1916
The howl of the wind outside his single porthole window kept Cecil awake, but barely. The days had grown long, interminable over the past several months without word from outside. Even the meagre telegrams that had arrived with clockwork regularity for many years, each containing but one number-the result of Billy’s die roll for their epic games of Snakes and Ladders-had ceased. At least in his old quarters he’d been able to gaze out across London from his balcony, to pretend he was still a part of the world below. Here, on the 112^th floor, he was nothing but a rusty old cog in the monotonous grind of a soulless machine.
His bushy beard was silver-white and reached down to his chest. His sore fingers, the prints worn away by too many cuts and abrasions during his obsessive fiddling with sharp edges and brittle lenses, hurt all day until he rested them in bed under his pillow. He slept more and more these days. No one seemed to complain, though, as his sharpness in the lab had long begun to wane. Truth be told, the scraps he’d fed the Council during his first few years spent in the tower, and his utter failure to reproduce his great machine-a deliberate failure-had relegated him to a kind of twilight position within the establishment. They treated him with benign neglect, neither resisting nor rewarding his small breakthroughs in other fields, despite his continued propensity for hard work.
It was genius they wanted-time travel or nothing-and he had let them down.
He’d slept peacefully each and every night with that knowledge.
The shadowy walls of his quarters slithered to life as he conjured, bittersweetly, his great adventure in prehistory. Airships swooped amid flying reptiles, diving bells plumbed the depths of a sea teeming with monstrous creatures, his friends fought with him and for him against impossible odds, and he grew to love them over time.
Ah, would that I were a young man again. I’d never go near a blasted laboratory. The world outside is much too interesting as it is. Am I right, Lisa? Am I right, Edmond?
Do everything within your power. Nothing else matters. You will never be complete if you don’t try. Let God stop it if He must.
Hurtful words from long ago. He hadn’t uttered them for years, but their sentiment haunted him like the scent of African lily perfume whenever he came across it in the tower’s dining hall or the movie theatre. The wound was still tender. It had never healed.
He closed his eyes, changed sides on the bed and snuggled against a double pillow. Not even rain pelting the window could keep him awake now that he’d found something worth dreaming about. He imagined his wife and son running toward him on the lonely, rickety walkway overlooking his giant machine, moments before its cataclysmic reaction. But their smiles quickly dropped, and they yelled something at him in unison. No sound escaped their lips.
A terrific crash jolted him, and he sprang upright on the bed. He spun toward the open window, shielding his face from the violent gust of wind he was expecting. But none came. Nor was there any rain. The storm had ceased apoplectically. He checked the wall clock.
Ah, five past eight. Right on cue. But what broke the glass?
He got out of bed, put his single slipper on and walked over the shards to the window. Before he reached it, the slick, broad form of a man swung in through the gap, narrowly missing him. The intruder thudded sideways onto the carpet and gave an audible wince.
“What the devil? What do you mean by breaking in-”
“Quick, help me untie the rope,” the interloper said as he leapt to his feet. A good six feet tall, he was young and handsome, with wide, straight shoulders and a rough and ready face, like a rugby player. He wore a navy blue slicker.
“Who are you? Tell me why I shouldn’t throw you back out right now and pin a bill for the window to your backside.”
“Five past eight. We’ve got seconds!” The man yanked at the knot around his waist, unfastening the rope, then he tossed it onto the floor. Next, he tore his slicker off to reveal a bizarre metallic contraption, about the size of a large rucksack, strapped to his back. He tightened the thick harness about the shoulders and around the waist of his khaki suit.
“What the hell is that? Who are you? ”
The young man was too busy to answer. He clicked two levers on either side of the metal box and without warning snatched Cecil toward him by the wrists. “Here-when we jump, you’ll need to wrap your arms and legs around me. Make sure the mechanical one is set to its walking gear so you can hold it bent around me. Is that clear?”
An escape! After all these years? “I understand.” He didn’t, but he would rather take this chance, perhaps his last, than spend the rest of his life cooped up in oblivion. “It’s already set to that gear.”
“Good. All right, here we go. Hold on tight, Cecil.”
Cecil? Who called him that? None in the tower, and he hadn’t spoken to a friend from the outside for going on a decade.
Ugh! His stomach vaulted into his brain as they jumped into a million suspended dew drops. The five past eight time glitch had rendered the storm a three dimensional, interactive tableau-spectacular and terrifying in equal measure. He crushed his limbs around the man. About a third of the way down, a whirring, clicking noise began in the metallic contraption. A dozen bulky silver rods shot out from either side. They immediately doubled in length, then tripled, becoming slenderer with each action. Finally, dovetailing metal lengths fanned out from each spine, forming streamlined wings. This new air resistance snatched Cecil and his rescuer from their deadly plummet and set them on a gliding path away from the tower.
The storm resumed with a shimmering stutter. A flash of lightning jived a million raindrops back to life, and they pounded the metal wings. Cecil clung even tighter as the birdman let go of him to pivot and angle the wings by means of levers at the base of the shell. He expertly guided them toward the deck of a medium-sized airship hovering a hundred feet over the Thames. A dozen African aeronauts waited with a giant net, to catch the fliers if they should overshoot their landing. Luckily, the birdman brought them down safely, skidding onto several wet mattresses arranged together on the quarterdeck.
“Well, how the hell do you do, Professor?”
Were he not already punchdrunk from too many shocks in too short a time, Cecil would have cried out with joy at the sight of his old Namibian friend, Tangeni, bounding over the mattresses wearing a slicker several sizes too big.
“Tangeni! I knew it was you behind this.”
The African pilot, now sporting a short, black-grey beard, threw his arms around Cecil and wouldn’t let go, and Cecil fancied he outdid that grip of affection with one of his own-one of the most heartfelt embraces he’d ever given.
“I thought you’d forgotten me, my friend.”
“Never. We thought of everything to free you, but they were one step ahead of us at every turn. In the end, we took inspiration from our old friends, the flying dinosaurs. It was his crazy idea.” He motioned to the birdman, who gave a bow. “The timing was everything-in and out before your captors knew a thing. And now that we have you back, there will be no stopping us. But come, they’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth when they find out you’ve escaped.”
Heavy rain thrashed the deck. Tangeni returned to the wheel, promising to share a brandy or five with Cecil as soon as he’d seen to their escape from London. Meanwhile, the birdman fetched blankets, raincoats and sou’westers for Cecil and himself.
“I can never thank you enough, young man. And now will you please tell me your name.”
His rescuer grinned, then gave a cheeky shrug. “’T weren’t nothin’.” The lad mimicked a Lancashire accent. The professor stood up straight, looked the young man over from head to toe, questing for further proof to support his unlikely assumption. But it couldn’t be. This stranger no more resembled the boy he’d left behind in the factory wreckage than “I believe I’m a few squares ahead of you this time around, Cecil.”
“Billy?”
“None other.”
“My God, you’ve grown…unrecognisably.”
“So have you.”
