Edited by Dennis Pepper, published by OUP @ £7.99.

There are some cracking good stories in here, especially one of my all-time favourites, A Sound Of Thunder by the brilliant Ray Bradbury. It`s an honour to have my own story, Timestorm, in the same book. Here`s an extract...

Red lightning burst on the West Hill without warning. Da Silva`s team was the nearest, out on routine patrol near the field-perimeter - And staying sharp on Doctor Carlson`s orders, because there had been a lot of disruption in the area just lately that boded ill for refs coming through...Refs, and whatever else the future cast up.

An alert crackled out over Danny Bryant`s helmet mike, the words badly distorted by static. Behind them, and beyond the harsh swishing of white noise, he could actually hear the boom and crash of Time`s ocean breaking on the shore of the night. Eternity coming in with the tide. It was the most wonderful, the most terrifying sound he could imagine.

Da Silva, the Team Leader, responded at once. He acknowledged Core Control`s message and then snapped out his orders to his men - splinter manoeuvre, in buddy-pairs, around the base of the hill and then in a twist pattern upwards. That should allow them to mop up incoming refs with minimum fuss or danger.

" Copy. Moving," was all Danny needed to say. Fifty metres away through the summer-rich maples he could see his team buddy Kane. Or at least, he could see the recognition lights glinting on Kane`s armour; a pattern of blue and gold sparkles that marked the man out immediately.

Danny got going. He spoke into his mike, giving orders to the weapon strapped to his back. It was a standard pulsegun that could do anything from raising goosebumps to shattering rocks. The settings shifted now to heavy stun: Danny swung the gun round off his shoulder and broke into the easy lope that brought him out on the track to West Hill. Kane soon joined him from a side path and they jog-trotted together heading for Zero Point.

" Whatcha think," Kane said, " Sols or civs?"

Danny grinned. Soldiers or civilians? This was leading to one of Kane`s bets and another chunk out of Danny`s pay. " I can`t afford your gambling, man," Danny came back, chuckling. " But I reckon civs."

People from the future, using time travel to escape the evils of the world yet-to-be. The scientists, the big brains, should have realised that chronotron technology would be used and abused like any of Man`s grand inventions. Sure, it stopped important people from aging; it lengthened the lifespan of machinery; it helped create some really interesting archaeological tools; it offered peepholes into the past; it had brought the dinosaurs back from the dead...But somewhere along the line, the awesome Time Line of the world, it had caused such dreadful devastation that people wanted to escape from it in droves.

Nobody really knew much about that devastation - The Catastrophe, as it had been called. It had happened - would happen, from Danny`s perspective - almost a million years in the future, or so the Time Techs believed. But Bryant was feeling its consequences now. Just as a stone sends ripples out over the water, so the effects of The Catastrophe came rippling back into the past, damaging the fabric of reality. When stray chronotron energy burst through into the present, its effects could be disastrous. Danny had seen a demonstration once where an airborne battletank was zapped with some C-particles. It had come apart like rotting fruit within seconds, reduced to dust inside a minute. The chronotron gun was the ultimate weapon, so terrible that no-one dared to use it. At least not yet. But one day in the future, they probably had. And maybe that was the what The Catastrophe was all about: the final war at the far end of time.

" Visual!" Kane yelled suddenly, startling Danny out of his dream. Sure enough, the craggy peak of West Hill was alive with electricity; or something like electricity, a spiderwork of red and white lightnings dancing over the rocks.

" Where to you suppose the zero point will be?"

Kane shrugged. They both slowed to a walk, each soldier`s breathing coming fast over the other`s intercom. Zero point was a natural node in the time flow, the place where the refugees broke through - not necessarily at the centre of the lightning storm, but often set some distance from it. There would be a glow in the air, a quiet brightening, a flurry of twinklings, and a man would suddenly be standing there, some mother`s son; or maybe a frightened family; or maybe a cadre of crack troops wanting to fight for their right to live in the past. But civs or sols, they were all refs that had to be stopped because, Rule One - you shouldn`t tamper with the basic machinery of the universe.

" The rocks outcrop again on the south side," Kane said. He had an instinct about such things. " The energy usually follows the lie of the land."

" Are you betting on it?" Danny quipped and this time Kane laughed, but said nothing.

They proceeded carefully, watching the head-up displays on their helmet visors with half an eye, but relying mainly on what they could see directly. The night was cloudy and marbled with moonlight; full of shadows and soft stirrings as the trees swayed in a warm southwesterly wind. High on the hill the lightnings flickered, and the ID lights of the field-soldiers winked as the teams continued their search pattern.

" I don`t like it," Kane said after some minutes of tautening silence.

" I`m getting odd sensor readings too - "

" Yeah, but it`s more than that...Can`t you feel it?"

Danny shook his head gently. Kane`s gut instincts were often dead right, and rarely entirely wrong. Something was happening out there. Something different. Tomorrow`s fingers tapping gently on the door of today.

Without warning the glows above the hill brightened and flared like fires fanned in a wind. There came a surge of pressure. Thunder rolled over. A vast auroral curtain of light swept out in all directions –

" Just there! Move - move!"...

    And then...?

Steve Bowkett 2001.

   Return to Contents...