by Jason Ayres
She noticed that several fag butts had been chucked into the large, open fireplace in the wall opposite the bar, more evidence of an after-hours party. The fireplace was hardly ever used these days. It had been such a mild winter that most of the lorry load of logs that the landlord had ordered in for the season were still sitting in the car park.
Despite the ever-increasing popularity of e-cigarettes, the older drinkers and hardened smokers in the pub still preferred their real fags – even at £20 per packet. The fact that the ends were in the fireplace was all the evidence needed of an after-hours party – it was strictly illegal when the pub was open.
The back wall of the pub was completely dominated by a huge TV screen, a good eight feet across, positioned above a stage. It was the latest in state-of-the-art entertainment – a holographic television which brought live sports action directly into the pub.
She grabbed the remote from behind the bar and flicked it on. Unsurprisingly, it was tuned into the sports channel. She flicked it across to one of the commercial channels and started tidying up the mess. Someone was bound to ask to have the sport on once the pub was open, but she wasn’t going to change it back until she had to.
The door behind the bar that led upstairs to the private quarters swung open and the landlord emerged, looking somewhat the worse for wear. He was overweight, untidy, and looked as if he’d gone to bed in the clothes he was wearing.
Richard Kent was 52 years old and had been landlord of the Red Lion for eight years. He was well known in the local area. For many years prior to taking over the pub, he had been in charge of the local police force. Unfortunately, things had gone rather wrong for him after a botched case involving a missing girl which he had called spectacularly wrong. After that he was invited to retire quietly from the force, on a very generous redundancy package.
At first, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his newfound freedom until his wife suggested that, as he spent so much time in the Red Lion, he might as well go and live there. He took her at her word and with the old landlord selling up, seized his chance and bought the lease.
Debbie, his long-suffering wife, was secretly rather pleased. She’d always wanted to run a restaurant and the pub came complete with one attached. She took over the restaurant while Kent managed the pub side of things. This suited him rather well. He still had her close by to look after him and cook him his meals, but running the restaurant kept her out of his way most of the time.
To say Kent was rather traditional in his attitude towards marriage would have been an understatement.
“Morning, Lauren,” he said. “Sorry about the mess. Had a bit of a late one last night with a few of the boys.”
“So I see,” remarked Lauren. “I see the cleaners haven’t been in again.”
“No, I was meaning to talk to you about that. We had a bit of a disagreement,” said Kent.
“What sort of a disagreement?” she asked.
“Well, basically, she wanted extra money for doing upstairs as well, and I said no. So she walked out.”
“So are you going to get someone else?” asked Lauren.
“Well, thing is, I was kind of hoping you might do it,” suggested Kent, tentatively.
“What, in addition to all the other things I do around here?” replied Lauren, feeling somewhat peeved. “I more or less run this place for you single-handed these days as it is.”
Before Kent could reply further, the door opened behind him and Debbie emerged, looking none too pleased.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, clearly on the warpath. “What time did you get to bed last night?”
“Oh, about half past twelve, I think,” replied Kent.
“And the rest!” exclaimed Debbie. “I woke up about 2am, you weren’t in bed and I could hear a right racket coming from downstairs.”
“I guess it could have been a bit later. The darts team had their last match of the winter season last night and we were celebrating winning the league. I have to socialise with the regulars, my love, it’s all part of the job.”
“You practically are one of the regulars,” she said. “I sometimes think you forget which side of the bar you are meant to be on.”
“There’s no point owning a pub if you can’t enjoy a couple of pints now and again,” he replied.
“Pints – more like gallons judging by this lot.” Debbie glanced around the room. Lauren was keeping out of the conversation and tidying the place up, but it was obvious no cleaning had been done.
“Look at the state of this place!” exclaimed Debbie. “Why haven’t the cleaners been in?”
“It’s alright. Lauren doesn’t mind doing it, do you, Lauren?” replied Kent.
“Lauren’s got enough to do,” said Debbie before Lauren had a chance to respond. “I’m going to phone that cleaner and ask her why she hasn’t come in.”
“Ah, that might be a little awkward,” said Kent, and he began to explain the situation. Lauren missed the rest of the conversation because she was interrupted by a loud banging on the front door. It was two minutes to twelve. Someone was eager.
“Come on, open up,” shouted a voice from outside.
Lauren took the keys from a hook on the wall next to the till, crossed the stone floor and opened the large, wooden door. She already knew who it was going to be. He turned up as regular as clockwork at the same time every day. She opened up the door and standing in the doorway was the pub’s resident alcoholic, unemployable waster, Andy Green.
She noted he was wearing the same green jumper he’d had on all week, beneath the ancient denim jacket which looked as if it was only held together by dirt. He already smelt of booze. No doubt he’d “breakfasted” at “Ye Olde Chapel” up the road which opened at 9am.
“Morning, Andy,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Alright, gorgeous,” he replied. “You’re looking as hot as ever.”
Andy never stopped flirting with Lauren, and she played up to it a little, even though she wouldn’t dream of sleeping with him in a million years. It was good for business to flirt with the customers, Kent had told her. So Andy remained ever hopeful. He’d heard other blokes in the pub say that Lauren was an easy lay, and he figured it was bound to be his turn sooner or later.
Andy was either the pub’s best or worst customer, depending on how you looked at it. He was the best because he spent more money than anyone else. He was the worst because when he was drunk he was a complete pain in the arse.
Kent could only see £ signs, though, where Andy was concerned. He had plenty of money. He’d inherited his sister’s house when she’d died a couple of years ago, promptly sold it for £500,000 and moved into a rented bedsit. He’d been pissing away the proceeds ever since. He hadn’t worked in years, and probably never would again.
Lauren returned to the bar where she caught the tail-end of the conversation between Kent and his wife.
“Just you get on that phone,” ordered Debbie, “and tell her you’ll pay her the extra money and to get herself down here tomorrow morning. And don’t be so tight in future.”
With that she stormed back off upstairs. Lauren began pouring Andy his customary lager and looked up at the television screen. The midday news had come on and the screen was showing some spectacular pictures of the new comet.
Kent and Andy were oblivious to it. Kent was sitting at the bar reading The Sun, whilst all Andy was interested in was getting his hands on his pint. She left them to it and went outside for a smoke.
Chapter Three – 12th April 2029 (3.30pm)
Kent and Andy may not have been interested in the comet, but there were plenty of people who were.
Josh Gardner was just finishing giving his afternoon lecture. He’d been at Oxford University now for nine years. A mathematical prodigy in his youth, he’d had no difficulty securing a place at one of Oxford’s leading colleges. After that he’d stayed on, done a PhD, and started lecturing.
The money from his father’s building firm
had seen him comfortably through college, and he was now earning a good living from the university.
All of this gave him the opportunity to pursue the thing he really wanted to do. Ever since his and Charlie’s adventures with The Time Bubble all those years ago, he’d been fascinated by the whole concept of time travel.
Since he’d been at the university, he’d made the acquaintance of Professor Anthony Hamilton. Anthony was an old school friend of Peter Grant’s, Josh’s time-travelling former English teacher.
He’d confided in Anthony all about The Time Bubble, and the professor was only too happy to get Josh involved in his tachyon experiments. Between them they’d built a device capable of detecting and measuring tachyon particles. They’d taken it to the railway tunnel where they’d discovered The Time Bubble, and the readings had gone off the scale as if they’d put a Geiger counter in a nuclear reactor.
They had noted down detailed measurements of the speed of the particles in the Bubble and discovered that they were moving at a pace many times faster than expected. By comparing these figures against normal particles in lab conditions, Josh had been able to correlate them against the length of time that they knew Peter was in the Bubble.
Since then, Josh had had two things in mind. Firstly, what if there were more Time Bubbles out there? Could they track them down? He spent a lot of time searching the internet for clues to possible locations. He looked into planes and ships that had mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.
Closer to home, he looked for missing person cases that had never been solved, tracing their last known movements to see if he could find any trace of tachyon activity. All had turned up blank so far – but he remained hopeful.
Secondly, he and the professor were working on another idea. They were conducting experiments in the lab with tachyon particles, attempting to speed them up and slow them down. Josh had the ultimate ambition of being able to create a device that could alter the speed of the particles so that it would be possible to take control of The Time Bubble, allowing people to move forward and possibly even backwards through time at their will.
Admittedly, this was all very much in the theoretical rather than the practical stage, but Josh had plenty of time on his side. He was only 27: he was young, ambitious and dedicated. He had no doubt that one day he would unlock the secrets of time travel.
Today, though, there were more pressing matters in hand. He’d been having a relationship with a researcher who worked in the Astrophysics Department and she’d sent him several messages during the lecture saying she needed to see him urgently. He headed straight out of the lecture theatre and across the quadrangle.
Alice had a classic look of academia about her. Her shoulder-length, blonde hair was tied up in a bun, and she wore thin, wire-framed glasses and a smart business suit. The first time they’d gone to bed and she’d let her hair down, Josh hadn’t been able to resist uttering a classic cliché he’d seen in an old 20th century movie. “But Alice, you’re beautiful!” he exclaimed. They both fell about laughing.
That was three months ago and since then they’d spent most of their evenings together. They had clicked: same interests, same sense of humour. It was an easy relationship to be in.
Alice lectured in Astronomy. The university had funded the building of its own observatory during the past decade, and Alice was one of the privileged few with unlimited access to it. She’d spent the morning tracking the comet’s progress towards Earth and now she had something distinctly worrying on her mind.
Josh could see straightaway from the look on her face that she hadn’t summoned him here for fun. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Come and have a look at this,” she said. She moved over to a large touch screen set into the wall with a map of the solar system on it. “I’ve been tracking the path of the comet as it approaches Earth,” she said. “And I’ve discovered something extremely worrying.”
“But the comet isn’t going to pass within a million miles of Earth, is it?” asked Josh. “You said so yourself last night.”
“No it isn’t – you can see here.” She touched the screen, zooming in on Earth. “This is Earth’s orbit, over the next few days.” The screen showed Earth spinning through space on a loop, backwards and forwards, one day per second.
“Now here is the projected path of the comet.” She touched the screen again and the comet appeared. It passed by harmlessly, some distance away on the screen.
“OK, so like you said, it’s going to miss us,” remarked Josh. “So where’s the problem?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. She cleared the screen, and started again. “OK here is the Earth’s orbit. And this time, instead of the comet, I’m going to add Asteroid Apophis which is also due to pass close by in the next couple of days.”
She overlaid the asteroid onto the screen and ran the loop again. As with the comet, the asteroid passed by, missing Earth by the projected distance of 18,000 miles, as had always been predicted.
“I still don’t see the problem,” said Josh.
“This is the problem,” replied Alice. She cleared the screen again and added just the comet and the asteroid. This time they intersected exactly.
“Are you saying that the asteroid and the comet are on collision course?” asked Josh.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” replied Alice. “And if my calculations are correct, we won’t have long to wait to see it. It’s going to happen around 9.30pm this evening.”
“So how come no one else has noticed this before?” asked Josh. “There are observatories all over the world which are much more advanced than this. Surely they must have spotted it.”
“Would they, though? Everyone’s been comparing the comet’s path in relation to Earth and the asteroid’s path in relation to Earth. Maybe no one’s thought of putting them all together. Plus there’s the fact that the comet came in quite close to Mars a couple of days ago, and the gravitational pull of that planet has altered its course slightly away from what was being predicted. Prior to that, it would have missed the asteroid by some margin.
“I thought astronomers had all these measurements down to a T and would have known that was going to happen,” said Josh.
“Only with objects we know about. This comet is new; we’ve not had time to get a proper fix on it. It’s not like, say, Halley’s Comet, which comes around every 76 years. We’ve been tracking that for centuries.”
“So if what you’re saying is true, what are the implications?” asked Josh.
“Possibly something more horrible than I dare imagine,” she replied, “but I don’t think we should speculate at this stage. One thing’s for sure, though, we need to have our eyes on the skies at half past nine tonight.”
Josh could see the worry in her eyes. She was a brilliant astronomer, and if she was worried then things were potentially very serious. He still couldn’t get over the question, though, as to why she had spotted the potential collision and no one else had.
In fact, plenty of others had. In major observatories across many nations of the world, astronomers were coming to the same conclusion. On informing the authorities of their find, however, the rhetoric was invariably the same.
In the interests of national security and to avoid panic, no one was to know. In America, Russia, China and all the other major world powers, a total news blackout was imposed, at least until after the event.
The really worrying thing for everyone involved was that, even with all of the most advanced equipment available, no one could precisely predict exactly what would happen after the collision. But they would not have long until they found out.
Chapter Four – 12th April 2029 (5.30pm)
Kaylee was playing with her god-daughter, Jessica, when she heard the key turn in the lock of the front door. They were playing a game of Scrabble, which Jess had received as a birthday present the previous weekend. Despite having only just turned nine, Jess was more than holding her own. She’d clearly inherited
her father’s literary prowess.
Kaylee was like a big sister to Jess. They spent a lot of time together. They could easily have been mistaken for sisters, even though Kaylee was old enough to be her mother. Both had long, blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. Kaylee and Jess’s mother, Hannah, had been best friends ever since they’d met during that crazy week when The Time Bubble had been discovered.
Hannah was dedicated to her career, and as a single parent often had difficulty juggling her work with caring for her daughter. But Kaylee was happy to help. Working from home a lot of the time as she did, her days were flexible enough that she could pick Jess up from school most of the time when Hannah was working.
She loved looking after Jess, and had begun to feel more than a little broody. It felt like a good time to be starting a family. She and Charlie were happily settled; they both had good jobs and she felt they were at the right age to do it. She had broached the idea to Charlie a couple of months ago and he’d been all for it. Not only did he love the idea of fatherhood, but when she suggested there would be a lot of extra sex into the bargain that sealed the deal. So she came off the pill and waited for nature to take its course.
There was no positive news yet, but she had a good stock of pregnancy tests in her top drawer in the bedroom and took one every week. Tonight was the night and she was eagerly looking forward to it. She had a really good feeling about it: she just sensed that it was going to be good news.
“Hi, Mum!” said Jess excitedly. “I’m winning! Look, I got a triple word score!”
“I never was much good at this game,” commented Kaylee.
Hannah was tired after a long day at work. She had been the D.I. in charge of the local police station ever since Kent had retired, and the never-ending amount of “paperwork” she had to do kept her at her desk most of the day.
It actually involved very little paper these days, but the old term was still used. Despite everything being very hi-tech and fast now, it seemed the administration increased exponentially to cancel any gains from the new technology.
