in the sense of having your face burned off, you mean," Rodrigo replied.
"Don't forget, the body you found was a wreck, burned to hell on one side. Right, Baz?"

I had to agree with my Cuban friend. "Whatever he traveled nine thousand years to
escape from isn't exactly something I'd turn the clocks back for."

"I think what he's trying to say is,
you first!
And don't forget to pack that
fifty-dollar sun block while you're at it," added Ethel, patting the Romanian's head. He seemed to
appreciate that in-joke between them and chuckled to himself. She squeezed past us on her way
to the kitchen, where she assembled various plates and pans for an early dinner.

"Keep going, lads," she said. "I'm still listening."

We heard the rain thrash the deck above us. I reached over to Rodrigo's drinks cabinet to
pilfer a re-fill of whisky for my hipflask. An unusual Scandinavian brand caught my eye.

"OK, let's assume this thing can do everything you say--skim over hundreds of years like
a pebble on a pond--what are we really talking about here? When you say
time
, what
forces are we really dealing with?"

Everyone looked across at Rodrigo. He had just kicked the conversation up a notch. For
my own part, having witnessed personally the effects of this so-called skimming across time, and
having had a little time to contemplate, I felt confident to answer first, even if I was in the middle
of a delicate pouring operation between bottle and flask.

"I've never had cause to think on it before today, but look: days, minutes, years, seconds,
millennia. They strike me as somewhat artificial. We've invented them as a means of measuring
evolution, right? The evolution of all things? The universe from beginning to end? Well, where
else in the cosmos is change broken down into such neat increments? All right, the earth revolves
round the sun, and the earth spins on its axis. But why
twenty-four
hours, why
sixty
minutes, over and over again, incrementally? We seem to be attuned to this idea of moving
forward through some kind of irrevocable destiny, from left to right along linear time. In my
mind, this simply isn't true. I say time, as a separate entity, has no more bearing on our lives than
any other abstraction we can conjure.

"When a change takes place--say a rock falls without warning from a cliff and starts a
landslide--we can accredit it to God, or fate,
or
we can say it was the net result of one or
more physical forces acting upon it. Cause and effect, action and reaction. Now, if science can
prove these exertions, where does that leave time in the equation? If time is a force unto itself,
and everything under its jurisdiction is bound to move forward regardless, then which is
responsible for the landslide: physical nature or time? If natural forces hadn't conspired to shift
the rock, would time have intervened, supernaturally, in order to ensure its inevitable course? No,
it wouldn't.

"Once you get past the idea that time is set apart as a force above and beyond the
physical universe, our awe of it dissolves to a degree, I think. And that it must be tied to causality
in some way--as I've said, action and reaction--suggests we're dealing with nothing but the forces
of nature set in motion. Therefore, as well as the universe acting upon us, our every choice, in
turn, manipulates the universe to some degree. What is time? Intrinsic. There in every action,
residual in every reaction. It's embedded in the fabric of cause and effect--the stabilizing factor, if
you will."

I finished there to take a small sip of whisky, quite pleased with my newfangled
philosophy.

"Sorry, Baz, you lost me at the landslide. Correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like you're
saying time is some kind of gravity, holding the dimensions in place. And that it
can
be
manipulated, physically, if you know how to find it. That it might be a preternatural force to us,
but it's one that scientists in the future will be able to measure using a pencil and a slide-rule. To
them, it will be elementary."

"You heard me right, Rodrigo," I affirmed. "Maybe not
that
easy to manipulate,
but I get what you mean. Most science fiction is science pending. I don't think any of this is going
to help us understand time travel, but at least it brings the concept down from its lofty perch a
tad."

"It's a better explanation than mine would have been," said Dumitrescu.

"But?" I sensed he was holding something back.

"Well, it's just that you're trying to put your finger on a pulse that has so far eluded the
world's greatest scientists and philosophers. Time is still the same enigma it was when Aristotle
was alive. We can but dance round it with words and ideas, for it is a concept as yet out of our
grasp to comprehend."