Darrell Bain - Circles of Displacement

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Circles of Displacement

by Darrell Bain

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Hard Shell Word Factory

www.hardshell.com

CATEGORY

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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original

purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk,

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Published by Hard Shell Word Factory.

8946 Loberg Rd.

Amherst Junction, WI 54407

http://www.hardshell.com

Electronic book created by Seattle Book Company.

eBook ISBN: 0-7599-0580-0

_All rights reserved_

_All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination

of the author, and have no relation whatever to anyone bearing the same name

or names. These characters are not even distantly inspired by any individual

known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention._

--------

_To my son, Randy Bain,_

This story was written with him in mind.

--------

*PROLOGUE*

_THE GREAT SHIP entered the spiral arm of yet another galaxy. Only the

beings in the control room were aware of trouble and they were terrified. It

was theoretically possible for the time stress fields of the huge ship to get

out of balance, but an actual occurrence was a rarity, something that had not

happened for generations. The Engineer Commander's stalks sprang erect as

wrongly colored patterns erupted inside its left forebrain, the engineer side,

demanding immediate action. There was little time to spare, yet the Engineer

Commander was forced to call on ancestral memory from one of its hindbrains in

order to assess the problem. By the time a solution became apparent, it was

almost too late. It did the only thing possible. It ordered the ship to cease

its headlong flight in one violent maneuver, hoping the excess energy would

discharge in one compact mass rather than leak backward into the ship and

cause its utter destruction._

_It worked, just barely. A globe of weirdly tortured space-time formed

around the laboring stress fields, a darker black than the space surrounding

them. The globe hovered, wobbling in place with the unbalanced fields like a

dancer about to lose balance. The ship shuddered all through it's mile long

length, as if shivering in fear at impending destruction, then at the last

possible second, tore loose from the newly formed mass of energized time,

instantaneously imparting an equalizing velocity to it in the opposite

direction. The ship continued on its way, slower now, but no longer

threatened. It would never pass that way again, nor would its commander ever

know or care about what happened to the energy it had lost._

_The stark globe of space-time shot away in the opposite direction. It

was more coherent than a laser beam, but even as laser light slowly attenuates

over distance, so did this different form of energy. It spread, becoming miles

wide in extent. The inherent energy, unable to maintain a single point of

concentration, threw off smaller globes in a radiating circle, while its

center gradually grew smaller. Where the globes of energy passed, hydrogen

atoms and rare intrastellar molecules of cyanide compounds and other esoteric

deep space molecules were thrown far back in time and replaced by other space

and matter from that era in an almost imperceptible cone from it's point of

origin, with the displacement in time gradually lessening as the attenuation

grew. Given enough distance, it would have lost all coherence, dissipating

harmlessly over vast stellar distances. A few molecules displaced here and

there would have made no difference whatever in the larger scheme of the

universe. In fact, even when it impacted on a planet, the universe would go on

in much the same fashion as it had for the last fifteen billion years. Such

things had happened before. They would happen again._

_The second circle of smaller segments of distorted time spread from

the center as the globes of terribly wrong energy approached earth, then a

third and fourth budded off, with more following, each growing progressively

smaller as it broke from its parent. Now the separate pieces were spread over

dozens of miles from the still intact, though much smaller center portion.

More than two thousand of the small globes of space-time struck the

atmosphere, displacing molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and

lesser elements, but they slowed down hardly at all. Only a large mass could

accomplish that, and the sleeping East Texas countryside served adequately. In

a circle with a radius measuring scores of miles, in a pattern affecting the

mass they encountered, pure chance decreed who and what was affected. In

places, circles of woods, brush, and pasture hundreds of yards in diameter

suddenly disappeared in claps of thunder and ozone and reappeared far back in

time, simultaneously sending comparable areas from there into the future.

Animals in the affected zones, unable to understand the changed circumstances,

blinked and attempted to carry on their lives as before. Some succeeded; some

did not. For humans caught in the time storms and thrown back to the

Pleistocene era, it was a different matter. They could reason and wonder and

become fearful or joyful, as circumstances dictated. In many cases, it

depended on where they were when the displacements occurred. It all cases

where humans were caught, they believed that they were the only ones affected.

At first, that is. Eventually, many of them would make contact with

inhabitants of other displaced areas. Sometimes they wished they hadn't._

--------

*Chapter One*

AS DEREK PULLED his pickup into the circle at the end of the

indifferently graveled road leading to the farmhouse, Sheila Holloway noticed

immediately that as she expected, her parents were still gone. On Saturday

nights they might play forty-two with the Marlin family until well after

midnight. That suited her fine. It was still only a little past ten, and she

and Derek could sit in his pickup for an hour or so with little chance of

interruption. She wanted to know where her relationship with him was going and

this would be a good time to talk.

"You want another beer?"

"No," Sheila said, "and you'd better not either. You've already had

three. If we're still here when Mom and Dad get home and they smell beer on

your breath, we'll both be in trouble."

"One more won't hurt. They won't be back for another hour, at least."

"No." Part of Sheila's protest was simply that she didn't really care

for the taste of beer, and when Derek had more than three or four, she didn't

like the smell of it on his breath when he kissed her. And she wanted to be

kissed. Her sixteen_-_year_-_old body was still a mystery to her, a thing to

be explored and tested, like a swimmer working up to a dive from the high

board, no longer content with mastery of the one still occupied by kids. She

leaned into Derek's embrace. He kissed her, his breath smelling faintly of

alcohol and tobacco.

Derek would be nice, in a way, she thought, if only he had interests

other than hunting and fishing and drinking beer with the other seniors.

Nevertheless, she allowed him more liberties than she ever had with other

boys. It was a puzzle to her sometimes, but a minor one. At least he showed

some consideration, touching her gently, rather than the rough and grasping

embraces of some boys she had dated. His hand moved over her breast, and she

allowed it, liking the sensation of his strong fingers as he squeezed and

molded it in his hand. His tongue entered her mouth and explored pleasantly,

like warm sunshine on bare skin. After a while he pulled her closer, letting

her feel the male hardness pressing against her thigh, hoping that she would

react to the sensation. Sheila did react, liking the feel of his body against

her own. She allowed him to unbutton her blouse and slip his hand inside her

bra. A wave of liquid warmth spread from her breast down to her belly, causing

her to squirm restlessly against him.

Had she drank one more beer, or had Derek not rushed things quite so

much, she might have given in. Her young body was demanding release, beginning

to overpower the dictates of reason, but Derek moved too fast. He left her

breast and moved his hand down between her thighs, rubbing too urgently, too

suddenly, too overpoweringly intimate with his attentions, digging his fingers

into the denim of the jeans between her legs as if grabbing for a slippery

prize that wouldn't come loose.

Sheila broke away from him, breathing heavily. She pulled her blouse

together and began buttoning it.

"Sheila -- "

"No." She fended off an encircling arm. "It's getting late anyway. Mom

and Dad will be home before long. Let's just sit and talk."

"I'm too bothered to talk. You know what you do to me." Derek reached

behind the seat and retrieved another beer. Defiantly, he popped the top and

tilted it to his mouth.

"If you're going to drink that, I'm going in."

"Aw, this won't hurt me." Derek pulled out a pack of Cambridge and lit

a cigarette, hanging it from the corner of his mouth.

"Do what you want to. I'm going inside." Sheila slid over to the

passenger door, frustrated and irritated.

"Don't be mad."

"I'm not mad."

"See you tomorrow?"

Sheila relented. After all, he hadn't really acted much different than

he usually did. She leaned forward, kissed him on the mouth, and slid out of

the truck. "Why don't you try getting to school a little early in the morning?

Maybe we can talk before history class?"

"Okay. See you then."

She closed the door and walked the few steps up onto the front porch,

using the inside light filtering out through a window to find the light switch

there. She flicked it on, then turned, intending to wave, but Derek was

already driving away. She watched until the taillights were obscured by the

tree line intervening between the house and the black top a quarter mile away,

then turned to open the door.

Just as she closed the screen door behind her, a clap of thunder

sounded, and a flash of light surrounded her, illuminating the living room

with an eerie suffused glow. It winked out immediately, leaving the farmhouse

in total darkness.

"Shit!" She muttered, an expression she seldom used, and never at home,

at least not when her parents might hear. She fumbled her way toward a drawer

where candles and matches were kept. She lit a taper, and carried it to her

bedroom, walking carefully to keep within the bounds of the flickering light.

Had the house not been so dark, she might have noticed that the end of the

hallway leading to her parents' room was no longer there; indeed, their

bedroom was not there either, nor anything else familiar in that direction.

She did notice a coolness in the air, but passed it off to an impending

thunderstorm. Unconcerned, she undressed and climbed into bed, wondering if

she would still be awake to hear her parents come home. She wasn't, nor would

she ever see her mother and father again.

FIRST LIEUTENANT Wanda Smith was still seething. She brushed a hand

through her short black hair, irritated at every man in the world, then

grabbed the steering wheel of the jeep Cherokee as it began drifting to the

left on highway 59, heading south to Houston. Goddamn him. Goddamn him to

hell, that son-of-a-bitch eagle_-_wearing, smirking army colonel that was

destroying her career. Right now, if she never saw a man again in her life,

she thought, it would be little loss. _The son of a bitch_! Trust him to catch

her with the little WAC corporal. Bad enough that, but the way he handled it!

Give him a little fucking or be reported! She would fuck him, all right, with

a nine millimeter in the mouth if she could get away with it. It wasn't like

she was a roaring butch feminist lesbian; in fact, she usually did prefer men,

but every now and then an unaccountable urge drew her to a female, and _damn,_

the little WAC had been so cute. They were just getting started when the

colonel walked in, drawn back to the office by who knew what. Maybe he had

suspected when she failed to react to his advances; more likely he was a long

time sniffer_-_outer of what he thought to be sexual aberrations, regardless

of what the regulations said. That didn't excuse his actions, though, even if

she had been consorting with an enlisted person. That, she admitted to

herself, was her own fault and she should have known better.

This morning, he had called her into his office. The smirk on his face

would have done justice to any cat with feathers hanging from its mouth. Wanda

tried unsuccessfully to brush aside images from the scene that followed.

"I know this sort of thing goes on in the service," Colonel Brewster

said, twirling a pencil in his fingers like a weathervane, "but you've gone

beyond the bounds of propriety. Sex with a subordinate. While on duty. Of the

same sex. Can you give me any reason not to report this?"

"No, sir," she said.

"That's too bad. It might be overlooked, given the proper

circumstances. You know what I mean?"

Wanda knew all right. She wavered. The hint was plain enough, and

possibly, just possibly, she could rationalize it to herself. Then she looked

harder at her superior officer. Balding. Going to fat. Piggy little leering

eyes leering, jumping from her breasts to her legs and back again as she stood

at attention in front of his desk. He reminded her of her stepfather, the

second one, undressing her with his eyes at every opportunity, bumping against

her whenever she forgot herself and got near him, passing his hands over her

in "fatherly" hugs and touches. It was impossible; she couldn't do it.

"Colonel, you can go straight to hell."

He twirled the pencil some more, obviously disappointed. "In that case,

Lieutenant Smith, you leave me no choice. Consider yourself relieved of duty,

as of now. Let the duty officer know your whereabouts at all times. If you

change your mind before I get the paperwork processed, let me know. I might

still be able to help. I could get you an honorable discharge, rather than a

separation under, um, a cloud, shall we say?" He winked obscenely.

Wanda turned on her heel and left, not bothering to salute. Let the

bastard court-martial her if he wanted to; she was through with the military

and everything it represented. It's not like I don't have a profession, she

thought. I'm a good Medical Technologist; I can get a job anywhere. In fact,

the medical center in Houston might be the place to go while her discharge was

pending. Abruptly, she decided to leave and call the duty officer each day

from there. If the colonel didn't like it, she might just file sexual

harassment charges against him and see how he liked being under a cloud

himself. She returned to her room in the BOQ, changed from her uniform into

jeans and blouse and began throwing other belongings into assorted luggage.

The way she felt now, she might not even return. Let them send the discharge

to her, and if anyone gave her any trouble she would call the colonel and read

him the riot act. She had nothing to lose, and was just mad enough to drag him

down with her, regardless of the consequences of exposing her occasional

sexual tendency for females. It wasn't as if it was anything unusual these

days, and she doubted that any laboratory in Houston hiring her would give a

damn one way or another.

The Cherokee cruised almost silently south on US 59. An occasional

vehicle passed in the opposite direction, headlights bright in the moonless

night. Wanda had her radio set to a station playing soft tunes from years

back, some familiar, some older than she was. An eighteen-wheeler passed her,

taking advantage of the reduced number of patrol cars at this late hour, and

pulled on ahead. Somewhere in the distance, another vehicle approached,

headlights dim at first, then growing brighter. Abruptly, they winked out. At

the same time, the radio cut off in the middle of a song, changing to bursts

of static. A sound of thunder pierced the enclosed cab of the Cherokee, and at

almost the same time a burst of light illuminated the highway. Ghostly pines

and telephone lines marched in ranks beside the highway, then faded from

sight.

Ahead, the taillights of the eighteen-wheeler brightened, and even from

the distance, Wanda could hear the squeal of brakes. She trod hard on her own

brakes, then stepped down with all her strength as a tearing crash sounded

ahead, awful in the suddenness with which it happened. The Cherokee slewed and

skidded, but didn't quite leave the road. Wanda brought it to a stop just

short of where the highway abruptly ended in a tangle of huge trees and the

mangled wreck of the eighteen-wheeler. Her headlights picked out the carnage

in a surreal display of twisted metal tangled into scarred trunks of huge

trees, still standing.

Quickly, she pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment, dropped

from the cab of the Cherokee to the pavement and raced forward. The

incongruity of hundred-year-old oak and pine trees bisecting the highway

didn't enter her mind until the pavement abruptly ended and she stumbled and

fell into some rough tangles of undergrowth. She got back upright and moved

more cautiously forward, playing her light on the ground.

There was nothing to do for the driver. The cab of the truck was almost

completely collapsed, crushing the driver inside like a bloody sardine, then

flinging the body through the windshield with such force that the remains were

a sexless blob. The van of the truck had separated from the cab and was

wrapped almost completely around the trunk of a huge oak. The impact had

knocked branches down on top of it. They lay dark and still, the white of the

broken ends in stark contrast to the moody green of the leaves, barely colored

in the beam of her flashlight.

Wanda felt a diffuse fear seep into her body. What were trees doing in

the middle of a highway? Why hadn't the truck driver seen them in time? It was

a puzzle. One thing for certain, though, there was no going forward. The only

thing she could do was go back to the nearest filling station or town and call

for help. Or maybe someone else would come along. She walked back past the

beams of her headlights and looked in the direction from which she had come.

Strangely, she could see no headlights approaching. But it is late at night,

she thought, striving for normality. Well, nothing else to do but go back. She

climbed into the driver's seat and turned the Cherokee around. Something, some

fear she was beginning to feel at a visceral level, made her drive slower.

Therefore, she was able to stop in plenty of time when another line of trees

burgeoned up across the highway and stopped her progress in that direction as

well. Startled almost into a gibbering panic by now, she got out of her

vehicle again and stared blankly at the coiling vines and tree trunks blocking

her progress. What in hell was going on?

A scream, not human at all, split the darkness, ascending into a wail

of terror that was choked off abruptly. Sounds of underbrush moving in the

night like something being dragged away came to her ears, as if a predator was

hauling off a kill. The noises scared her back into the Cherokee. She locked

the doors and pawed at the glove compartment for her pistol. The old .45 Army

automatic felt comforting in her hand. She shivered and decided to wait until

daylight before venturing out again.

MICHAEL WRONSEN was caught on a lonely stretch of highway 190 between

Livingston and Huntsville. He managed to stop his old Explorer, but just

barely, and now he was pacing fearfully back and forth between where the

highway stopped and forest began, trying to make sense of his predicament.

_Where am I and how in hell did I get here,_ he wondered, as bewildered as a

toddler in a funhouse mirror maze. This just can't be highway 190, not with

monster oaks and pines blocking both ends of the stretch of pavement.

Typically, he put his mind to work and began reviewing the past few hours,

trying to pinpoint some moment in time where he might have had a memory loss.

He had been driving from Texas A & M for a visit to his parents, and possibly,

to go job hunting. He was a professor of physics at the college, but the

academic life had begun to pall. Michael was smart enough to realize that he

was a very mediocre physicist and would probably never contribute much

originality to the field. His former wife hadn't understood that fact. She

became dissatisfied at his lack of advancement beyond assistant professor and

finally left him for greener pastures. She also left him with a load of debt

incompatible with his salary.

A friend with the Compaq computer corporation in Houston had invited

him out to tour the plant during his visit and he was seriously considering

applying for a job there. He felt as if a change from teaching and desultory

research might lead to a brighter outlook on life, especially if the money was

good. His free spending ex-wife had never let him accumulate any, and that

lack kept him from pursuing some of his other goals. His interests were

wide-ranging and he loved to read and dabble in other fields, especially

politics, sociology and history. Although he didn't know it yet, that

self-acquired knowledge was going to be more beneficial to him in the coming

days than physics ever would. Right now, though, that was the last thing on

his mind. None of his thoughts explained his present predicament.

The only incongruity he could come up with had been that sudden flash

of light and clap of thunder, coming abruptly out of a clear, starry night.

The light had momentarily illuminated a bank of huge trees seemingly bisecting

the highway. As the light faded, the edge of his high beams picked them up

again in time for him to slow and stop, and here he remained. Like Wanda, he

had turned around and tried to retrace his path, but trees blocked him there

too. It has to have been that thunder and light, he told himself. Either that

or I've gone slap dab crazy. Wait. Maybe the radio would have something on it.

He climbed back into the Explorer and flipped the key. There was only static.

He got back out and paced some more. Thunder and lightning. Well, light,

anyway. Could that have ruined the radio? Possibly, but that didn't put him

any nearer to solving the problem. Eventually, he felt a tiredness in his legs

from the constant walking back and forth. How much time had passed? Hours, it

must have been. He noticed a faint brightening in the east. Almost dawn. Wait

until daylight, he thought, then hike out of here and find out where I am. The

decision somehow brought little comfort.

APPROXIMATELY fifty miles to the west of where Wanda Smith was holding

her pistol like a talisman to ward off demons, and from where she was

separated by only a few miles from Sheila Holloway, who was going peacefully

to sleep, a forbidding red brick building squatted in the very center of the

city of Huntsville. Inside that building, known as "The Walls" to city folk

and prisoners as well, an execution was being prepared.

Dawson Reeves was already strapped to the gurney, immobile, prepared,

but certainly not ready, to receive his lethal injection. Not much further

away, several dozen men rested in their cells on death row, contemplating

their own ultimate fate. Guards watched them and numerous other hard-core

prisoners over black and white monitors; other guards were more or less alert

in outlying portions of Texas' most secure prison facility. Here they kept the

men considered too dangerous for other facilities or too recalcitrant to be

let out for work details under guard.

The Walls contained other facilities: a dispensary for convicts with

real or imagined ills staffed on the early night shift by two female nurses,

an armory locked away but ready for access in case of rioting prisoners, a

gym, a day room, and many, many cells, inhabited by miscreants, hard core drug

dealers, murderers who had dodged a death sentence, recidivist thieves, strong

arm men, and a rare innocent, caught in the coils of an overburdened justice

system.

Dawson Reeves was certainly not an innocent, but he raged nevertheless,

not at the justice of his sentence, but at his own mistake in being caught. If

only he hadn't gone back for that girl. Damn the bad luck, how was he to know

that the fucking cops had a description and were staking out that apartment?

And damn it, he should have moved sooner; there was too much evidence of his

previous rapes and kills left laying around in his apartment. That was what

had ultimately convicted him, and he cursed the day he had ever let that

little teen-aged sweetie slip from his grasp. He should have left then, taking

the evidence he jacked off to with him, or destroyed it maybe, burning it up

like Jews in an oven. But no, he hadn't tied her tight enough, nor noticed how

intently she stared when he removed his mask; and she escaped, the damn

ungrateful bitch, and here he was, strapped to a table like his mother had

strapped him down when he was bad and wet his pants. It just wasn't fair. If

he ever got another chance, he would never, never let one of the bitches get

away again.

The lights in the death cell blinked out. At the same time there was a

clap of thunder and a diffuse bright light flared and died. Dawson blinked at

the after images, wondering what was happening. Suddenly he noticed that the

tension of the restraints holding his right arm and leg had relaxed. At the

same time, he felt wetness at his right hip, and a pain just beginning there.

He flexed his right arm and was startled when it came free. The padded

restraint was still attached to his wrist, but somehow it seemed to have come

loose from the underpinning beneath the gurney.

In the darkness, Dawson had no idea of what was going on; he only knew

that his arm was free. He scrabbled at the buckles on his left arm, got them

loose, then sat up and freed his left leg. From out of the darkness, there

came a chorus of shouts and screams, heard faintly from the isolation of the

death cell, but he paid them little attention, nor did he wonder where the two

attendants who had been in the death room with him had gone. By some wild

chance, he was free, at least from the gurney, and little else mattered. He

stood upright and felt ahead of himself in the darkness, looking for a way

out.

The floor dropped out from under him as if he had stepped on a

trapdoor, and he fell, screaming into the black night. He crashed to the

ground one story below. One of his outstretched arms crumpled, sending a

searing pain up through his shoulder as the bones of his lower arm shattered.

A gun shot sounded, closer than he wanted to hear. He scrambled away

from the sound, thinking that the guards were coming for him, to strap him

back to the gurney and plunge the syringe of lethal drugs into his arm.

A tangle of vegetation and tree trunks, closer to the walls than he

remembered, impeded his progress, but it served to hide him as well. He

crouched in the darkness, listening as more shouts and gunfire rang out in the

night. He need not have worried about the guards. They were up to their ears

in alligators.

Eventually, the gunfire died away. He listened closely to exuberant

voices and concluded that they belonged to triumphant convicts. It gave him

little consolation. In the feudal-like strata of prison society, he had no

status at all; his kind were at the bottom rung, right down there with the

crazies, child molesters, and deviants.

Finally satisfied that he wasn't being pursued, he crept away into the

dark jungle, cradling his broken arm. He had no sense of direction, wanting

only to get away from the prison. Had he gone west, the jungle would have soon

thinned, but his progress led him southeast, where, if it had not almost

entirely disappeared, he would eventually cross US Highway 59, in the same

general area where Sheila Holloway was sleeping peacefully and Wanda Smith had

returned to her Cherokee and locked all the doors.

The edge of the time bubble that cut Dawson's bonds and shaved a small

chunk of meat from his right hip continued in a perfect circle around the rest

of the prison. It was pure chance that where portions of the old brick

building disappeared from the new environment, it took most of the guards with

it.

The armory was left, and the dispensary, and a goodly portion of the

cells. The auxiliary generator disappeared as well, leaving the cell doors

unlocked, and what few guards remained were in total disarray.

Over the next hour or two, the guards and convicts fought a number of

confused and nightmarish battles in the darkness, but the issue was never

really in doubt. Dawn revealed a prison, with a perfect arc cut from it and

replaced by forest, where the former convicts were firmly in control.

The arc went on to form a circle hundreds of yards in diameter;

enclosed within the circle were shops, service stations, streets and a few

private dwellings, all surrounded by forest. The remainder of the Walls_'_

unit sat on the northern perimeter of the circle. As the sun came up, the

convicts moved out to secure the rest of the area, gathering in those few

civilians who hadn't broke for the new forest when they saw armed convicts

moving around.

Let it be said that cons do have their own code of honor, of sorts; a

hierarchy of ranking as rigid as a feudal system. Had Dawson Reeves been seen,

he would have been eliminated as ruthlessly, and with as little compassion as

a gardener kills a snake, but he had already taken refuge in the forest

adjoining his former place of confinement, still nursing his broken arm and a

slowly building exhilaration at his freedom.

Dawn revealed another aspect of the changed circumstances in the

remains of the prison. As it happened, some of the hard-core whites had been

closer to the armory, and had seized the opportunity. One of them, a big,

hulking brute, a weight lifter by the name of Burley Simpson, a convicted cop

killer, had seized the first arms and directed their distribution and the

ensuing fight. Burley was on his third incarceration, and so far as the

authorities believed, his last. He would not be eligible for parole until he

was well into his eighties, and at that he had been lucky; only a technicality

had prevented him from receiving a death sentence. He was already prejudiced

when he first entered the prison system; by the time of his second sentence,

he became rabidly racist. Now, in the Walls, he ran a white brotherhood gang,

a body of convicts devoted to white supremacy within the prison system. He had

distributed the newly acquired arms accordingly. Daylight brought the

revelation of his fondest dreams. The whites were armed; the blacks were not.

He seized the day like Napoleon getting a second chance at Waterloo,

especially when he was made to understand that the prison had somehow been

displaced from the bounds of a society he had never had much use for in the

first place.

_WHEREVER THE balls of time energy touched down, whatever was within

the confines was displaced backwards in time to primeval forest eastward from

their center in Huntsville, and to scrub and plains westward. Most of the

changes never affected humans directly except here and there, but wherever the

time fields touched down, a circular area of the twentieth century landscape

was replaced by areas of flora and fauna from the past and displaced

backwards, willy-nilly, to cope as it could with an environment not seen since

the late Pleistocene._

_ON A RANCH somewhere well north of Houston, cattle were suddenly

without the supervision they had been bred for. A few died in the night,

others in days or weeks ahead, pulled down by animals such as earth had not

seen for thousands of years._

_IN THE LAKE Livingston area, about eighty miles north of Houston,

several portions of the huge lake were transported in the blink of an eye.

Unconfined walls of water, dozens of feet high and hundreds of feet in

diameter, collapsed down across the land, drowning strange creatures and

familiar alike, along with a few humans who never had a chance to know what

hit them. It flowed and sluiced and washed where the hand of man had never

been seen, scouring new paths to old rivers and streams._

_A TEXAS FARMER slept the sleep of the just, having put the kids to

bed, made love to his wife, then got back up to watch the late news and

weather. He believed in weathermen about as much as he believed in

politicians' promises, but there was corn to plant the next day, and he wanted

to see what the weather radar was showing. He would make his own prediction

from that. He fell asleep in his recliner while he was waiting, and never

awoke even when the clap of thunder and bright flash of light stole Maude and

his three children from him. They were replaced, unfortunately, by a set of

huge, dog-like animals. He was torn to pieces before he even became fully

awake._

ONE CAPSULE OF altered time struck the center of the small town of

Goodpasture on Highway 59, located a few miles south of the city of

Livingston, which was built on the shores of the lake. This displacement took

only a few teen-agers and their pick-up trucks into the past, along with a

deputy sheriff and a few inhabitants of homes near the town's center.

The kids were intent at that hour only with driving past the downtown

shops and impressing their peers. One or two crashed gently into the wall of

trees suddenly surrounding their environment; the others slowed, stopped and

wondered, unable to comprehend immediately what vast changes had come into

their lives.

AT A ROADSIDE rest area, a mixed bag of truckers and travelers spending

the night there suddenly found themselves confined to a section of highway

that began and ended a hundred and fifty yards on either side of them. As dawn

brightened into full sunlight, they gathered in disparate groups to try to

make sense of their predicament but soon enough, the vending machines emptied,

the toilets overflowed, and no one came to rescue them.

Some of the truckers began quarreling. Darla Cranston, a schoolteacher

from Tyler on her way to a seminar in Houston, sidled back to her Toyota Camry

and furtively tucked her twenty-two-caliber revolver into the pocket of her

jacket.

Brent Sampson, a salesman with a slight physique belying his name did

the same, only his weapon was slightly higher powered, a .25 automatic.

Neither of them trusted the four truckers parked there, and the truckers

didn't even trust one another. It was a situation made for trouble.

_ALL IN ALl, there might have been several hundred -- or perhaps even

several thousand -- people who were displaced backward in time on that early

summer night in east Texas. No one will ever know. Many of them never made

contact with their fellows, and many more fell prey to an environment they had

no preparation for coping with. It was a new world, sparsely populated and the

selection had been entirely random, isolating individuals here, cutting

families apart there, and nowhere was there a rule of law such as the

displaced individuals had been used to and grown up with. The same sun they

had been accustomed to all their lives came up just as usual the next morning,

but many of them never lived to see it set that night._

--------

*Chapter Two*

SHEILA HOLLOWAY woke up to the sounds of birds chirping and calling out

to each other. It was not an unfamiliar sound, given that the farmhouse was a

quarter mile removed from the black top traffic, but it did sound louder than

usual this morning, and somehow, not quite the same cheerful sounds as she was

used to. Not only that, there seemed to be more of them, as if all the birds

in the neighborhood had congregated right outside her window and brought their

neighbors along as well. She shook off the covers on the bed and headed for

the bathroom, shucking her nightgown as she went.

The two beers she had drank the night before had left a nasty taste in

her mouth, and she turned on the faucet to get a drink of water. It ran for a

moment, then sputtered and quit. She blinked her eyes open and remembered that

the power had gone out the night before. The early morning sunlight streaming

through her bedroom window and into the bathroom had caused her to forget. Oh

well, power outages never lasted long, unless there had been a hurricane or

something, and it was probably too early in the year for that. She dry brushed

her teeth then opened the closet door, flicking the light switch by habit,

laughing at herself when nothing happened.

She pulled out fresh jeans and a bright yellow blouse and took them

back into the bedroom. There was quite enough light to let her rummage in the

dresser for bra and panties. It was Sunday, so she gave no thought to the lack

of any other sounds in the house. Mom and Dad must have really stayed out late

last night, playing dominoes with the Marlins, she thought.

The light in the bedroom was enough to see how to run a brush through

her bright red hair. She wrinkled her nose at the scattering of freckles

across her cheeks, tied her hair in twin pigtails and walked out from her room

into the hall.

In plain daylight now, the incongruity struck her immediately. No

wonder the birds had sounded so loud. Dozens of them were cheerfully singing

and chirping from a growth of vine-entwined brush at the end of the hall,

growing at the foot of a yards wide tree trunk. The trunk of the huge tree

grew up and up until the hall ceiling obscured it. Where it grew should be the

entrance to her parent's bedroom.

She could not have been more surprised had a dinosaur suddenly decided

to take up residence in the hallway. Her hand shot to her mouth. Had a tree

fallen into the house overnight? Was she dreaming? From somewhere outside, she

became aware of a snuffling noise, like a rooting pig eating acorns.

Cautiously, she stepped forward. Her hand came to rest wonderingly on the bark

of the tree. It was rough, as real as an algebra test, and just as

threatening.

Shakily, she peeked around the trunk, trying to make sense of what the

end of the hall had become. More trees met her vision, and rooting at the base

of one was a large furred animal like nothing she had ever seen or heard of.

It resembled nothing so much as a huge, slow moving sloth.

_Sloth?_ Sheila bit her thumb and shook her head. She knew nothing like

that inhabited the piney woods of east Texas. Had it escaped from a zoo? No.

If that were the case, then a six-foot wide tree trunk had also escaped from

somewhere and taken up residence in the hallway. This must be a dream, but if

it were, it was a singularly vivid one, complete with sounds, and she noticed

now, smells as well. A rich odor of composting vegetation wafted into the

hall, and the snuffling sounds took on the aspects of a small idling steam

engine, chuffing away as the weird animal nosed closer.

Sheila turned and ran back into her bedroom, slamming the door behind

her. Shakily, she opened the other door of the bedroom, the one that led out

into the living room. She peeked through the gap. Everything seemed normal

there. She stepped out into the room, then quickly turned back and locked the

door to the hall, where she still heard the sounds of the feeding animal. At

least it sounded no closer, but what on earth was it?

She crossed the room and looked out the large picture window. Normal

there, too -- no, wait! Not normal. From where she stood, she should be able

to see almost to the county road, but her vision was blocked by forest,

angling in a circle around the familiar farmyard at a distance of a couple

hundred yards. As she watched, a shaggy creature ambled into view, blinked in

the early morning sunlight, then retreated back into the woods. It was about

the size of a bear, but resembled nothing she had ever seen before. She stared

blankly at it, her mind numb.

Blazer, the elderly dog she had grown up with was nowhere in sight, but

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