RE 3

Short Story by Jim Blow
A Time Traveller original idea from the author that brought you Heroes in odd Places.
Wylock Roger and Leo

The Reoccurring.

Part I

Chapter ii

2008

A white light faded. Wylock brought his hands away from his eyes.
"Are you listening?" Leo asked, looking at the professor.
Wylock nodded. "What is it?"
"It's broken! The thing's imploding!" Leo shouted.
Wylock looked over at Roger. Roger nodded and they split into action.
"Shut it down."
"I can't."
"We'll have to do it manually!"
Leo climbed down to the TIME PORTAL. Strange purple fumes spat out from within the vortex. Leo reached up and flipped a switch, suddenly his feet slid out from under him and he flew upward, then sideways into the portal. It closed, swallowing him up.
"The portal's shaking." Roger said, walking over to Wylock.
"And now it's done." Wylock muttered, turning away.
"We're back where we started again."
"And once again we'll try to solve all of this!"
"I'm with you to the end Professor."
"I know you are, Roger. I know."
"Why do we come back here?" Roger asked, looking around the destroyed lab, and the collapsed TIME PORTAL.
"I don't know. I assume because this is where it all started."
"I don't understand time."
"Few do."
"I believed for the longest time that it was only possible to go forward in time. You know. If I were to go up in space, time would be different for me than it was for people on the planet here. I'd be going forward in time....at least in a sense I would."
"Time is a great mystery. Clocks tick on when Time Stands Still. Nothing makes sense to me anymore."
"So we take another crack at it. Straighten out the Line."
"I wish I'd never invented this confounded portal...and the Time Jumpers in the first place!"
"The first place. That's where we'll try this time."
"I beg your pardon."
"Every time we get here we go somewhere else in time to try to straighten out the Line we disrupted. I say this time we go back to when you first invented the Time Jumpers themselves."
Wylock nodded. "It wasn't a pretty time."
"Is any of time 'pretty' anymore, doc?"
Wylock shrugged. "I suppose not."
Roger and the old scientist raised the Time Jumpers to their faces, twisting the dial backward to go back in time. "Leo will be there. Will that change what happened there?"
"I don't think time can get any worse than it is."