Time Travel Trouble (eBook)

Tony Thorne MBE (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
104 Seiten
Tony Thorne MBE (Verlag)
978-0-00-003416-8 (ISBN)

Infos

An introduction to the concept and hazards of Time Travel...in either direction, including a collection of quirky tales to illustrate them including:

Time to Survive  - The awesome perils of short term time travel, before you even arrive!

Testing Time - Some trips might be unplanned, and  take a lot longer than expected.

Timely Encounter -  How to escape justice... on a permanent basis? 

Brain Leak - An acount of a painless way to travel ahead in time.. or was it.

Tomorrow the World - If only you could go back..!  Think of the infinite rewards in reach.

Long Term Future - A way to survive the time involved in putting you right, one day maybe? 

A collection of eight speculative tales about the idea of traveling in time, to intrigue and entertain you. Read them and then decide if the author's conclusions are valid.

Textauszug

MIGRAINE TIME

If you really want to risk a travel in time, to the future, it might be a good plan to send something on ahead first and make contact.

All that first day, I had that apprehensive feeling. I knew something unpleasant was going to happen, but I had no idea what. The weather was hot and humid, which didn't help my state of mind at all. Then the fireworks display started. Electric blue, and silvery white, staggered streaks of jagged lightning totally distorting my view of the world. I began to stagger and lose my balance.

For my safety, I had to sit down and wait. An agony of minutes later the display began to slowly disperse. Eventually, my sight became almost normal, but then the usual headache began. Slight at first, but gradually increasing in intensity, and steadily expanding across from the right side of my forehead, facing forward. Painful at first, it soon became unbearable. I had already taken a couple of painkiller tablets and could only wait for them to react.

From previous experience, I knew they usually took about twenty minutes to work, but when forty had passed altogether with no relief from the pain, which was getting worse by the minute, I knew I was in for a bad time.

For some unknown reason, it was much worse than usual. The storm outside was becoming more violent, so maybe that had something to do with it. I decided to go to bed. It helps to lay down and relax, in a darkened room. Ten minutes later I was flat out on the bed with my hands over my eyes, when through my fingers I noticed a kind of glow coming from just behind the end bedposts.

Fascinated, I clasped my hands together behind my head and raised myself up for a closer look. The glow was coming from a small gray ball floating, in mid-air, and moving slowly from side to side. Actually I could see two of them, every now and then, because the second one was a reflection in my wardrobe mirror.

Slowly, I got up from the bed and approached the weird phenomenon, feeling more curious than alarmed. I peered at it closely then walked all around it. It kept moving from side to side as I did so. Finally I paused and tried to grab hold of it. However, I hastily pulled my hand away when I felt the heat coming from it.

Then watching it closer I noticed that its movement was slowing down, and the glow was not as bright as before. Soon its oscillations ceased altogether and the room became darkened again. I went over to the bedroom door and switched on the light. I turned around to look at the object again, when I suddenly realized that my headache had gone.

Intrigued, I reached out to try to touch the ball and this time found that I could as its surface temperature had become much cooler. I pressed it softly at first and then harder. My finger sank into it slightly, but the ball didn't move. I put the palm of my hand against it and pushed very hard. It still didn't move, but when I took my hand away, I could see where it had been. Then, as I watched, the impression slowly vanished.

Just to see what would happen, I reached for my dressing gown and draped it over the ball. Immediately there was a reaction. The gown began to move steadily,from side to side, then I noticed that it was steaming slightly at the top. I hastily removed the gown, and the ball stopped moving. Gingerly I felt its surface and found it was becoming hot again. Then, I had the feeling that something was trying to communicate with me.

I had already learned not to cover it, or try to move it, so I pulled up a chair and sat down to study it again, and see what would happen next.

I did not have long to wait. Its surface suddenly became mirror-like, and I could see what I assumed was my own spherically distorted reflection in it. But was it me, or was it someone, or something, else? I decided to get closer , to be sure either way.

Yes, it was my image, but very distorted, much more than it should have been with such a perfectly spherical mirror. Then it changed from looking like my head, to something more like the head of some kind of animal. I began to suspect that this weird floating object must be a very advanced television set, but from where did it come; and what was it doing, floating unsupported,in my bedroom?

I got even closer to it with my nose almost touching its surface. What I could see, was something located well inside the sphere, was mostly a head like a lizard, but much larger in proportion to what I could see of the rest of it. It was opening and shutting its mouth, revealing a long red tongue and some very sharp looking teeth. I guessed it was trying to talk, maybe it was, but I could hear nothing. Then a familiar buzzing sound came from the sphere, which made me listen intently. It began to change to a hissing sound, then back to a buzz again. It sounded to me just like a computer program being downloaded from the Internet.

I had a small program recorder in my bedside cupboard so I dashed over and retrieved it. I switched it on and began to record the sounds still coming from the sphere. To my amazement, the lizard like head in the sphere was nodding, directly to me, as though it approved of my actions.

After a short while, the sound ceased and then started up again. It stopped again as the image faded and finally disappeared. Soon the ball began to glow once more and I could feel the heat coming from it. I moved away, just as it gave off a flash and then completely vanished. I looked around, but there was absolutely no trace of it. It was as if I had imagined the whole thing, however I did have the recording of the sounds it had made, and could hardly wait to see what I could make of them.

I spent the next few days trying to learn what they meant. I slowed them down, sped them up, loaded them into my computer and then tried everything I could think of to get some sense out of them.

Finally, almost at the point of giving up, I reversed the tape and loaded the signals in backwards. My computer accepted them, as video and began to process them. I was elated and also amazed at how large the resulting program must be, because it took quite some time before anything appeared on the screen. I was delighted, when it did, to see a much clearer picture of the creature I'd previously seen in the sphere. It certainly was some kind of lizard, but with a large head, and wearing what looked like a long skirt with a broad belt securing it.

All by itself, the picture began to scroll down slowly. More images appeared and I realized I was watching the condensed history of a race of intelligent creatures. First I was shown a sea, with very primitive life forms, similar to the ones we know were originally present in our sea. Next appeared scenes showing how more life forms evolved, moving on to the land, and even into the air. They all looked familiar, with one or two exceptions. I suspect life on any habitable planet would follow a similar pattern of evolution to that which took place on our planet.

Here of course, we know that the dinosaurs were all wiped out when an asteroid collided with our earth, allowing the more resistant mammals to evolve, leading eventually to us, humans. This intelligent alien creature must be the result of evolution on a planet where no similar global disaster had ever occurred.

The display continued and I saw a picture of the creature's home planet. A water world similar in appearance to what our earth must have looked like a few millions of years ago. Then the display suddenly zoomed out to show a view of space, with the planet becoming a tiny dot to one side of the screen. Without warning, and directly in the foreground there appeared a large mass of rock and debris, clearly indicating a large comet or asteroid. A dotted line then appeared joining it to the planet. The asteroid became smaller and moved along the line until it appeared to make contact with the planet. At the same time what must have been numbers appeared on the screen and changed rapidly as the asteroid moved along the line of its indicated orbit. The animated characters sequence was then repeated several times, until the final number appeared, on the screen, flashing on and off in green characters.

It was only too clear that I was being shown a forecast of an impending disaster, and how much time would elapse before it would take place.

The next series of pictures really fascinated me. And showed a laboratory with several of the lizard creatures working on some large spherical structures. It was then I began to understand what was going on. They were constructing spaceships to enable them to escape the inevitable disaster that would otherwise soon destroy them all.

Then another sequence of pictures appeared. This time I was highly intrigued by what I eventually understood from it. They were using a small version of the structures to contact another planet, to arrange for as many of the larger units as possible to be sent there. They planned to send more of the small units to arrive in a circle around what looked like some kind of power station. This would be connected to each ship and then activated to provide the energy system they would need to complete the transfer of as many of their ships as possible.

I was stunned and horrified, when it finally became apparent that somehow, their remote device had selected me, probably by chance, and it was to our planet that they wanted to come. I did not know what I should do. Should I try to tell the authorities? What would be their reaction and how long would it take to get them to believe me and do anything? I had no way of knowing, and it soon became obvious to me that I could not help these poor creatures. How could there be enough time, however much of it they had left? Even if our government...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.10.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-003416-9 / 0000034169
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-003416-8 / 9780000034168