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.