The Basingstoke Chronicles (6 page)

There was something odd, though. Shining my torch around the chamber, I saw no
discrepancy, but when I focused on the portal, our only observation and access point to the sea, I
gasped.

We both stood over the dark hole and peered through. Brilliant specks of light lay
scattered about the otherwise completely black environment. Yet, our beams could not illuminate
anything outside: not a stray fish, a coral configuration or even a bed of sand. The discovery was
problematical...until I followed our time travel paradigm to its logical extreme.

If we traveled far enough into history...

The answer was awe-inspiring and terrible. I focused on an attractive formation of
specks and, breathless, realized we could be staring at nothing other than a celestial constellation.
The time machine had thrown us to a time before the earth itself, before our planet had been
formed. Our spectacular window was to the heart of deepest space, unfiltered, unparalleled and
unnerving.

My perception of scuba divers being the astronauts of the ocean was suddenly the most
gut-wrenching of ironies. It is hard to translate that sense of isolation. I was in a black sea with no
bottom and no surface. Life itself did not yet exist, nor did its womb--Mother Earth. I wanted to
tear myself away from the view but couldn't. No one else had ever glimpsed the universe like
this. Perhaps these were some of the first stars born out of the Big Bang. I couldn't recognize a
single constellation. Cold now, having to steady my breathing as my heart pounded, I felt the
most alone that any human being had ever been in the cosmos.

The more I focused on the stars, the more they seemed to skew from their axes. My mind
couldn't help but roll with them. If Rodrigo had not been there to steady me, I would have toppled
headlong into the abyss.

As he yanked me to safety, I gripped his arm and felt clarity in my senses again. We both
watched in horror as my torch fell from my grasp, slid over the brink and floated, majestically,
into the infant cosmos.

I shuffled quickly over to the panel and touched the correct function to undo this awful
detour. Waiting on my knees, face to face with those symbols until the five minutes or so had
elapsed, I swore to start my plan afresh.

As I couldn't let MacDuff or anyone else get their hands on the time machine, I
determined our return to 1979 was to be short-lived, perhaps a matter of moments. Our proposed
journey, then, to retrace the dead time traveler's passage through time, to find out who he was and
how he died, had to be
now
.

First, I assured myself that the scale was indeed incremental--rising from right to
left--and then touched the reverse function beneath a symbol located directly to the left of the very
first I had pressed. Did that symbol denote weeks or months? I couldn't be sure. But the
nine-thousand year leap loomed, and I planned to arrive with sufficient time to predict and evade
whatever disaster befell the previous occupant.

Twenty seconds later, the fresh cycle eased to a stand-still. From my reckoning, we were
some time before our original starting point in 1979--about a month, I hoped.

So far so good, I thought.

Rodrigo must have trusted me completely, as he did not once interfere. More likely, he
did not trust himself after our startling mishap.

Next, I concentrated fully to ensure there was no error. I pressed reverse beneath the
pyramid of interlocking circles, hoping to trace back the giant step of the deceased
time-traveler--nine thousand years, at least.

So, forgetting Rodrigo's accident, we ought to wind up exactly where the time machine
began its journey to us, plus the value of my additional increment...let's say a month or so
beyond.

The oscillations barely reached their critical dissolve when the cycle began to slow. I
would say less than a minute had elapsed in transit. Again, the vessel stopped as if no change had
ever taken place. I opened my eyes and was relieved to find the chamber beautifully lit. A far
brighter, greener pigment seeped through its filtered walls.

Aqua-blue!
I almost shouted aloud, damn near choking on my mouthpiece.

I felt a gentle current of relaxation as I untangled my flippers and rose to my feet.

Rodrigo placed a firm hand on my shoulder and pointed to the keel hole. It was majestic!
A giant sea turtle, grey-skinned, possessing a wonderfully dark green, ornamental shell, swam
across a bronzed coral reef. The gentle push of its strokes through the water epitomized the
care-free nature of his species in our own time, and we were at once given a wry reminder of the sea's
serenity through which our time travels had, so far, stumbled.

An ebullient curiosity welled up inside me. There was also a sense of catharsis in
knowing that Rodrigo and I, of the exhausted twentieth century, had achieved something without
precedent.

I checked my wristwatch. We had used fifty minute's worth of oxygen. Our escape to the
surface could not wait. I grabbed Rodrigo by his arm and signaled for our departure. Easing
myself into the tepid water, I glanced over our vessel one last time, on tenterhooks, before
completely submerging.

An endless, shallow coral reef stretched out in front. Brilliantly colored, it teemed with
exotic marine life. To a true oceanographer, this sight alone would have made the trip
worthwhile. Rodrigo and I instead turned our attentions to what lay behind.

An incredible land mass barred our underwater view for what seemed like miles across.
As it was too far away to adequately survey and the ocean itself was no more than forty feet deep
where we swam, Rodrigo started after our new reptilian friend, the turtle, who rose diagonally
toward the surface, carefree, oblivious to the strange new creatures he guided.

Regarding its attempts to make sense of time outside of our clock-watching perception,
the human mind can be likened to a captive animal scrabbling for dear life against the walls of an
inescapable pit. I confess to having no idea whatsoever how the time machine re-introduced to us
an island long ago shifted by tectonic upheaval. Similarly, I make no claim in this discovery other
than my being the willing participant in luck's incredible roulette. Sam, Ethel and Dumitrescu
might have balked at the opportunity presented them in the first place, but my contribution to
time travel, all told, amounts to little more than riding the coattails of fortune. We had certainly
not earned the right to be here, whenever
here
was.

Rodrigo and I breached the surface at around midday. The sun beamed down directly
overhead. A warm, saline breeze provided our first taste of this ancient air. Sculling for a
moment, I took in the full dimensions of the land mass.

It was a gargantuan wall of rock over two hundred feet high, shielding our vista to the
east as far as I could see. To the west, it seemed to curve briefly inward before rounding to a
vertical head. Directly in front of us were two impressions at the base of the cliff. Shaped like
horizontal teardrops, they were partially shrouded in mist but gaped just above sea level.

"Two identical caves?" asked Rodrigo.

"Maybe two ways up," I replied.

"Five dollars on the left one."

"You're on."

We traversed the eighty or so feet to shore with relaxed, contemplative strokes. The
upper lip of Rodrigo's cave appeared the more rugged of the two, but led into a far deeper hollow
in the rock. Faint, orange-brown contours were visible through the shadowy interior of the right
hand cave. It looked to press inward a mere ten feet, however, and did not appear to be of much
account.

As we inched inside the left cave, a striking chill greeted us. I was intrigued to notice the
absence of any kind of air current. The hollow was uncommonly cold. My head throbbed as we
approached a shaft of sunlight from high above. Yet, even that provided no warmth; the cave
seemed refrigerated somehow, and we were the slabs of meat floating towards its icy shelf at the
rear.

My face grew so cold I had no choice but to submerge. Rodrigo followed my lead.
Thank God for the restless motion of this warm, salty water; if it had been an isolated pool or
freshwater lake, I shudder to think what sub-zero temperature it might have reached.

We crossed the thirty or forty feet to the far wall of the cave in no time at all. The
moment we surfaced, Rodrigo's torch beam blazed about the shadows to his left. He had
obviously spied something in the water.

"What is it?" I asked, lending my own eyes to the frantic search.

"I thought I saw...
yes!!
There it is in the rock... Can you see... Steps! Steps in
the rock. They start ten feet below the surface. Where do you suppose they lead?"

I was glad to have Rodrigo with me. The fellow was always a lit fuse, liable to explode a
practical joke or gesture of brute honesty in someone's face without warning, but his
unpredictability also had its benefits, namely an uncanny resourcefulness under pressure. Our
various scuba exploits over the years had taught me that.

We clambered onto a narrow cross-walk which jutted out a few feet from the sheer rocky
rise before us. This ledge wound toward the mysterious stairway directly. Not wishing to dally a
moment longer, we made our way over, and it was there I gained my first clear view of what
seemed to be the only potential dry route from the cave.

I was less than enthusiastic, though. While definitely not a natural feature--the steps had
been carved, in the loosest sense of that word, at some point in time--the flight itself rose upward
in a steep, precarious manner against the edge of the rock. The word that came to mind was scale
rather than climb. In order to ascend the sixty or so feet until the steps disappeared into a tight
crack in the wall, we would have to be agile, flexible, unencumbered by our bulky diving
gear.

"Let's see how far we can get," Rodrigo said from between chattering teeth, "before it
starts snowing in here."

We left our extraneous equipment on the frosty shelf, and decided not to use our change
of dry clothing just yet; our wetsuits were far better insulators against the cold. The only item we
presently needed from our survival hold-alls was footwear--boots, rather than flippers, with
which to make our ascent. Nevertheless, I insisted we take our full packs along. One can never be
too prepared.

Rodrigo took the lead and made short work of the climb. Balance rather than effort was
required, sure-footedness as opposed to stamina. Together, we reached the point of ingress into
the rock and pressed on. A tiny pitter-patter of droplets fell from our wetsuits onto the bare rock.
The poorly cut stone route spiraled upward inside the cliff. And as we stayed low to the ground,
torchlight ensuring our only visibility in that claustrophobic vena cava, I recall just an endless,
dizzying creep, ever higher and ever warmer, to the heart of the island, to a daylight I thought we
would never reach.

The passageway opened suddenly to the bright afternoon. The final few stairs were
exposed to the elements, and were overgrown with moss. They ended at a shallow, inclined verge
of short, dried grass. I breathed deeply as we stood there, not quite sure what to do next.

The sweet smell of newly-cut grass excited my senses with a potent mix of ease and
nostalgia. I certainly didn't feel thousands of summers from home.

Before climbing the verge, I wandered over to the cliff's edge. The scenario so closely
resembled my childhood jaunts atop the coastal heights of Cornwall that for a few moments I was
that dauntless boy again.

But an anchor wrenched my gut as I looked down over the vertical drop. Our vessel was
in a shallow, undersea harbor far below. I stepped back from the seize of vertigo, and instead
focused on the inland view. A dense, arboreal shield of a forest barred our way, stretching as far
as the coast allowed in either direction. Lime-colored, the vista was muddied by an oppressive,
sentry darkness lurking between every leaf and bare trunk.

I strode over to Rodrigo and joined him in unpacking our kits for a change of clothing.
He extended his arm toward me.

"I'm gonna need the torch again," he said with his eyes fixed on the trees ahead. He
flinched as I placed a metal object in his palm.

"Maybe you'll need this instead."

It was a brand new, black Beretta, fully loaded and ready to smoke: Ethel's twelve-round
life insurance policy she'd wrapped in a towel as if it were nothing more than a snazzy bathing
suit. Rodrigo looked hard at the plastic carrier I placed between us on the dry grass, and even
harder at me. To my surprise, he threw back the gun.

"New rule," he said, reaching into his own bag to pull out a silver six-shooter revolver,
"all twentieth century men go armed."

Taking careful inventory of our supplies, I nibbled a chocolate Bourbon biscuit Rodrigo
gave me. Each now dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt--his was cream, mine was maroon--we
flung the heavy bags over our shoulders and sauntered up the verge toward the forest.

As we approached the first emerald thicket, I slowed to a creep. The place seemed
conspicuously quiet, and I sensed we were being watched.

"Keep a sharp eye," I said, wrenching a rotten branch to one side. "We're not alone."

The oppressive gloom ahead felt thick, tropical, over-cooked: a hotbed of stakes holding
up an evergreen roof. Rodrigo stretched the front of his t-shirt to soak up sweat from his
forehead. Our guns handy, we pressed on. After a while, insect noises drowned out the
silence.

The first half hour was hard going. Without a machete, forging a route through the brush
proved taxing. On some of the taller trees, the buttress roots were so pronounced we had to
negotiate an insanely convoluted route just to walk around them. Rodrigo explained how these
buttresses provide stability for tropical rainforest trees, whose roots are ordinarily not as deep as
those in temperate zones. Apparently, these ridges can reach thirty feet in height before blending
fully into the trunk; the highest we came across was closer to fifteen feet.