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To my son, Randy Bain,

This story was written with him in mind

Prologue

The great ship entered the spiral arm of yet another galaxy. Only the beings in the control room were aware of trouble and they were terrified. It was theoretically possible for the time stress fields of the huge ship to get out of balance, but an actual occurrence was a rarity, something that had not happened for generations. The Engineer Commander's stalks sprang erect as wrongly colored patterns erupted inside its left forebrain, the engineer side, demanding immediate action. There was little time to spare, yet the Engineer Commander was forced to call on ancestral memory from one of its hindbrains in order to assess the problem. By the time a solution became apparent, it was almost too late. It did the only thing possible. It ordered the ship to cease its headlong flight in one violent maneuver, hoping the excess energy would discharge in one compact mass rather than leak backward into the ship and cause its utter destruction.

It worked, just barely. A globe of weirdly tortured space-time formed around the laboring stress fields, a darker black than the space surrounding it. The globe hovered, wobbling in place with the unbalanced fields like a dancer about to lose balance. The ship shuddered all through its mile long length, as if shivering in fear at impending destruction, then at the last possible second, tore loose from the newly formed mass of energized time, instantaneously imparting an equalizing velocity to it in the opposite direction. The ship continued on its way, slower now, but no longer threatened. It would never pass that way again, nor would its commander ever know or care about what happened to the energy it had lost.

The stark globe of space-time shot away in the opposite direction. It was more coherent than a laser beam, but even as laser light slowly attenuates over distance, so did this different form of energy. It spread, becoming miles wide in extent. The inherent energy, unable to maintain a single point of concentration, threw off smaller globes in a radiating circle, while its center gradually grew smaller. Where the globes of energy passed, hydrogen atoms and rare intrastellar molecules of cyanide compounds and other esoteric deep space molecules were thrown far back in time and replaced by other space and matter from that era in an almost imperceptible cone from it's point of origin, with the displacement in time gradually lessening as the attenuation grew. Given enough distance, the time energy would have lost all coherence, dissipating harmlessly over vast stellar distances. A few molecules displaced here and there would have made no difference whatever in the larger scheme of the universe. In fact, even when the globes impacted on a planet, the universe would go on in much the same fashion as it had for the last fifteen billion years. Such things had happened before. They would happen again.

The second circle of smaller segments of distorted time spread from the center as the globes of terribly wrong energy approached earth, then a third and fourth budded off, with more following, each growing progressively smaller as it broke from its parent. Now the separate pieces were spread over dozens of miles from the still intact, though much smaller center portion. More than two thousand of the small globes of space-time struck the atmosphere, displacing molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and lesser elements, but they slowed down hardly at all. Only a large mass could accomplish that, and the sleeping East Texas countryside served adequately. In a circle with a radius measuring scores of miles, in a pattern affecting the mass they encountered, pure chance decreed who and what was affected. In places, circles of woods, brush and pasture hundreds of yards in diameter suddenly disappeared in claps of thunder and ozone and reappeared far back in time, simultaneously sending comparable areas from there into the future. Animals in the affected zones, unable to understand the changed circumstances, blinked and attempted to carry on their lives as before. Some succeeded; some did not. For humans caught in the time storms and thrown back to the Pleistocene era, it was a different matter. They could reason and wonder and become fearful or joyful, as circumstances dictated. In many cases, it depended on where they were when the displacements occurred. It all cases where humans were caught, they believed that they were the only ones affected. At first, that is. Eventually, many of them would make contact with inhabitants of other displaced areas. Sometimes they wished they hadn't.

Chapter One

As Derek pulled his pickup into the circle at the end of the indifferently graveled road leading to the farmhouse, Sheila Holloway noticed immediately that, as she expected, her parents were still gone. On Saturday nights they might play forty-two with the Marlin family until well after midnight. That suited her fine. It was still only a little past ten, and she and Derek could sit in his pickup for an hour or so with little chance of interruption. She wanted to know where her relationship with him was going and this would be a good time to talk.

"You want another beer?"

"No," Sheila said, "and you'd better not either. You've already had three. If we're still here when Mom and Dad get home and they smell beer on your breath, we'll both be in trouble."

"One more won't hurt. They won't be back for another hour, at least."

"No." Part of Sheila's protest was simply that she didn't really care for the taste of beer, and when Derek had more than three or four, she didn't like the smell of it on his breath when he kissed her. And she wanted to be kissed. Her sixteen-year-old body was still a mystery to her, a thing to be explored and tested, like a swimmer working up to a dive from the high board, no longer content with mastery of the one still occupied by kids. She leaned into Derek's embrace. He kissed her, his breath smelling faintly of alcohol and tobacco.

She thought Derek would be nice, in a way, if only he had interests other than hunting, fishing and drinking beer with the other seniors. Nevertheless, she allowed him more liberties than she ever had with other boys. It was a puzzle to her sometimes, but a minor one. At least he showed some consideration, touching her gently, rather than the rough and grasping embraces of some boys she had dated. His hand moved over her breast, and she allowed it, liking the sensation of his strong fingers as he squeezed and molded it in his hand. His tongue entered her mouth and explored pleasantly, like warm sunshine on bare skin. After a while he pulled her closer, letting her feel the male hardness pressing against her thigh, hoping that she would react to the sensation. Sheila did react, liking the feel of his body against her own. She allowed him to unbutton her blouse and slip his hand inside her bra. A wave of liquid warmth spread from her breast down to her belly, causing her to squirm restlessly against him.

Had she drank one more beer, or had Derek not rushed things quite so much, she might have given in. Her young body was demanding release, beginning to overpower the dictates of reason, but Derek moved too fast. He left her breast and moved his hand down between her thighs, rubbing too urgently, too suddenly, too overpoweringly intimate with his attentions, digging his fingers into the denim of the jeans between her legs as if grabbing for a slippery prize that wouldn't come loose.

Sheila broke away from him, breathing heavily. She pulled her blouse together and began buttoning it.

"Sheila--"

"No." She fended off an encircling arm. "It's getting late anyway. Mom and Dad will be home before long. Let's just sit and talk."

"I'm too bothered to talk. You know what you do to me." Derek reached behind the seat and retrieved another beer. Defiantly, he popped the top and tilted it to his mouth.

"If you're going to drink that, I'm going in."

"Aw, this won't hurt me." Derek pulled out a pack of Cambridge and lit a cigarette, hanging it from the corner of his mouth.

"Do what you want to. I'm going inside." Sheila slid over to the passenger door, frustrated and irritated.

"Don't be mad."

"I'm not mad."

"See you tomorrow?"

Sheila relented. After all, he hadn't really acted much different than he usually did. She leaned forward, kissed him on the mouth and slid out of the truck. "Why don't you try getting to school a little early in the morning? Maybe we can talk before history class?"

"Okay. See you then."

She closed the door and walked the few steps up onto the front porch, using the inside light filtering out through a window to find the light switch there. She flicked it on, then turned, intending to wave, but Derek was already driving aw...