Paul Gadzikowski
scarfman@iglou.com

King Arthur in Time and Space

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Pelleas dashed into the control room in a panic. The disaster alarm was the least of the CAVE alarms clamoring for attention. "What's happening!!"

"Convergence crisis!" cried Nimue, as if Pelleas knew what that meant. "Two - no, three people's timestreams, backing over each other, doubling ahead of themselves, snapping back - Great Lady, an overcompensatory retroflow! That's supposed to be impossible!" She was dancing around the controls, whence most of the alarms were sounding, even drowning out the great chiming of the time engines. The four-dimensional map projection of the space-time continuum above the navigation controls was wobbling. "The Fabric of Time could snap and unravel!"

"Avalonians? Dragons?" Pelleas shouted over the noise.

Nimue looked up with the expression of contempt she'd learned from the old man. "Athenian Greeks!"

"The planet Greece didn't have time travel in the Athenian age!" Pelleas objected. Not spaceflight either.

"Not after I catch up with these irresponsible cretins!" snarled Nimue. "Or rather - before I do!"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I'm going to upstream the eventflow and unhappen the holistic enchilada!" She slammed a lever from one end of its groove to the other. The continuum projection stilled and Pelleas was left to scramble after her out the CAVE doors.

They'd landed in an empty shopping mall parking lot at night. Two people, an old man with wild white hair and a guy a little younger than Pelleas, and a shaggy dog were clustered around a black and chrome - what had they been called? - muscle car. Looking at it crossed Pelleas' eyes just like looking at the continuum projection.

"Remember, son," the old man was saying, "eighty-eight leagues per hour breaks the time barrier - but more than ninety-one will melt the solder in the seams."

FIN

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