Chapter 4

I wondered if I could get hold of one, and thought about how that could be done. I was not going to stick my hand inside and possibly dislodge something in the innards of the device. If I did that and stopped it working, I might be stuck here for ever.

I searched around and then found a pair of long thin tongs, probably used to transfer a small object onto the weighing machine. The arms of the tongs were about 25 centimetres in length, and I reckoned that might be sufficient for me to nab an ingot securely enough to lift it out and into my grasping hands. I wanted to use the ingot to test whether I could carry an item home in my pocket, and then later check its value against the current price of gold bullion. I was aware that banks make charges for conversion of gold into coin of the realm, but that would be small beer in relation to the probable current rate of gold.

I fetched the tongs and inserted them at the most open-spaced angle to reach the ingots. Success in reaching, but would the tongs grip an ingot well enough to lift one out? Practice was the test, and I tried gripping one and lifting it up. That didn’t work well, for the tongs were catching it at its broadest. I had to lever one up against another, so that it lay at an angle, allowing me to grip it at its depth, a much thinner option. I found I could lift it slowly, holding the ingot as tightly as I could, and manoeuvred it out. I dropped it on the nearby table with a sigh of relief. Now I could pick up the heavy object and place it safely in my right-hand jacket pocket. I could feel the drag this imparted to my jacket, so in the aim of balance, I went back in and slowly retrieved a second ingot for my left-hand pocket.

That felt much better; it gave me a sense of balance and made my stance steadier. Now, do I get out of here with my gold bars, or do I try the door?

After consideration, I decided that the safest approach was to have a wedge of some kind handy to keep the door open while I looked beyond it. Searching the room, I found a sturdy lab stool made of mild steel. That should be heavy enough to hold the door open and prevent it from closing behind me. I dragged it across to the door, and took a close look at the door lock.

The lock had a set of buttons on a sort of panel, and a small door knob below it. Guessing that the door could be opened from the inside unless deliberately locked, I tried turning the knob. It moved easily, and I grasped the main handle with my other hand, then pulled.

The door opened towards me, and I took a first glance outside the door. It was pitch black, with nothing visible at all. Damn!

I tried a sniff at the air beyond, without losing my grip on the door, and the smell told me that it was not the outside air, just another indoor place; possibly a corridor. I allowed the door to close and retired to find a torch or some way to project light outwards. A mirror might help me to reflect the inside light out into the corridor or whatever, but a hand torch would be much better.

I went back to searching any drawers I could find, then I noticed an upright cupboard against a wall. Opening the cupboard door, on the shelves were a collection of bottles, tools, and a large hand torch. I grabbed the torch and checked if it worked by pressing the ‘on’ switch. It lit up, pushing out a strong beam of light.

I switched it off and headed back to the lab’s one and only door.

I went through the routine of opening it again, but this time I pulled the lab stool over and stood it in the gap to prevent the door closing, then I swung the torch round to point outside the open door.

The black gave way to a dull beige and otherwise blank corridor stretching ahead of me. Half way along there was a door on the left, and a matching one on the right. I was too far to see clearly, but the shapes I could almost make out looked like button locks on the doors. Possibly other labs? Or possibly store rooms for supplies? I could only guess, but what was at the end of the corridor? That was more to the point.

The light beam decreased in visibility as it pushed on, and to my eyes in the distance there was either another door, or a bend in the corridor. This was a much longer corridor than I expected. It suggested that the lab was built underground; for whatever reason, I had no idea. Secrecy? Security? Bomb proofing? Or was it simply that the excavation had been there previously and had been repurposed as a site for the lab?

I finally noticed a light switch on the wall of the corridor, next to the doorway. I flicked it and recessed lights came on in the ceiling, lighting the way ahead as far as what now appeared to be a sharp bend in the corridor. I switched the lights back off, for I did not need them for now.

I did not want to go further for the moment; not without making the lab door secure from shutting behind me, unless I could discover the code to work the button key lock. I slowly backed inside, removed the stool, and allowed the door to swing shut and close with a definite solid click.

I was safe inside for the moment.

As I felt the weights dragging in my pockets, I remembered that I had my lunch with me, and it might be getting squashed by the gold ingots. I pulled out the sandwiches from one pocket, and the apple from the other, and laid them on the nearest table, setting the apple upright so that it would not roll away before I picked it up.

As I munched on the apple I walked round to the tea maker and looked at the controls. Despite the complications of choices – tea (with and without milk), coffee (caffeinated and decaffeinated), hot chocolate, and a herbal tea - the instructions were simple enough. The water was plumbed in and it was merely a matter of selection the tea option and pressing the start button. Almost at once the machine dropped the powdered tea into the paper cup, then produced boiling water that poured down into the cup to a certain level then stopped. Sugar was provided in a small paper sachet if you desired that sweetness, but I preferred tea without sugar, having been brought up that way by my mother. Curiously, my father took his tea with two sugars – ugh! Far too sweet; must have been something from his childhood to make him want so much sugar.

I opened my sandwiches and laid them on the flattened paper bag, then tasted the tea after it had cooled slightly. It was not too bad, surprisingly. I had assumed it would be old, but the lab condition may have been as it was last time the operator was here and not a minute more, it seemed. It looked completely fresh and not left abandoned for ages. I had to revise my conception of time and age in this new environment.

So I sat and ate my lunch and drank my tea, thinking about what I was facing with that door and corridor. I wondered how the room kept its breathability despite being underground. My eyes eventually noticed a thing on one wall that looked like a small version of an extractor fan, so as soon as my snack lunch was finished, I walked over and had a closer look. It had a square format holding a frame which must contain a filter, which is what I presumed the faint mesh structure must be, and as I looked closer I discerned a set of fan blades sitting behind the filter. So, it must act as an extractor fan. That must mean there should be another pulling in the fresh air as an input to the system. Checking the opposite wall, I found what I hoped for; a similar object on the wall, and I could feel the air issuing from it towards my face.

Clever; fresh air in and used air out. There was even what appeared to be a slight perfume to the inbound air. While it smelled ‘countryside’ it smacked of a manufactured perfume, as no outside air would be so consistent in its aroma. I concluded that it must go through a machine that filtered dust particles from the air and added an attractive aroma to it for the benefit of those breathing it in the lab.

However, interesting though this was, it did not help with the task at hand: learning more about the space/time transport machine.

I had a sudden nauseous feeling as I wondered about the mechanics of how I was able get from here to there, or vice versa. Was my whole body moved in its entirety, or was it turned into a wave or energy component, moved by radio, then turned back into matter again? Surely that was far too complicated to be possible, yet ... I pondered at the thought of a complete person jumping from one location to another in almost no time at all. The mind boggles at such a concept.

Either option, to me, meant using a great deal of energy to achieve the same result. Either there was a huge machine providing the required energy, or there was another machine that provided the energy then took it back, in a recycling process, such as happens with plants: they absorb nutrients from the soil, add sunlight as energy, and grow into small plants and tall trees, then these die, they fall to the ground and are converted back into plant nutrients by worms, fungi, and soil bacteria.

Possibly a similar recycling circle operated via this and some other machines. At least, that was my best guess, but I needed to see if there was another machine that had some connection to the first one. The connection might be by cable, or by wireless transmission. Moving energy by electrical transmission would need massively thick cables to transfer so much power, so possibly there was an electrical substation on the premises somewhere that catered for the moving of energy back and forward. Either that, or a substation was nearby to provide the necessary power. There was no indication of a meter cupboard within the laboratory, so where and how was the power accounted for, if it was accounted for at all? Did the whole laboratory steal its power from the main network, without going through a meter? That would mean that the lab was an illegal installation, so possibly hidden underground for that reason. It had a rationale of sorts to it.

All in all, the whole system must be massively large; somewhere out if sight, for the operating machine here and at Gourock were not very great in size. Possibly this was not much more than a set of controls, remote from the actual machine that performed the actions.

Perhaps this might be why the laboratory was underground: the vast machinery shuttling power around could be built into the surrounding rock. It must have cost a fortune to set this whole operation up and get it running, so who was financing it, or had financed it? And from legal funds or fraudulent financing?

The other immediate question was, how could the machine possibly move you in time as well as space? The time knob was simply for duration of stay at the other end, as far as I could make out. Or was it? I had better have a close look at it, for it did relate to time, right?

I had another gander at the two control knobs, and on this occasion I saw a small difference: the duration knob had a central protrusion that the other knob did not have. It was not prominent, but certainly enough to get your fingers round it. Now, was it meant to be pushed in or pulled out? If pushed in, I concluded that it would not be able to be pulled back out easily, so the odds favoured a pull to operate it. I tried that, and it moved out about half an inch. The other change was that the indicator panel no longer said Duration, but indicated the word Time.

For setting duration, one turned the knob, so I assumed that the time setting did likewise. I tentatively turned it a little, and the display showed the number 1. That shocked me.

One? One minute, one hour, one day, one year? Then I peered more closely; and saw that in small type was the letter m.

I turned the central knob and it quickly ran through the numbers past 59 and again displayed 1, this time with a small h. for hour. So, this meant that the control set the period of time you changed as you travelled. But was it forward or backwards in time, or was there a choice? Could you travel into the future?

Now that was a question. If you move in time, are you still living in the same timeline? There was the old conundrum about killing your great-grandfather and would you still exist; or would the timeline correct itself by making your real ancestor someone else? Did a similar situation exist about moving to the future? What could you do that would make a difference? All I could imagine was using knowledge from the future to help you back in your own time; things like a gambling win by knowing what runner would come first, or which teams would win a championship. In reality, the gambling authorities might come down on you like a ton of bricks and accuse you of cheating. Lottery wins would not work as the winning ticket could be sold anywhere in the country. You could not be sure of buying the winning one.

Putting such thoughts aside, I returned the time knob to zero and tried it in reverse. Yes, it worked that way too, just showed the number with a minus sign in front of it. That was a sensible precaution, I thought.

On another thought, I decided that I would not for now try to transport from the lab to anywhere except the house vestibule, just in case of unforeseen problems. I didn’t know enough to try moving from here to anywhere else, as the return trip seemed to be from where you started. I preferred to get home, as I had no idea where the laboratory was actually sited; it could be anywhere.

That corridor was annoying me. I wanted to know what was at the end of it. Was there a door to the outside, so that I could ascertain where I was? The lab door was the main obstacle to progress, so I looked at the problem as a practical question: how to keep the door open with some degree of security.

A simple wedge would work, but these had a bad habit of slipping and the door closing. After a time, I thought of extending the wedge from the opposite door frame to the open door. To keep it in place, I envisaged an open v-shape at the door frame side. The V, or more likely a U-shape, would fit round the door post, and the bar would extend towards the door, ending with a wedge that would go under the open door.

It wouldn’t do any harm if I could also discover the code that the buttons need to lock and unlock the door. Would the mechanism work when the door was open? I could try it, but after some consideration of the mathematics, I realised that the number of possible solutions was immense! It would be easier to find the code written down somewhere in the lab.

While I looked around for a way to make the large wedge, I also took a close look at all the equipment in the lab, paying particular attention to flat surfaces where a number could be written and ignored by visitors. I looked in particular to the back panels of apparatus, and in a few minutes I spotted what I was searching for. It was on the back of the tea dispenser, the one unit that was always had the user at the front and attention devoted to the hot drink.

The apparent solution was a four-digit number: 1982, easily assumed to be a year date, possibly for maintenance, if you weren’t thinking of a door code. But I had only surmised that this was the door code; it had to be tested.

I went back to the door and examined the lock. With the door opened, the tongue had been pulled back and released once the lock was opened. I tried to work the lock without a code, and it resisted; the tongue stayed put. I pressed the buttons in the sequence I had found, and tried again: it opened: the tongue was retracted and stayed that way until I pressed the release button: it closed again.

Great! I now could get in and out the lab door without worrying about being shut outside. But I decided to continue with making the door wedge as a belt-and-braces answer to the entrance/exit question.

I had noticed a powered lathe in the lab, presumable for minor repairs or alterations, and the attached storage cupboard had sections of both stiff plastic and mild steel, None of them were long enough for my purpose, but there was a drawer with an assortment of nuts and bolts, so If I could drill holes in two pieces of mild steel, I could bolt them together to be long enough, and use the nearby metal cutting band-saw to make the notch at the one end. At the other end I could attach a small bar across the long bar to act as a stop while the remainder slipped under the door, the whole functioning as a wedge would.

The only trouble with all my effort was that the considerable length of time it took to complete, so that I had to remember that I had set the duration as three hours, and it must be getting towards that time. I finished what I was doing and after making sure that the lab door was closed and locked, I spent the remainder of my visit in taking a close interest in all the lab apparatus and storage cupboards in case I had missed something important. There was nothing that I felt I needed to be concerned about, but I did find lying on one table a thing like a glass slate; a slate such as was used by schoolchildren a hundred years back. Why glass, I wondered? Then I spotted that it had what looked for all the world like recessed buttons on the frame. I wondered if it was a form of abacus where you could calculate sums, assuming it had a display like the transportation machine.

For now, I was not going to take risks, so I simply filed its existence in my memory for later attention, like I had done with that long corridor. While I stood there cogitating, I was whisked back to the vestibule in Gourock.

Now that I was aware of the time travel aspect of the machine, I took a note of the time on my wristwatch. Okay, it was a cheap watch, so might not be accurate to the minute, but close enough for practical use. All I had to do was locate another timepiece and compare it to mine, thus showing whether or not I was still in my own time period, more or less. That would be enough for me.

I had to vacate the premises, ensure it was seemingly locked, and walk down to where I would catch a bus home to Greenock. I did so, and spotted a public clock on a local church. It corresponded to my watch to within a minute or two, so I was happy as I made my way home in plenty of time for my dinner.

I fended off my mother with vague references to things I had seen at Gourock, and talked of wandering on the shingle beach near the pier, looking at some colourful stones amid the seaweed growing on the larger boulders. I mentioned the pier’s supporting pillars with their masses of mussels growing on them, and the sight of men and boys fishing from the pier. She was given the notion that most of my visit was spent on and around the local beaches. I certainly didn’t visit the sea bathing pool, as I had never learned to swim. I reminded my mum that when I was about five, my father had forcibly tried to get me to swim in the cold river Clyde, and that had the converse effect. It put me off going into cold water altogether, and that was why I had never learned to swim.

As I had taken off my jacket in the hallway when I got home, the gold ingots were hanging there. I hoped the drag to the pockets was not noticeable on a passing glance.

That evening I got a hold of my father’s daily newspaper and turned to the business page, and perused the list of commodities which gave the current prices of precious metals including gold. The price of gold seemed amazingly high at 12 pounds sixteen shillings per ounce, and it was, at that date. Looking back now, I was naive to think that, but hindsight is always wonderful. Houses were remarkably cheap compared to today, but back then they seemed expensive.

I was unsure what to do with my gold ingots, so I came to the conclusion that they should be hidden away for the present. But where? I had no place in my parents’ flat that was secure from my mother’s cleaning efforts. My father had a safety deposit box in a bank in Glasgow, where he stored essential papers – share certificates, family papers; that sort of thing. A similar box would suit me, but it would have to be in a bank in Greenock or Gourock, and I didn’t know of a bank that offered that option. Then there was my age: the bank would probably insist on my father’s signature on the application form for the box. A box was out.

I really had no safe place. The safest was probably back where I found them, dammit!

So the ingots stayed where they were until I could get back to Gourock. That was a week later, and I fretted for all that time that my mother, my father, or my young brother would ask about the heavy things in my jacket pockets.

The weather forecast did not help either. The whole week was damp, so cutting grass would not be sensible. I had to simply walk in as I owned the place. But perhaps I could use the gold to make that become a reality. That assumed I could arrange to make such a transaction without revealing my age. That would need some exploration to find out the possibilities.

My finances were still surviving thanks to the Post Office job, so I was able to make another trip to Gourock, despite my mother’s queries about what made Gourock so interesting. I imagined that she suspected I had met a girl there. I said nothing to disabuse her of that notion.

I got myself to the empty house, and let myself inside. A quick glance confirmed no changes since I was last there, so I went straight to the controls and checked that the power level was adequate. The strip said it was fully charged, so that allowed me to begin. I wondered if it was safe to go back to the same spot in the lab, in case I might meet myself, so I set the time to four hours ahead as a precaution.

Arriving as expected, I checked the wall chronometer, and the time was as I had hoped. It was after I had left. I unloaded my gold ingots and replaced them in their stash, and replaced the panel on the equipment. I was glad to lose that mass from my pockets.

This time I was determined to get to the end of the corridor and see if it led outside, for there were no windows in the lab or the corridor. I opened the lab door and placed my made wedge in position to hold the door open. With that secure, I stepped into the corridor and switched on the corridor lights from the wall switch.

With light available, I walked confidently along the corridor. The two doors that I passed each had a button lock at the handle, identical to that of the lab. Possibly they employed the same entry code, but that was for later. It was the end of the corridor that I sought.

Getting to the sharp bend, I noticed that it was a right angled bend. Going round, the corridor continued for around a dozen feet and ended at another door. Once more I was faced with a button lock.

Dare I assume that all the locks were keyed to the same code? A user might stick to the same sequence to make remembering simple and easy. I tried the same code with this door lock, and it clicked open. Holding the lock knob to keep it in the open position, I pulled the door to me, and it opened.

My nose first told me that I was facing the outside, but puzzlingly the light level was low, as if it was evening. The light from the corridor gave me some sight of what I was facing. It was the walls of a tunnel, and a train tunnel at that, for in the middle was a single rail line. The metal showed no sign of wear, so no recent use. In fact, it looked like it had been unused for many years. I looked at the curved brick walls of the tunnel, and again there were signs of age. To me, the tunnel was at least a hundred years old.

I looked in both directions, but the tunnel showed no exit in either direction, just a vague shimmer of dim light where the tunnel curved slightly. This curve was evident in both directions. The tunnel was a long one, clearly, and ancient. The presence of the rail was curious, because when a rail line is discontinued, the lines are normally lifted for the rails to be reused or the metal recycled. The other oddity was that the single rail line was in the centre of the tunnel. Usually if a line is changed from a double track to a single track, one set of tracks was lifted and the other left, and so not in the middle of the tunnel.

This track had obviously been lifted then relaid to be central within the tunnel. The only practical reason for such a change must be that the wagons to be used were larger than previously, and only the greater height in the centre of the tunnel would cater for such a change. The centred rail line also offered more width for the wagons. My conclusion from this was that the tunnel had the line relaid for a new, taller and wider, rail wagon configuration.

But the line was no longer used, so the function it had been relaid for had also ceased to be viable, whatever it was, and the line had been left in hopes of it restarting in the future. It looked like that hope had not come to fruition.

So I was standing at a door inside a disused tunnel with a disused rail line still in place and probably forgotten by now. Not a bad place to hide a secret laboratory that you don’t want anybody to know about, now or in the future.

But surely adventurous youths exploring an abandoned tunnel would notice this door in the wall? I stepped out and swung the door to look at the exterior panel; and got a shock.

The exterior of the door was painted or otherwise finished to look exactly the same as the tunnel walls; apparently entirely brick, with no evident lock at all on the outside. How the heck could anyone enter without having a door handle, with or without a lock? I felt the lock on the inside and slipped my hand round to the outside, to feel what was there. Ah, I could feel a metal panel, so I realised that under that panel would be the button pad and the door handle.

The whole place had been carefully hidden so that there was nothing visible to suggest that a door was ever there. I looked down, to see if there was construction debris that might give it away, but no; the ground looked identical to the remainder of the tunnel floor. A scattering of stones and gravel that did not even allow for footprints by the persons entering or leaving. This had been carefully thought out before and after building. I bet that they used the rail line to bring in everything they required to construct the laboratory and remove the excavated material. Then the furnishings and fittings would be brought in using the rails, and the packaging removed the same way. Some organisation had designed and built this secret laboratory, and anyone commenting on the presence of road vehicles with rail wheels for the switch to rail, could easily be told it was an experimental test of how robust an old tunnel was, as there were buildings far above it and this added a safety factor for the buildings. A suggestion could be implied (though not verbally expressed) that it might be being considered as a possible nuclear bunker site. That would also meet with approval and a willingness to stay quiet about what they had seen.

Yes, I could see how easily such a construction could be completed, and then left as if the testing had been done and the results being taken to the appropriate body for amalgamation into whatever plans there might be for bunkers. The tunnel would then be just as before, to the view of the occasional adventurous explorer looking into old rail tunnels.

There was indeed a degree of thought put into this tunnel alteration. Someone had to have researched possible tunnels and selected this one as the most appropriate location. I would bet there was an electrical substation directly above or very close by. It would simple be a drill hole through to the laboratory to bring a power cable through and connect it to the substation as if it went off to a local factory. Once a cable vanishes underground, nobody bothers about where it goes. There is an automatic assumption that it goes where the power company says it is supposed to go.

There was no sound inside the tunnel; no indication of machinery nearby, and not even a hint of traffic at ground level. Down here, well inside the tunnel, silence was all you could hear.

I sniffed the air, and all I got was the musty smell of long-abandoned tunnel, with an occasional hint of plant material drifting along from one end or the other. I expected that near the tunnel there would be a set of steps down from a road to the trackbed, probably marked as an access for rail staff to inspect the line at intervals, with a padlocked gate at the top.

That would deter most casual walkers. The determined researcher of old tunnels or looking for fungi or mosses, who would be willing to climb over the gate, was only foreseeable very occasionally, so entry through the gate by someone armed with a key would be assumed to be an authorised person.

Having been standing at the open door for a while, I had to decide what to do. As I went to close the door, it struck me: if I was in the tunnel with the door closed, how would I know where the door was, given that it was camouflaged? That was a serious thought, so I stuck my head out and looked all around the doorway’s adjacent brickwork. I was striving to find some indicator that would tell me where the door was located. After a search to both sides, as well as above the doorway, the answer revealed itself in an obvious but unobtrusive way. There was a lighting unit on the opposite wall; directly opposite the door. It stayed on all the time, but at a low level, and the colour was unusual; the light had a green tinge instead of the usual white light. That was another clever design feature, showing where the door can be found but without being at the door. Visible, but invisible as a sign; a green light also indicates an ‘on’ or ‘open’ position, so to someone like me it showed that I was at the right spot to find the disguised door. There were probably other lights in the tunnel, away from the exits, and I guessed they would be either white lights or reddish in colour. The colour was the code for finding where the door was placed.

I closed the door and made sure it was securely locked. My discovery of the rail tunnel gave me some information about where the lab was; how it was hidden underground, but whereabouts. The tunnel could be anywhere, for there were disused rail lines all over the country. There were abandoned rail tunnels everywhere, most of them very short, but a few long ones. Greenock was noted for the large number of tunnels running under the burgh. In the later 19th century there were three competing rail lines running through the town, one nearer the river, running through Greenock Central Station and on to Gourock; one at a mid level through Lyndoch Station and down to the ocean terminal at Princes Pier, and a high level line at Upper Greenock station and on to Wemyss Bay (pronounced Weems Bay). Each of them had sidings running into major local business premises or to company goods yards, so Greenock was covered with rail lines, many of them in cuttings and tunnels. I remembered Greenock West station, where the platforms were about 30 feet below road level. The line came from Greenock Central through a tunnel more than a mile long, and vanished into another even longer tunnel to Fort Matilda station before getting to Gourock. At the time it was built, the Greenock West to Fort Matilda tunnel was the longest in Scotland, and remains in use today.

Yes, Greenock was replete with railways, deep cuttings, and tunnels. Unfortunately, by 1961 the transatlantic liners were tailing off as air travel took over, and the sugar cargo ships were starting to go to other ports where newer, more efficient refineries had been built. Shipbuilding was also declining as competition around the world expanded using cheaper labour and more modern yards for constructing vessels of all sizes. Clyde shipbuilders were not keeping up with the upstarts who were starting up, and as a result Greenock’s population was no longer expanding but starting to contract.

I went back down the corridor and tried each of the side doors, with the same code: they worked! In the first one I found a light switch next to the door and flicked it on. It was a storeroom of some kind, with boxes laid on shelves on both sides and on a free-standing set of shelving in the middle. I had no time to explore further, so closed the door and moved to the other one.

This proved to a technical store, with everything from tools and bits of equipment to light bulbs and batteries of various sizes. Again, a glance round was enough for me, and I closed the door again. I moved back to the laboratory.

Once in there, I did what I should have done long before; I fished out a gold ingot and checked its surface for a weight. It claimed to be 10 oz: ten ounces. There was nothing more, so I moved it to the weighing machine and tried it: 283.5 grams, it told me. My mind was still geared up to ounces and pounds, so I wondered why grams on the scales? Had we changed to a new system of weights by that time?

Whether that was so or not, it meant I still had a ten ounce bar which I could relate to the newspaper’s quotation for an ounce. I only had to multiply the newspaper quote of 35 dollars an ounce by ten to get the value of a ten ounce ingot: 350 dollars. I could only remember a rough idea of the dollar exchange rate to pounds, and it was two pounds plus. Working on two pounds for simplification doing that multiplication told me that this little, but heavy, ingot was extremely valuable at about £140. Then it struck me, that over the years, gold almost always appreciates in value, so in the time of the lab’s existence it was probably even more valuable. Turning it into cash in my time would be impressive, but in this lab’s time, it must be worth many times that amount!

The only trouble with my mental speculation was that in this future, it would be convertible only into banknotes of the period, and not currency that was current in my own time, so inherently useless; unless I could find a shop here that bought and sold notes from my own time, and paid for them with a gold ingot, if that was possible. Rules about buying and selling gold changes over time, I was sure. I think the US banned private ownership of gold many years ago; pre WW2. The UK might have brought in a similar measure at some time to protect the pound’s value, but in my time it was not a problem; only my youth was a problem.

I remained at a loss as to the lab’s location, whether in Scotland or elsewhere, and with no means of identifying where it was, unless I walked out of the tunnel and explored the locality enough to find out where I was.