Geoff Nelder

Tapping her shiny new laptop at the kitchen table in Jackson, Tabitha couldn’t believe her luck, nor how her bank account bulged.

Kallandra lifted an eyebrow in disbelief. “Blake’s been back twenty thousand years?”

Gathering painful consciousness, Blake assumed he’d fallen back into the cave. But, no. He registered, not Oqmar’s cave, but from within, a van, much like the Student Union’s Ford Transit. Nighttime, judging by the two rectangles of pale yellow light that struggled in through the rear doors. Looked like the inside handle was broken.

On the way back to the Johnson Space Centre Kallandra expressed no surprise to learn that all the spheres had left simultaneously. But her eyebrows rose when Derek, back at Johnson, told her on the radio that after they’d reached a thousand miles directly above their takeoff points, they veered to park in a geosynchronous orbit 26,000 miles above the equator.

Back at Johnson, sixty people had been arguing. A quarter of them sported military uniforms, a few wore their NASA apparel with equal pride. The shouting had died after Colonel Dwight Disraeli demanded they employed cogent argument, or he’d clear the room and ask the cleaners in to make the strategic decisions. Of course they knew it was a bluff, but one that brought their bickering into perspective. Even so, the Army Chief of Staff, Gibbon, made the point that the increasing time shifts would probably end if the spheres didn’t exist.

“Yellow Fin Tuna?” yelled the red-faced tourist, his riotous-red Hawaiian shirt bursting over his belly. “We hired this boat to catch shark.”