They walked through the fog along a cobblestone thoroughfare which opened into a marketplace. They stopped, observing merchants hawking wares and women examining produce, inspecting fabrics, haggling for wool...
The locals were either oblivious or unconcerned of the happenings nearby in the harbor, and paid no attention to the two well-dressed but slightly unkempt men observing the scene.
"It appears Mister Henly that the time lapsed while away is not consistent."
Henly was silent. His room at the inn had long been re-let. Six weeks had passed. There was no explanation for this, assuming there may be an actual science at work. And even if there were, could a computer program trained in medicine ever decipher what even the most accomplished temporal physicist could not?
This was still assuming the chronoton surge was the result of logical behavior rather than deliberate tampering.
And what of Lord Myron? Was he whom he claimed to be, or there to monitor Henly to keep things going?
Henly raised his device for the fifth time that hour. It indicated an almost blurry intensity of radiation from the direction where they emerged early that morning.
As he pondered the readings, Myron stepped into the movement of the square and purchased a scone with a tin cup of hot cider.
Henly frowned behind his goggles. The readings were so intense yet so vague. How could that be? They did not resemble a phase shift; anyone unfamiliar could mistake it for one though...
...or was that the point?
He looked up at the grey sky.
Lord Myron watched as he sat on a large burlap sack, observing Henly's shifting facial expressions. The newest one looked promising.
Henly looked down and caught Myron in a half-smirk with a mouthful of food.
"What is it?"
Myron gulped hard, then chased it with some drink. After some moments he said, "For a moment I thought we were getting somewhere."
"I'm don't know..."
"Hold onto that thought, no matter how improbable."
Henly paused. He had witheld from Myron his true nature, and with it his lack of a "gut instinct." Still, there was something to be said for unvisited options when all likely avenues were exhausted. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle said as much...
"There is something not right about these readings. I've taken the radiation of the chronoton particles into consideration so that any phase shift on their part should be filtered out, yet the readings remain... 'fuzzy'."
Myron nodded.
"I'd like to run a scan of the pier and immediate vicinity, narrow the beam."
For reasons Henly couldn't fathom, a smile slowly crawled across Lord Myron's face.
"Good show, man. If anyone can crack this mystery, you can!"
For a microsecond, Henly wondered if his companion could be some form of artificial intelligence as well. Short of him being the source or cause of this phenomenon, which was highly unlikey. More like he'd come to this point in his people's history to learn first-hand the cause of some catastrophic event. It could explain why Neo Adapolis was in no known Federation navigation records.
"Myron," he whispered discretely as the man stood, dusted the crumbs off his coat, and walked up to him, "I think it's time you told me what happened here."
Myron responded with a nervous chuckle. "What gave you the idea that I know what will happen?"
"Everything."
The smile disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
"Well?"
Lord Myron grew very serious as he looked Henly in the eye. "Neo Adapolis, with all its inhabitants," he whispered, "disappeared from known existence."
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