The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  Secondly, assuming the world of 1992 was normal, all his hopes were pinned on the Josh of this world coming back in time to attend the wedding in June. He would be arriving in January, which would give him five months to prepare.

  Heading for the tree on Christ Church Meadow, for what he truly hoped would be the last time, he reflected that this was a huge gamble he was taking and very likely to be his final roll of the dice. If he failed to find his other self, then hopefully he could forge a life in the 1992 similar to the one he had been living in 2014.

  If the worst-case scenario happened and he found himself again plunged into danger, he would have no regrets. After all, how many people could say they had been able to have the sort of adventures he had?

  Holding out the tachyometer, he pressed the button and stepped forward one last time.

  The end…but now the adventure continues in Class of ‘92…

  Class of ‘92

  Chapter One

  Peter Grant had found himself running away from quite a few scary situations in his time.

  There was the time he and a couple of mates had unwisely decided to start throwing stones at a bees’ nest they found in a tree in the village he had grown up in.

  More recently he had found himself in the wrong place wearing an Oxford United scarf after a particularly bad-tempered local derby against bitter rivals Swindon Town.

  Both of these paled into comparison against what he was currently facing.

  As he sprinted along the stony towpath that ran alongside the River Thames, he could hear the deafening roar of the Tyrannosaurus Rex behind him.

  Dinosaurs rampaging through Oxford? It was like one of those old Chewits ads or some old B movie. He had seen a few such films when he was growing up but none of them had been particularly convincing. He hadn’t seen Jurassic Park yet, but then nobody had. This was 1992 and the movie wouldn’t be out for another year.

  Unfortunately this wasn’t a movie. It was happening right now and Peter had never been so terrified in all his life.

  As he approached the boathouses on the left-hand side of the path, he risked a glance back over his left shoulder to see where the monster was. It was clearly visible, no more than a hundred yards behind him above the tops of the aged lime trees that lined the path, still devoid of leaves after the long winter.

  The dinosaur must have been at least forty feet tall. Despite the danger, he felt unable to tear his eyes away and watched as it crashed through the trees, scattering thick, heavy branches in all directions like pins in a game of tenpin bowling. As it did so, it roared, revealing a row of hideous, razor-sharp teeth, dripping with saliva as it sought out its prey.

  Peter could hear screams in the distance from the other side of the park, but there was no one else on the towpath. It was late morning on a cold, late winter day, too early in the year and too cold for the throngs of tourists that flocked to this area for most of the year.

  Hopefully that meant that nobody else would be killed, but that was scant comfort to Peter. It also meant that there was no one else in the way for it to eat before it got to him.

  This was assuming it knew he was there, of course. Peter couldn’t tell if it could see, smell or hear him. For all he knew, the ancient creature was blundering around probably in confusion, not even aware of Peter’s presence, but the problem was, it was coming in his direction. Even if the giant yellow monstrosity didn’t devour him, he didn’t fancy being crushed to a pulp under one of its enormous feet.

  He had been quite surprised at the T Rex’s appearance. It was yellow, with mottled black markings, like an overripe banana. The movie makers had got that one wrong, he thought, as he ran towards the end of the path at the edge of the boathouses. He had only ever seen dinosaurs portrayed as a greenish brown colour.

  “Get a grip,” he muttered, as he desperately tried to focus on the rather more pressing matter in hand. Here he was fighting for his life and he was ruminating about the colour of dinosaurs. Perhaps he ought to concentrate more on not acquiring the unenviable record of being the first person in history to be killed by one!

  This wasn’t at all what he had in mind back at the start of the year when he had resolved to make his life more interesting. He was twenty-one years old and thus far his existence had been at best unremarkable, and at worst downright disappointing.

  “Go to university,” he had been told by teachers and parents. “You’ll have the time of your life.” But university hadn’t turned out to be all it had been cracked up to be.

  He had got his place at the last minute through the clearing house system after a set of A-level results that had been less than inspiring. A bout of glandular fever had struck him down midway through the last year of sixth form, turning him from an already listless youth into a positively lackadaisical one. His final results of two D’s and an E left him well short of the points he needed to get in to study Physics at Oxford.

  In the end he had to settle for a place at a teacher training college just outside Oxford, the only place left that would have him. Up until that point, he hadn’t even considered teaching as a profession.

  How he had caught glandular fever in the first place had been a mystery. People had taken the piss when they found out, looking at him knowingly and calling it the kissing disease. Chance would have been a fine thing.

  At the time, Peter had been just seventeen and his experience with women bordered on the non-existent. He wasn’t bad-looking, he had a slim build, his jet-black hair was cut fashionably short, and he hoped he had some decent dress sense, buying most of his clothes from Topman on Queen Street.

  His problem wasn’t so much how he looked more that he was so awkward around girls. Going to an all-boys’ school hadn’t helped. His only real contact with girls in his mid-teens had come through the local church youth group.

  Peter wasn’t in the slightest bit religious. He had only joined because they had a table tennis table. He got on well enough with the girls there but there was no question of any of them obliging any of his growing teenage fantasies. They were sweet, virginal, well-behaved girls who wouldn’t dream of allowing a hormone-laden teenage boy touch their naughty bits.

  He wanted a girlfriend like Madonna. Specifically, like the tarty version of Madonna he had seen dancing on a canal boat in her Like a Virgin video. That had sparked a sexual awakening within him that was to remain unfulfilled through the long, lean years of the mid-1980s.

  Whilst he spent plenty of time alone in his bedroom fantasising about Madonna, kisses from real-life girls had been few and far between. If he had caught glandular fever from a kiss it must have been incubating a long time because the only decent snog he had enjoyed had been on a PGL holiday in the summer of ’87 with a chubby girl from Cheshire.

  Other than that, 1987 had been like the previous three years – a complete desert. It wasn’t helped by his schoolmates constantly bragging about their sexual conquests. On later reflection, most of their bravado had probably been bullshit but he had believed it at the time, only adding to his feelings of inadequacy.

  He had hoped that this sorry situation might change when he got to university, but he was so late getting his place that there were no rooms left in the halls of residence. He couldn’t afford to commute from his parents’ village, just outside Cheltenham, every day or rent a room off campus, so he ended up having to stay with his gran, in Cowley, on the other side of Oxford.

  He loved his gran and she was delighted to have him there but she was old-fashioned in her outlook and made it clear there wasn’t going to be any hanky-panky, as she referred to it, under her roof.

  From what he heard, there was plenty of hanky-panky going on in the dorms on campus, but once again, just like all those years at school with barely a girl in sight, he was missing out.

  After wasting the whole of the first year at college pining after a girl who later turned out to be a lesbian, he did eventually get a girlfriend during his second year. Thus, he succeeded at los
ing his virginity at what he considered to be the rather late age of nineteen. The relationship wasn’t to last and fizzled out after a year or so.

  He liked Christina but there was simply no chemistry between them. They were more like mates than lovers, sharing common interest in the local indie music scene and going to gigs at The Dolly and The Jericho Tavern. They had only paired up in the end because they were the only two single people in a group of friends and it seemed the logical thing to do.

  After a few dates, things did eventually progress to sex in the tiny attic room she rented in a crowded student house in Botley. He had been disappointed in the experience because there hadn’t really been any passion at all. She had also been a virgin and neither of them really knew what they were doing. It had all been rather mechanical and not anything like the mind-blowing experience he had expected.

  Eventually, in the third year, they called it quits. Both were away most of that year doing their in-school training and after several weeks apart with little contact, there seemed little point continuing. They just carried on as mates, going to gigs just as they had before they had got together.

  Then, at the start of their fourth and final year, Christina simply didn’t come back. Perhaps she had decided teaching wasn’t for her, but he had no idea.

  He thought about trying to get in touch with her a couple of times, but he didn’t even have any contact details for her. He knew her parents lived in Wiltshire somewhere but that was about it. Even if he could get in touch with her, what was the point? She had clearly moved on – it was time he did the same.

  In the autumn of 1991, he was offered the chance to move into the very room she had been apparently been kicked out of in the student house for non-payment of rent, but he knew he couldn’t really afford it. On top of that, when he had broached the idea to Gran, she had suddenly developed a rather serious angina attack.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to me and you weren’t here,” she had said.

  Admitting defeat, he realised he had no option but to stay put. From what he had seen of his nights there with Christina, all the other students in the house were having one non-stop party, but he tried to forget about that and concentrate on preparing for his final exams.

  Most of that fourth autumn term had been spent either sitting with Gran in front of her endless soaps or up in his room listening to his favourite bands on his Walkman. By Christmas, he hadn’t had sex for ten months.

  “Things are going to change!” he had said determinedly as he looked into the mirror on New Year’s Day 1992. “Things have got to change.”

  He needed to get a life and willed himself to go out there and get one. Saying it was all very well, but he needed a slice of luck, too. Despite his lack of religious conviction, he found himself offering up a silent prayer for some divine intervention that might help him on his way.

  Now, as he desperately tried to avoid the rampaging dinosaur behind him, all he could do was reflect that if someone had been listening, they had given him significantly more than he had bargained for.

  Trying not to get squished by the T Rex was just the latest development in a remarkable run of events that had begun with a man turning up on his doorstep claiming to be from the future. Now it looked like potentially ending with him being ripped apart in the jaws of a creature from millions of years ago.

  Had it been worth it? Life may have been boring before but at least it was safe. Which was better – a long, boring life or a short, exciting one? At the moment, he would quite happily settle for the former. But then he would never have met Rebecca.

  Rebecca. He tried not to think about her. This was no time for wondering about what might have been. He had to keep running, but it was getting difficult. The right shoelace on his cheap, Barratts trainers had come undone and his shoe was becoming decidedly loose.

  This had been happening consistently ever since he had bought them. Why was it always the right lace that came undone? It was never the left! It was maddening. He knew he should have bought a decent pair, but he couldn’t afford it.

  “You’re only paying for the name,” Gran had said when he’d asked her if she could let him off his keep for a week so he could buy a pair of Reeboks. He wasn’t sure about that theory because a few extra quid on a pair of Reeboks without self-undoing laces might well have saved his life right now.

  The creature roared again, coming ever closer. It was incredibly loud, but didn’t drown out a new whistling sound coming from above. He looked up to see the unmistakeable sight of a Harrier Jump Jet bearing down on both him and the dinosaur. Peter knew his planes and recognised it straightaway. He also knew where it must have come from – nearby RAF Brize Norton.

  So, they were going to shoot down the T Rex. That was great from the point of view that he probably wouldn’t get eaten now, but very bad because the plane was heading straight towards him. As he watched he saw a flash of fire from the front that meant it had just unleashed its salvo of AGM-65 Maverick missiles.

  If the missiles didn’t hit him, there was a good chance the fallout from the explosion would, including the possibility of several tons of chargrilled dinosaur flesh falling on him. Despite the fact that he possibly only had about two seconds to live, he found himself wondering what barbecued dinosaur would taste like. Why the hell was he thinking that? He really needed to get some sense of perspective.

  In the present circumstances, there was only one course of action left to him.

  He ran to the right, held his breath, and dived head first towards the murky waters of the Thames, his right trainer falling off as he launched himself.

  He hit the water just as the deafening sound of the exploding missiles reached him.

  Chapter Two

  Josh had been travelling for a very long time.

  Geographically, he hadn’t travelled far at all from his Oxfordshire home. But chronologically, he had come a long way. Initially from 2055, he had been caught up in a time-travel accident while visiting 2025 that had sent him spiralling further and further back through time.

  Just to complicate things further, his many jumps through time had also sent him into a strange variety of alternate universes. He had been to worlds ravaged by plagues and wars, where familiar faces weren’t quite what they seemed, and where his life had been in danger on more than one occasion.

  Now, in one last, desperate throw of the dice he was leaping back to 1992 in the hope of finding the one person who might be able to get him back home.

  That person was himself.

  He had been gone for many months and would be gone for many more, even if this worked out. He would be arriving in January, nearly six months before hopefully another version of his future self would show up.

  Using his ailing tachyometer, the instrument by which he travelled through time, he materialised in his usual spot, beside the River Cherwell in Oxford, on New Year’s Day. He had picked the date and location carefully. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything to worry about.

  There was a real danger that he would once again find himself in some strange, alternative world that was so different from his own that he would have no hope of finding the salvation he sought.

  In a worst case, life-threatening scenario, he wouldn’t even be able to stay in the world. That would leave him having to travel on even further into the past. By his calculations, the next stop would be 1947.

  Even if he did find a friendly universe back then, he would still be in a world in which no one he had ever known had even been born yet. He would also have no immediate means of support in an England of rationing and austerity, just starting to rebuild after the ravages of World War II. That was assuming England had even won the war in the universe he arrived in.

  What if the Nazis had triumphed? That had been the staple of many a science fiction story but it wasn’t one he contemplated exploring first-hand. At least in 1992, as long as he was in a world similar to his own, he could survive, even if he wa
s stuck there permanently.

  As he took in his surroundings, the initial signs were encouraging.

  Christ Church Meadow looked exactly as he would have expected on a midwinter day. The trees had long shed the previous season’s leaves, some of which were still blowing about in the breeze around him.

  Crucially, the skyline of Oxford, set against the leaden-grey January sky, looked more or less exactly as it should do. There were one or two familiar buildings missing but he guessed they simply hadn’t been built yet.

  So far, so good, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted yet. He had been in times and places that had looked deceptively normal before, only to have some calamity or other develop. He needed to spend some time exploring before he could even think about letting his guard down.

  It was cold, but not bitter, which meant there were a few people in the park. As always he cast an eye around to check that no one had seen him pop out of nowhere. Normally it wasn’t a problem – the tree beside the riverbank provided good cover, though this time it was noticeably smaller than it had been before. How old were the trees in this park? he wondered. It was the sort of thing most people probably never thought about because trees seemed timeless and permanent, changing very little from year to year.

  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.