Baron Trump and the Chronicle of Tomorrow
A Lost Adventure of Ingersoll Lockwood
Introduction
There are certain books that seem to exist in the twilight between literature and legend.
Readers discover them by accident, mention them in whispers, and pass them from one curious soul to another like the fragment of a map leading toward an undiscovered country. Such are the strange and fascinating Baron Trump adventures of Ingersoll Lockwood, those peculiar nineteenth-century tales that combine fantasy, exploration, hidden worlds, and prophetic imagination in a manner unlike anything else in American literature.
For many years I wondered what might have happened had Lockwood written one final adventure. What if Baron Trump had grown to adulthood? What if the mysterious journeys of his youth had merely been the beginning of a much larger story? And what if, somewhere beyond the boundaries separating literary worlds, he encountered some of the greatest explorers ever imagined?
The result is the tale that follows.
In these pages Baron Trump seeks the aid of Sherlock Holmes, descends beneath the Atlantic aboard the Nautilus of Captain Nemo, argues with Professor Challenger, discovers a hidden crossroads between centuries, and ventures into humanity’s distant future. Yet despite its strange machinery, hidden cities, and journeys through time, this story is not really about technology at all. Like the best adventures of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton, it is ultimately concerned with a more enduring question: what becomes of humanity when it gains the power to reshape its own destiny?
The answer, as Baron discovers, lies not in perfect knowledge, perfect science, or perfect control, but in something far older and far more difficult—the freedom to choose.
So let us imagine that somewhere in an old library, tucked between a forgotten volume of Verne and a worn collection of Holmes stories, there survived one final manuscript. Let us imagine that its pages have only now been rediscovered.
Open the Chronicle.
The journey begins.
Part I
The Second Map
It was upon a wet October afternoon, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eight, when London had drawn about herself that grey and dripping cloak in which she most resembles an elderly duchess who has mislaid both her jewels and her youth, that Baron Trump first came into possession of the object which altered the whole course of his life. The young gentleman had lately arrived from the Continent, where he had passed some months in that wandering study which is so often mistaken for idleness by those who have never learned that the world itself is the oldest university. He was no longer the strange, impetuous boy who had once vanished into lands so remote that geography had no name for them, and returned with a face too grave for his years and eyes that seemed now and then to be looking upon a landscape invisible to other men. He was taller now, composed in manner, and possessed of that peculiar courtesy which is sometimes found in those who have been early frightened by wonders and have survived them.
The death of his father had brought him to London. It was not that Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian von Troomp, whom the English, with their usual economy of pronunciation, had long called Trump, had loved London above other cities; rather he had mistrusted it less. In a narrow house not far from Russell Square, he had deposited during his latter years certain boxes, chests, cabinets, and sealed instruments which he had removed from America, Germany, and various unnamed places with the jealous caution of one who knows that there are thieves who do not steal money, and murderers who do not kill for hatred. Baron had received from the solicitors a key, a packet of instructions, and a sentence written in his father’s own hand: “When the first map is remembered, seek the second.”
This sentence had troubled him more than any legal formality connected with the estate. The first map could mean only one thing. It was the map of his childhood’s adventure, the map which had led him beyond ordinary roads, beyond known kingdoms, and into that inner world of marvels where he had learned, while still a boy, that the universe is much larger than the opinions of comfortable men. He had seldom spoken of that journey in later years. People are willing to praise imagination so long as it does not presume to be fact. Baron had discovered that the easiest way to keep a wonder safe is to let fools suppose it a fable.
The house in Russell Square stood between a bookseller who dealt chiefly in theological remainders and a retired naval surgeon who had the habit of practicing the cornet after dinner. Its exterior had nothing remarkable about it except that its windows were unusually clean and its knocker unusually black. Yet from the moment Baron entered it, he felt that strange double sensation which comes to a man who is both master and intruder. The rooms were heavily furnished, but not luxuriously. His father’s taste had always run toward the practical, the durable, and the locked. There were cabinets from Vienna, strongboxes from Hamburg, campaign chests scarred by travel, rolled charts in brass cylinders, and several curious machines covered with green baize, as if even the dust were not to be trusted with their outlines.
For two days Baron examined the papers that had been left in ordinary order. They were disappointing in the manner of most family documents. There were deeds, letters of credit, receipts, inventories, and several disagreeable communications from men who believed that grief should be accompanied by prompt payment. But on the third evening, while rain hissed against the panes and the gaslight trembled over the leather backs of his father’s books, Baron found what he had been meant to find.
It happened by accident, though Baron had long since ceased to believe that accident is merely the name for events with no manners of introduction. He had opened a small ebony cabinet whose drawers contained specimens of stone, small metal discs, dried seeds, fragments of parchment, and a silver whistle fashioned in the shape of a bird. At the back of the lowest drawer he noticed a slight irregularity in the grain. Pressing it, he heard a click so faint that it might have been the death of a beetle. The cabinet did not open further; instead, the entire row of books immediately behind him shifted outward by the breadth of a finger.
Baron turned slowly. The books were all in German, bound uniformly, and bore titles of a dullness almost protective: municipal law, agricultural tariffs, coinage reforms, and the proceedings of forgotten committees. Pulling at the shelf, he found that it swung inward upon concealed hinges. Behind it lay a recess no larger than a fireplace, lined with lead, and within that recess stood a narrow iron box.
The key from the solicitors fitted it.
Inside were three objects. The first was a bundle of papers tied with a faded blue ribbon. The second was a flat case of black leather stamped with a device that Baron did not recognize: a door standing open upon a field of stars. The third was a letter addressed to him in his father’s handwriting.
He opened the letter first.
“My son,” it began, “you were once taken by me, and perhaps also by Providence, into regions where childhood saw more clearly than science. I have never asked forgiveness for that act, for I do not repent it; yet I have often trembled to think what burdens a father may lay upon the imagination of his child. If you have grown into a man who dismisses those days as dreams, burn this box unopened. You will be happier, and perhaps happiness is the more merciful inheritance. But if you know, as I think you know, that we saw not dreams but the outer courtyards of realities, then read further.”
Baron laid the paper down for a moment. The rain had stopped, but the silence after it seemed louder than the storm.
He read on.
“The map which guided us before was not the first, though I believed it so. Nor was the kingdom we found the center, though I once believed that also. There are doors beneath doors, worlds behind worlds, and times hidden within time as a tree is hidden within a seed. In my later years I acquired, at a price I shall not set down, a second map. It is not a map of place alone. It is not a map that any ordinary geographer would acknowledge. It is a map of correspondences, of roads that appear only under certain conditions, of passages by which the ancient, the present, and the unborn may touch without mingling. With it came an instrument called, in the only translation I trust, the Chronicle of Tomorrow.”
Here the old hand had faltered, and several words were scratched out. Then the writing resumed with a severity that seemed almost angry.
“Guard it. Do not use it lightly. Do not surrender it to scholars, governments, financiers, or reformers. The first will explain it until it is meaningless; the second will weaponize it; the third will sell it; and the fourth will improve mankind by destroying men. If danger presses, seek the one man in London who loves facts more than theories. He will not believe you, which is why he may be useful.”
There was no name. Beneath the last line stood only an address: Baker Street.
Baron turned next to the leather case. Its clasp resisted him at first, then opened with the clean reluctance of a thing long undisturbed. Within lay an object so unlike any instrument he had seen that for some time he could not decide whether it belonged to astronomy, navigation, clockmaking, or worship. It was circular, rather larger than a gentleman’s watch, though thinner, and made of a pale metal that was neither silver nor platinum. Around its circumference were engraved letters in several alphabets, some familiar, some ancient, and some which Baron could not have said were letters at all, though they possessed the terrible look of meaning. At its center, beneath a clear crystal, lay not a needle but a small darkness, perfectly round and deep, like a well seen at midnight. When he tilted the instrument, the darkness did not move with it; instead it remained, impossibly, upright, as though it obeyed another gravity.
Around the inner rim were marked dates.
Most were past: 1492, 1066, 33, 753 B.C. Others were future: 1936, 2001, 2426. Baron felt, at the sight of those unborn years, the same inward cold that a man might feel if he heard his own name spoken in an empty room.
The bundle of papers contained the second map.
At first it appeared to be nothing more than a set of concentric circles, beautifully drawn upon a material too smooth for parchment and too soft for metal. But when Baron set it beneath the lamp, the lines altered. Mountains rose where no mountains had been. Seas withdrew. Cities bloomed and vanished like breath upon glass. Names appeared in Latin, Greek, English, and unknown characters; then faded before he could be sure he had read them. He saw the Atlantic marked not as water but as a roof. He saw a city named Asterion, placed beneath no country and above no sea. He saw, in the margin, the words: “The door opens where memory, courage, and necessity meet.”
It was then that he heard the sound below.
Not the noise of the house settling, nor the step of the old caretaker who came by day and never after dusk. It was a careful sound, made by someone who wished not to make one. Baron closed the case, gathered the papers, and extinguished the lamp. The room sank into darkness, except where the wet street threw a faint reflection upon the ceiling.
The sound came again.
Baron moved to the door and listened. A board creaked upon the stair. Then another. Whoever ascended knew the house imperfectly, for he avoided the central treads but not the loose board near the landing. Baron looked about quickly. There was no weapon at hand except a bronze ruler, a poker by the cold grate, and a heavy ivory-handled magnifying glass. He took the poker.
The door-handle turned.
“Who is there?” Baron called.
There was no answer. The handle ceased moving.
For several seconds nothing happened. Then a soft voice, speaking through the wood, said, “You have opened what should have remained closed.”
The accent was not English. Nor was it quite German or French. It was the accent of a man who had learned many languages and belonged to none of them.
“My father left this house to me,” said Baron. “You are the trespasser.”
“Your father was also a trespasser.”
Baron tightened his grip upon the poker.
“What do you want?”
“The Chronicle.”
The word, so quietly spoken, settled the matter. Baron stepped backward, placed the leather case beneath his coat, and with his left hand drew the second map against his breast.
“You are misinformed,” he said.
The answer was a small laugh, almost pitying. “No. We are very old. We are seldom misinformed.”
Then the door burst inward.
Baron struck at the first figure as it entered, and the poker rang upon something harder than bone. The intruder stumbled but did not fall. He was masked, dressed in a dark travelling coat, and moved with astonishing quickness. A second man appeared behind him. Baron overturned the table, sending papers, specimens, and the dead lamp crashing between them. In that instant the room flared with a strange green light. It came from the Chronicle beneath his coat. The masked men stopped as if halted by a command. Their eyes, visible through narrow slits, were fixed not upon Baron’s face but upon his breast.
Baron did not wait to understand. He sprang toward the window, threw up the sash, and stepped onto the narrow iron balcony outside. The air was cold and smelled of rain, soot, and horses. Behind him the first man shouted in a language Baron did not know.
The balcony ran past two windows and ended beside a drainpipe. In childhood Baron had climbed stranger things than London drainpipes under less urgent circumstances. He descended rapidly, scraping his hands and tearing his sleeve, and dropped into the little yard behind the house. A gate opened into a passage between buildings. He heard the men above, then the crash of glass.
He ran.
London at night is not one city but many, and a fugitive may pass through several before he has crossed a mile. Baron ran through the scholarly London of shuttered windows and respectable squares; then through the commercial London of carts, lamps, and late clerks; then into a muddier region where the poor moved like shadows beneath railway arches, and every face seemed both curious and incurious. Twice he looked back. Once he thought he saw a tall figure pause beneath a lamp. Once he heard a whistle answered by another whistle far ahead.
The Chronicle had grown warm.
At last, breathless but composed by that necessity which makes men calm when comfort would make them foolish, Baron entered a cab stand near Euston Road. He gave the driver no address at first, but stepped inside and drew the curtains.
“Where to, sir?” asked the cabman.
Baron hesitated. The letter’s final line returned to him with peculiar force. Seek the one man in London who loves facts more than theories. He will not believe you, which is why he may be useful.
“Baker Street,” said Baron.
The cab lurched forward.
As it did, Baron opened the leather case once more. In the dim light he saw that the dark point beneath the crystal was no longer still. It had become a little star, burning without flame, and around the rim of the instrument one date shone more brightly than all the rest.
Then, from somewhere in the fog behind the cab, there came the sound of running feet.
Baron Trump and the Chronicle of Tomorrow
Part II
The Consulting Detective
Then, from somewhere in the fog behind the cab, there came the sound of running feet.
