by Jason Ayres
The only people close by were an elderly woman and two little girls, brightly dressed in colourful hats and scarves. They were about fifty yards away standing next to a felled elm tree trunk, feeding morsels of bread to an eager crowd of hungry ducks. They didn’t appear to have noticed his arrival. He began to stroll nonchalantly down the pathway in their direction.
As Josh was about to find out, even if this was the right place, the right time, and the right universe, it wasn’t going to be without its complications. He had arrived less than a minute ago, and already something extremely strange was about to unfold.
The younger of the two girls looked up at him, but rather than go back to what she was doing, began peering at him intently. He felt uncomfortable and looked away – staring back at a small girl in the park who couldn’t have been more than five or six simply wasn’t something a fifty-four-year-old man ought to be doing.
But if he hoped to ignore her, he was wrong. Next time he glanced towards her she was running right towards him.
This was somewhat unsettling so he turned around, deciding to walk back in the opposite direction. But that was nothing compared to what happened next.
“Doctor Gardner, wait!” she cried out.
She knows my name, thought Josh. How can she know my name? He wasn’t a doctor, but she had got his surname right. That couldn’t be just a coincidence.
He stopped and slowly turned back round, noticing that the elderly woman, whom he took to be her grandmother, was also walking towards him and shouting after the girl.
“Amy, what do you think you’re doing?” yelled the elderly, white-haired woman. She was surprisingly sprightly for her apparent age, but no match for the child’s speed. “Come back at once!”
Amy. What was significant about that name? She had now reached him and as the words started tumbling out of her mouth, he quickly realised exactly who this mysterious girl in her rainbow scarf and bobble hat was.
“Listen, we don’t have much time,” she began in her squeaky, high-pitched voice. “My name is Amy Reynolds. I was a nurse at the John Radcliffe Hospital in January 2025 when you came in and did something that sent me back in time. Now I’m falling backwards through my own life and I need you to do something about it because in less than two weeks I’m going to reach a time before I was born which I presume will mean I will be dead.”
This was all said in ten seconds flat and it was as far as she got because at that point her grandmother reached her and pulled her away, all the time apologising profusely.
Josh himself didn’t say a word, his mind working overtime as he attempted to digest and make sense of what she had just told him.
Wriggling and trying to escape her grandmother’s grip as she dragged her away, young Amy turned around to face Josh once more, shouting out, “Please, remember what I said.”
Josh still didn’t say anything but he smiled briefly, giving her a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement. He had taken in what she had said, even if hadn’t yet figured out exactly how all this had happened and what he could possibly do about it.
Then he walked away, along the edge of the riverbank, in serious need of a cup of coffee and some time to analyse this brief exchange and come up with some answers. It had come completely out of the blue and certainly hadn’t been something he had been expecting. He hadn’t expected to be recognised by anyone in 1992.
There was only one possible explanation. He had thought that it had only been him that had been affected by the time-travel accident in 2025, but clearly it wasn’t. Now it wasn’t just him he had to worry about getting home. He was going to have to think about Amy, too.
Before he could ponder any further on that, he realised he had an immediate and new problem on his hands – or to be more precise, on his back.
As always with his travels through time, he was wearing his trusty backpack, a navy blue, fabric pack of the type favoured by hikers that stretched right down below his waist.
Normally the padded black straps provided plenty of comfort, even packed out as it was with all his time-travelling gear. But right now it was anything but comfortable.
Suddenly he felt a searing heat through his shoulder blades and instinctively tore off the backpack. There was an acrid smell of burning rubber and plastic in the air and a fizzling and popping sound as if someone had set a firework off inside. As he removed it and turned to look, that was exactly what it looked like. There were no visible flames but the back of the pack was literally melting.
He couldn’t afford to lose his backpack. All his currency and detailed notes he needed to survive in the twentieth century were inside. Despite the heat, he grabbed at the red-hot zip, trying to ignore the burning sensation searing through his fingers.
He had a pretty good idea what was causing this and when he wrenched the bag open, his suspicions were confirmed. The tachyometer, his only means of travelling through time, had gone haywire.
It was glowing and sparking like an out of control electrical cable and he knew he had to get it out of the bag right now before he lost everything. He just had to hope it didn’t end up seriously injuring him or, worse, in the process.
He tore off his coat and then his jumper, the blast of cold winter air on his bare arms a sharp contrast to the heat in his fingers. Using his jumper like an impromptu oven glove, he grabbed hold of the tachyometer, swiftly pulling it out and then quickly dropping it again, as an agonising pain shot through his hands. This was hotter than any tray he might have pulled out of an oven.
The tachyometer fell to the ground, sparking, bounced once and promptly vanished from existence.
Where had it gone? Or was it more a case of when? thought Josh. The tachyometer had already been badly damaged by the earlier accident and had been barely functioning on his recent travels.
Clearly his last trip through time had finally been too much for it and it had gone berserk. Josh strongly suspected that it had probably activated itself, creating a new time bubble and sending itself off through time to goodness knows when.
That settled it, then. He was in 1992 for the duration. There would be no more trips back through time and all his eggs were now in one basket – being rescued by his future self. At least he was safe, or so it seemed. If this world was as normal as it appeared then he ought to be able to survive.
Safe he may have been, but comfortable he certainly wasn’t. The burns on his hands were growing more agonising by the second. The temperature of the tachyometer must have been hundreds of degrees.
Desperate to cool them, he stumbled towards the river and threw himself face first to the ground, getting covered in mud in the process. Then he plunged his hands into the freezing cold River Cherwell, much to the consternation of the assembled raft of ducks who scattered in all directions, quacking with disapproval.
The water provided some temporary relief but he knew he was going to have blisters at the very least. He just hoped it wouldn’t be bad enough to require hospital attention. He’d had enough of hospitals for the time being, and goodness knows what primitive methods they used to treat burns in 1992. Josh had done plenty of research on the year on the internet before he had left his previous year, 2014, but medical procedures hadn’t been part of it.
Pain receding, temporarily, he turned his attention back to the bag which thankfully had not actually caught fire. He could see from the outside that it was badly charred and melted. Had his stuff inside survived?
A quick glance around suggested that no one had seen the scenes that had just unfolded. Amy’s grandmother had dragged her well away by now and there was no one else nearby.
Perhaps that was just as well as the sight of a fully grown man lying face-down on a muddy bank in the middle of winter with his hands in the river wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. One thing his travels had taught him was that when arriving in a new time zone it was generally a good idea to keep a low profile.
Taking his hands out of the water, he could feel the heat from his back
pack as he approached. Despite this he felt cold in the January air, dressed as he was now in just a T-shirt. His jumper was useless now, with a large, charred hole in it where he had picked up the tachyometer. Thankfully his coat was undamaged, though it was now somewhat dirty from being dropped in the mud.
He picked it up, wincing, and did his utmost to put it on without touching the sore parts of his fingers. This was surprisingly difficult. When it was done he went back to the river to dip his hands in for another cooling.
He knew any relief would remain temporary so as soon as he removed his hands again he went straight to the backpack, hoping it had cooled enough that he wouldn’t cause himself any further burns. It was vital he rescue whatever he could from the bag.
He spent a couple of minutes, rummaging through, trying to avoid touching any of the melted plastic inside. Most of his clothes were damaged and he was also horrified to discover that he had lost a great deal of money.
He had managed to bring with him a couple of thousand pounds in used banknotes appropriate to the era, all bound up in elastic bands. Much of this was charred and clearly unusable but thankfully the tachyometer had not touched the bottom stack of around 500 pounds which looked mostly intact.
This would be enough to get him through the next few days, assuming of course that the notes were legal tender. Not every version of Britain he had visited had used sterling.
He had also brought three notebooks with him with all the details he needed for this time period, including detailed sports and horse racing results, tabulated by month so that he could live a comfortable lifestyle funded by betting.
Unfortunately, the first notebook, containing all the information for January and most of February, was as charred through as many of his banknotes. He was amazed it hadn’t actually caught fire but maybe the lack of oxygen in the bag had saved that from happening.
He had no knowledge now, other than what he could try and remember, of anything that he could invest any money in now for several weeks.
“So much for staying at The Randolph, then,” he glumly remarked. Once spring rolled around, he would be fine, but how was he going to live for the next two months? He couldn’t imagine £500 would get him very far, even at 1992 prices.
If things got tight, he might even have to get a job. He hadn’t had what most people would consider a proper job in years. Yes, he had a nice salary at the university, but it was hardly work. Most of the time, he was just messing about in the lab, chucking in the odd lecture when he could be bothered.
What could he do in this time zone? Stack shelves in Tesco? With his blistered hands he wouldn’t even be able to do that for a while.
He wouldn’t even know how to go about getting a job. It would be hard enough in his century but how would he find one here? They didn’t even have the internet! He may have made copious notes about sports results and news stories from 1992, but very little to prepare for the reality of what actually living in this era was like.
He thought about the smartphone in his pocket. It was now useless. It may have been charged up but there was no network to connect it to and even if there had been there would be nothing to connect to. Wikipedia, Amazon, BBC News, Google. None of it existed. How did people find things out in this time period? Go to a library? He remembered there used to be one near Westgate called the Central Library, long closed down by the mid-twenty-first century.
Then there were newspapers of course. He was pretty sure people used to advertise jobs in them. Presumably to get one you needed some sort of identity – which he wasn’t sure he even had anymore until he had properly been through the contents of his backpack.
What a start this had turned out to be – first his encounter with Amy, then the demise of the tachyometer and much of his survival kit, not to mention the burns to his hands.
Carefully picking up the still warm backpack, he tucked it under his arm as the straps he usually attached it to his back with were now welded to the edge.
“Sod going for a coffee,” he said to himself. “After all this I need a drink!” And with that, he finally began to make his way out of the park.
Chapter Three
Wednesday 1st January 1992
Despite some cosmetic changes here and there, the heart of historic Oxford appeared to be more or less the same as ever. After all that had gone wrong already it was reassuring to see that he seemed to be in a universe at the very least similar to his own. Now he just had to hope nuclear war didn’t break out unexpectedly like it had once before.
He made for his usual bolt-hole, The Bear on Alfred Street, which seemed to be a reliable standby in any era and any universe. On the way he examined the scene around him closely, noting some of the differences between this time period and his own. Whilst the architecture might be timeless, the dressing around it wasn’t.
He noticed many squat metal dustbins on the street with black plastic lids. They were very different to the multicoloured wheelie bins of his century. There didn’t appear to be any separate recycling facilities. He wondered when that had changed.
Josh wasn’t totally unfamiliar with this era as he had visited it once before, a year and a half prior to this in the summer of 1990.
On that occasion he had been following up on one of the many mysteries he had investigated during his time-travelling adventures. He had come to Oxford to meet a man called Thomas Scott who had claimed to be a fellow time traveller.
At the time, neither of them had any idea how Thomas had ended up living the strange life he had, moving backwards through his life one day at a time. Now, Josh had deduced that it must have been down to the same accident that had brought him here. Thomas’s body had been in the bed in the hospital room when the accident had occurred, which he now knew had also affected Amy, the little girl he had met in the park.
Josh knew he needed to face up to the fact that his time-travelling wasn’t just messing with his own life. It was affecting other people as well.
When he had come here in August 1990 it had been during a blistering heatwave and he had sat outside The Bear beneath an umbrella advertising some long-forgotten brand of beer. There would be no sitting outside today at the desolate, windswept tables. Opening the black front door, unchanged from his time, he had expected the pub to be as busy as it usually was, but it turned out to be remarkably quiet.
Other than a couple of overweight middle-aged men with beards, smoking pipes at the bar, he was the only customer, despite it being early afternoon. He was shocked when he first saw the pipes, filling the air with their sickly sweet aromas, before he remembered that in this era people were allowed to smoke in pubs.
To someone from Josh’s time, where smoking was banned pretty much everywhere other than in private residences, this seemed quite archaic. Still, a century earlier they used to send kids up chimneys so he guessed it was all progress.
“What happened to your bag?” enquired the barman as Josh approached the bar, gesturing at the molten mess Josh was still clutching under his arm. He was a young chap with short-cropped ginger hair and a very rural accent. If asked to name what county, Josh would have guessed Somerset. He had noticed that accents tended to be stronger the further back he went in time.
“I had a small accident,” said Josh, looking at the two men smoking, inspiring him to add, “Faulty cigarette lighter.”
“I should say so,” replied the barman. “What was it, one of those Zippo jobs?”
“Yes, that’s it,” replied Josh, having no idea what a Zippo was, but the barman seemed to buy it.
“What can I get you?”
Josh cast his eye along the impressive array of real ales on the bar. He had got a taste for this stuff after Peter, his former English teacher, had introduced him to it on a boozy night out in The Eagle and Child. Prior to that, like most of his generation, he had been brought up on lager.
“I’ll have a pint of Old Peculier please,” he said.
“Good choice,” said one of the two bea
rded men, both of whom were also drinking real ale. He pulled on his pipe and looked Josh up and down. Meanwhile, the barman began the process of pulling the beer through the hand-drawn pump.
While he was waiting for his drink, Josh reached into his trouser pocket for some of the money he had kept separate from the rest in his bag. At least that wouldn’t be singed. His hands hurt as he rummaged in his pocket but eventually he pulled out a crisp and pristine ten-pound note.
Now that’s a real note, he thought. It was much larger than the polymer ones of his time, printed in brown ink on proper paper.
“One-thirty please,” said the barman, eyeing the note with suspicion.
The barman’s look didn’t reassure Josh and he was briefly worried that he might be in a world where his currency wasn’t valid.
To his relief, the barman simply said, “Haven’t you got anything smaller?”
“Sorry,” said Josh. “I’ve just been to the cashpoint.”
“That’s alright,” said the barman. “I just haven’t got a lot of change yet. We’re a bit quiet as you can see.”
“Yeah, why is that?” asked Josh. “It’s normally packed in here.”
“Probably because it was New Year’s Eve last night and everyone’s still hungover,” replied the barman. “It’ll pick up later.”
He looked Josh up and down before adding. “Do you know that you’re covered all over in mud?”
Josh had forgotten about that. Lying face-down in the park at this time of year wasn’t a good idea.
“Err, yes,” he replied, before adding the first thing that came into his head by way of explanation, “Football training.”
“Aren’t you a little old for football training?” asked the barman in his strong Somerset twang, a sceptical look on his face.
“Actually, I’m only minus nine,” he quipped, which was technically correct. “I look old for my age.”
