The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  The Professor also came up with an idea to try and keep people out of the way, which could also explain the strange appearance of whoever arrived. It turned out that one of his many hobbies was that he liked to make amateur films in his spare time and just happened to have a rather large and unwieldy video camera.

  By 10.30am on Saturday morning all the gear was set up by the riverbank and Peter was busy asking anyone who approached their location if they would mind keeping their distance as they were shooting scenes for a film.

  It clearly wasn’t a big-budget movie, what with there being only three of them there, but hopefully it would be convincing enough that they could pass off whoever came through the bubble as being in costume for the film. Then they just had to hope the new arrival wasn’t hostile.

  The plan wasn’t working out particularly well. Whilst they had been successful in setting up an exclusion zone of around fifty yards, far from being able to keep people away they were hanging around trying to get a glimpse of what was happening.

  “Ooh, you’re making a film!” exclaimed one rather rotund lady in her mid-thirties. “Who’s in it?”

  “Is it anyone famous?” asked another, younger woman. “Is it Michael Douglas? He’s gorgeous.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” insisted Peter, annoyed and well aware that someone was about to emerge from the bubble any second. “Don’t you think there would be a few more people here if we were filming a blockbuster? It’s just a student project for the university and really not very interesting, now could you please move on?!”

  “What’s it about?” asked the plump lady, looking over. “Ooh, look at him!” she exclaimed. “He must be cold in that costume.”

  Peter looked over and caught his first glimpse of the newest time traveller to descend on Christ Church Meadow. The man was more or less what he had been expecting to see. He could quite easily have stepped straight off the set of One Million Years B.C.

  The man was short, probably no more than five feet in height, with long, straggly hair and a beard to match. He was very lean and naked apart from the brown leather skin from some long-dead animal wrapped around his waist.

  What was concerning was that he was standing right in front of Josh and the Professor brandishing a crudely fashioned wooden spear with what looked like a sharply carved stone head.

  “Bloody hell,” said Peter, walking briskly towards them, as the small crowd of onlookers observed.

  “I know you probably can’t understand me, but we mean you no harm,” said Josh, getting nothing but a wild-eyed stare in return.

  “Poor chap’s probably terrified,” said the Professor, looking at him closely. “I’d say late Stone Age, judging by his clothes and the spear.”

  The Stone Age man uttered a few grunts, looking all around as he did so. Then without warning he shouted something completely unintelligible and ran straight towards the approaching Peter, brandishing his spear.

  “Bloody hell!” exclaimed Josh. He’d persuaded Peter to come back and help, and now he was about to get him killed.

  However, the Stone Age man went straight past a terrified-looking Peter, ignoring him completely, and on towards the group of onlookers.

  “Oh my God, I knew this film thing was a bad idea. We’ve attracted a ready-made crowd for him to attack,” said Josh.

  “Possibly not,” said the Professor, who was busy filming the whole thing on his video camera. “I don’t think it’s the people he’s going for.”

  Sure enough, the man ran straight past the group of twenty or so observers who burst into a spontaneous round of applause, still thinking they were watching some filming. Josh looked at where the man was heading and realised what the Professor had meant.

  Just across the other side of the tree-lined avenue was a field full of cows that had grazed on the meadow for centuries. The Stone Age man raced towards these now and thrust his spear right into the neck of one of them, drawing gasps from the crowd whose appreciation of what they were watching had taken a distinct downturn.

  “He’s a hunter,” said the Professor. “Food’s hard to come by where he comes from, I imagine. Seeing that field full of cows was probably the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for us.”

  The man had now climbed over the fence and was stabbing at the cow over and over again. After a few more stabs, it fell to the ground. Meanwhile, the other cows had panicked and run off.

  There was a lot of screaming and shouting going on amongst the crowd which doubtless included plenty of animal-lovers.

  “I don’t think there will be any need for you to call the police,” said Josh, noting a woman in the crowd speaking into the same model of mobile phone that the Professor had. “They’ll be here soon enough.”

  “Well, thank-you very much for that,” said Peter who had now caught up with the others. “I swear you’re going to be the death of me.”

  As he spoke, the three of them walked towards the crowd which, despite their protests, was still keeping a safe distance from the man and the dying cow. Their concern for the animal was tempered by the fear of having a spear thrust into them.

  “Relax,” said Josh. “Look, no one’s been hurt.”

  “Apart from the cow,” replied Peter.

  “You like burgers, don’t you?” asked Josh.

  “Yeah, OK, spare me the lecture,” replied Peter. “I can see where you’re going with this.”

  “Well, this is just the Stone Age man’s version,” said Josh.

  “The police didn’t take long,” remarked the Professor, noting some officers sprinting down the path from St Aldates.

  “Well, the station’s only just over there,” said Josh. “I imagine they’ll have him banged up in no time.”

  “Poor chap,” said Peter. “How’s he going to survive in this time?”

  “Quite well, I would imagine,” said the Professor. “Life in the Stone Age was brutal and short. Most of them were lucky to see thirty. At least here he’s going to get fed, watered and looked after.”

  “But look at him,” said Peter. “Surely the police can’t pass this off as a prank. He doesn’t even look like a modern human.”

  “You’d be surprised how much they can delude themselves,” said Josh. “They’ll try and interview him, get nowhere and then probably send him off to Littlemore where he can make friends with the last two people they sent up there.”

  “Yeah, I can’t imagine the interview will last long,” said Peter. “A man whose vocabulary consists largely of variations on the word ‘Ug’ is not going to be helping them very much with their enquiries.”

  “Looks like that’s it, then,” remarked the Professor as the police dragged the man off. “Same time on Wednesday?”

  “I guess so,” said Josh. “Perhaps leave the video camera at home next time, though. This whole making a movie thing didn’t really work, did it?”

  “In hindsight, probably not, but I’ve got some fantastic footage. Perhaps I’ll bring it along anyway, just for academic purposes.”

  “Fair enough,” said Josh, knowing there was no point trying to talk him out of it. “How’s our Mr Lewis getting on, by the way?”

  “Oh, famously,” said the Professor. “He reckons the college has hardly changed at all since his time. He’s slipped back into the old routine as if he’s never been away.”

  “That’s good to hear,” replied Josh, before turning to Peter. “Will you be here?”

  “For my sins,” he replied. “How much longer do you think this is going to go on for?”

  “For all we know, today could have been the last time,” said Hamilton. “Britain was very sparsely populated prior to the Stone Age. Once we’re talking about more than 10,000 years ago we are getting into the period of long ice ages. This whole area would have been pretty much uninhabitable.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Peter who was keen to see the end of this.

  The Professor’s mention of ice ages proved to be somewhat prophetic as w
hen the three of them returned on Wednesday there had been a heavy fall of snow and the park was covered in a good couple of inches. It was half-term and there were kids out everywhere, building snowmen and throwing snowballs around.

  With a dusting of snow also covering the branches and twigs of the lime trees, the park had a real Christmassy feel about it, apart from the minor detail of it being February.

  It proved to be a fitting scene for something to emerge from the time bubble that none of them had been expecting.

  It was a large, shaggy brown creature about the same size as an African elephant. Shortly after coming through, it stopped and looked around, clearly surveying these new and strange surroundings.

  “Oh my, it’s a woolly mammoth!” exclaimed Hamilton who was filming it all on his video camera. “I must ring my colleague, Doctor Francis, at the Zoological Department. Here, keep filming.”

  He handed the camera to Peter, took out his mobile phone and began dialling.

  “Oh, great,” said Peter. “What are we going to do with this? We can hardly take it round to Jonty’s and ask if he wants a new pet!”

  “At least it doesn’t look hostile,” remarked Peter, watching the creature as it stood still by the edge of the river, moving its head to and fro as it looked around.

  “It’s probably confused,” said Josh. “Hopefully you’re right about it not being hostile. They were vegetarians, I believe.”

  Other people in the park had spotted the mammoth now and were coming over, curious. Peter recognised the large woman he had spoken to the other day. She promptly spotted him and came over.

  “Ooh, are you filming again today?” she asked. “Your caveman the other day looked very realistic. Why did he attack that cow, though?”

  “That was all part of the film,” replied Peter. “He didn’t really kill the cow, it was fake blood.” He didn’t for a minute think the woman would believe this, but remarkably, she seemed to buy it.

  “Ah, that makes sense,” she replied. “So what’s this big, hairy elephant thing? Is that the monster? You’ve done a good job with that. It looks very realistic.”

  Peter couldn’t believe how daft this woman seemed to be, but perhaps that’s why they had gotten away with as much as they had for so long. It was easier for people to accept a rational explanation, even if it denied the evidence of their own eyes. Didn’t anyone have an imagination anymore?

  For the next half-hour the creature did very little except shuffle about a bit. The Professor’s colleague, Doctor Francis, arrived and excitedly concluded that it was indeed a woolly mammoth. By this time quite a crowd had gathered including several members of the press who had got wind of proceedings.

  After some debate about what to do with it, a team was despatched from the Cotswold Wildlife Park to collect it.

  The papers were full of speculation the next day about where the mammoth had come from, but time travel was again conspicuous by its absence. The popular theory was that a scientist at Oxford University had discovered how to re-create long extinct animals using their DNA, but Doctor Francis, who had given an interview to reporters at the scene, vehemently denied this.

  He even went on TV the next day to refute this, alongside the writer Michael Crichton. He had been invited along to talk about similar theories in his novel, Jurassic Park, which was currently in the process of being turned into a major Hollywood movie.

  The debate raged all over the media for a couple of days, but Josh and the others had more pressing concerns.

  If a woolly mammoth could turn up, what next? Both Josh and Peter had seen the lively debate on TV and there was a very real possibility that something far more dangerous from Earth’s past could appear.

  Amazingly, the police still weren’t interested. Josh had gone to them once again saying that the park wasn’t safe. When he suggested that sabre-toothed tigers or pterodactyls might start turning up, he was laughed out of the station.

  DI French and DS Bradley had really been of no use whatsoever during this whole thing. He and the team were going to have to handle this until the bitter end, it seemed.

  All he could hope was that it didn’t spell the end for him, or anyone else.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The remaining members of the time bubble team had assembled on a cold Sunday morning at what they hoped was a safe distance from the riverbank from whatever, if anything, was to come through.

  There were five of them this time. Josh and Peter were both there, still with a noticeable atmosphere between them, along with Christina. The Professor was also there again, complete with video camera along with a rather excitable Doctor Francis.

  Josh was dressed in a smart, new, black coat that he had bought courtesy of his winnings on Docklands Express at Kempton Park the previous day. Any concern that his presence in the timeline might have caused ripples to spread out enough to affect the racing results had proved unfounded. Hopefully now he could go on to live the rest of his time in 1992 in style.

  “I have to say, as Oxford’s leading anthropologist, this is quite possibly the most exciting experience of my life,” said Francis.

  “And possibly the most dangerous,” remarked Peter, wondering why he had felt the need to include the bit about being Oxford’s leading anthropologist in the sentence. These scientists certainly seemed to like showing off.

  “Maybe, my boy, maybe. But I wouldn’t miss this for the world. The mammoth was amazing enough but today we have the chance to see another long-extinct creature from the even more distant past. It could be anything! I only wish David could have joined me today, he would have loved this.”

  “David?” asked Josh.

  “Attenborough, of course,” replied Francis. “We were at Cambridge together. But he’s down in Antarctica at the moment filming a new series for the BBC.”

  “It’s probably the safest place for him,” said Peter. “At least he’s not going to get eaten by a rampaging dinosaur down there.”

  “You don’t seriously think a dinosaur is going to come through this thing, do you?” asked Christina, looking nervous. “How big are these time bubbles? Would something like that even fit through?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any limit to the size of a thing: the only rule we established very early on is that only one life form can come through at a time,” said Josh.

  “A dinosaur is just one of any number of possibilities, Christina,” explained Doctor Francis who, despite being new to the team, had swiftly been brought up to speed over a few brandies in the Professor’s study the night after the mammoth arrived.

  “It’s quite possible nothing will come through at all,” he added. “We’re talking about millions of years in the past now, when the Earth was much more sparsely populated than it is now. And that’s not taking into account the geographic changes. This time bubble could have been buried deep underground then, in mid-air, or even in the middle of the ocean!”

  “So some sort of fish could come through?” she asked.

  “It could be anything,” said Josh. “But we’ll find out very shortly.”

  “And if it is something dangerous?” asked Christina?

  “Then we call the authorities,” said Josh. “Professor Hamilton has his mobile phone so we can call anyone we need to.”

  “I’ve briefed the same people who picked up the mammoth that I might be calling on them again today,” said Francis. “Like I said, this is an anthropologist’s dream. I’m very keen to get my hands on whatever comes through.”

  “That’ll be interesting if it’s a bloody huge Brontosaurus or something,” said Christina. “How will you get that in the back of the van?”

  “Tut, tut, I do wish people wouldn’t use that term,” said Doctor Francis. “The correct name for the beast to which you refer is Apatosaurus.”

  “Well, whatever it’s called, by my watch it’s just about time right now,” said Josh.

  Five seconds later their worst fears were confirmed. It wasn’t an Ap
atosaurus but the most fearsome dinosaur of all that burst into view, towering high above the riverbank.

  The T Rex took a few steps forward, and then stopped, just as the woolly mammoth had, momentarily confused by its surroundings.

  “I don’t believe this,” exclaimed Josh. “It’s huge.”

  He had seen all the as yet unmade Jurassic Park films, but nothing could have prepared him for this. In real life the creature was far bigger and more terrifying than the big-screen CGI versions had ever been.

  “Never mind whether you believe it or not, let’s get out of here!” shouted Peter.

  Francis stood transfixed looking at the beast, while the Professor backed slowly away, filming as he went.

  “Give me your phone, Professor,” insisted Peter, dialling 999 as soon as he passed it to him. Quite what the police would be able to do in this situation he had no idea, but they could hardly ignore it.

  “Come on, Doctor Francis,” urged Josh, trying to pull the academic away as he continued staring at the dinosaur, which was standing still, casting its head about, great blobs of saliva pouring from its mouth.

  “Look at that, it’s yellow!” said Doctor Francis. “I often wondered what colour they were.”

  “It’s also extremely dangerous!” exclaimed Josh. “Now I’m no biologist, but that saliva suggests to me it’s planning to eat something sometime soon and I don’t want that to be us! Now come on, run!”

  “No, don’t run,” said Francis. “That’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll encourage it to chase you.”

  “And you’re an expert on the behaviour of these creatures based on what – a few old bones in the Pitt Rivers Museum? Anyway, there’s no point telling people not to run, look around you!”

  All over the park, people were screaming and running away, doing a very passable impression of extras in a 1950s Hollywood monster B movie. This wasn’t looking good, thought Josh. He had vowed no one else would get killed, but seriously, what could he do to prevent it?

  Sensing the movement and the noise, the T Rex raised its head and let out a colossal roar.