The Basingstoke Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

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