BY ARTHUR CHAPPELL

The time traveler arrived in the 1640's and drew the machine to a halt. His two assistants impatiently grabbed for the crate that he intended to deliver, but he stopped them in their tracks.

"We must check our surroundings first. We could be behind Parliamentary lines or in the middle of nowhere. We do not want our materials to fall into the hands of the wrong people or we will speed up that which we came here to stop."

The other men dropped the crate, narrowly missing the foot of one of them, who swore and growled accordingly. The time traveler was disgusted with this and said so. "Gentlemen, you are the first people to ever go back in history in this way. Try to have some sense of occasion. Think 'One great leap for mankind' rather than 'Ow my bleedin' foot, you stupid bastard..."

"Sorry Jeremy," one off the men said, sheepishly, and with indifference to the pioneering spirit of what he was engaged in. He yawned and picked at his nose. For lack of a handkerchief, he wiped his hand down his jeans, and started tucking his Chelsea Forever tee shirt into the trousers.

for the occasion. He had considered going in period dress, but had decided that as men from the future they should look the part to demonstrate as much.

The other one, in a 'Star Trek Deep Space Nine' shirt snapped. "Look, can we get on with this. I promised the missus I'd be back in time to take her out to dinner tonight. It's our anniversary today."

"We have a time machine, Barry," Jeremy told him. "Being late isn't likely. I can get you there in the nick of time or a week early if you'd prefer to meet yourself on the way."

Just as long as we get them triple rollover lottery numbers like you promised," the other man said.

"Consider it done, Chris" Jeremy told him. "You'll be richer by tonight than if I'd paid you by the hour, because I could never afford to do that."

"Of course we will," the labourer said. "We've only been with you for about three hours."

"It's sixteen forty-four or so now," Jeremy told him. "You've been with me for five hundred years. Work that out in hours, and then you'll see why the lottery ticket will be worth more than I could possibly pay you."

The man chosen for brawn rather than brains tried to work it out. His mind told him simply that it was lots of money and he seemed satisfied. He grinned and drooled approvingly.

Jeremy told them to 'shut up', and then he slowly opened the door. Swirling black acrid smoke poured in along with the sound of loud rumbling thunderous explosions.

Coughing and spluttering, Jeremy slammed the door shut.

Barry shouted and raved as the smoke cleared. "We're in the Somme or something. You've brought us in the middle of a mustard gas attack..."

Jeremy laughed. "No, nothing that bad, but I fear we are in the midst of the 1644 battle of Marston Moor. The thunder and the fog are made by cannon fire and the muskets on a naturally misty day. I think we need to move our machine forward about a year to a more peaceful interlude before we attempt to promote our wares."

"I reckon we could get through to the right people here if we hang on long enough," Barry said, still impatient to get the job done with and away to his home.

"We wouldn't get far in the shooting, and we wouldn't know which side we were approaching. Surely you wouldn't want Fairfax and Cromwell to take our merchandise from us instead, would you?"

The men knew better than to argue politics with Jeremy Forester. He was pompous, opinionated, full of long words and also their boss. They wondered if he hadn't considered their dismissal from service taking the ruthless form of leaving them behind in the mists of time. They were there for only one reason. His crate was too heavy to lift on his own. The rest of the job he intended to accomplish single-handedly.

"We need to go now," Jeremy said. "I don't think the machine can take musket fire, let alone a cannon-ball."

Something ran by Barry's leg, and barked, growled and started scratching at the door. Their first thought was that it was a rat, but they realised as the smoke cleared that they had acquired a dog. It was a poodle.

Jeremy was happily overawed. "It's Boy."

"Who cares what sex it is," Chris said, "what's it doing in here?"

"It's name is Boy," Jeremy said. "he's the pet dog of Prince Rupert Of The Rhine."

"How the hell do you know that? It could be any old dog?" Barry remarked.

Jeremy scowled. "I know my history. I've researched such matters. If I hadn't, would we even be here? "

The men accepted this logic and allowed their employer to continue.

"Rupert took his dog into battle with him, and it scared the hell out of the Parliament army for years, but the dog finally died at Marston, where we are now. By saving Boy, we have in effect already changed history. Rupert will be pleased that we can re-unite him with his pet. Now, we should be just about arriving at Market Harborough from where the King rode into Naseby, in 1645 about now."

Jeremy went to the controls that operated the machine. The Men expressed simultaneously their surprise that they were in motion again. The machine moved without friction or turbulence of any kind and they were unaware that they were back in transit at all. Boy however seemed sensitive to the machine's high pitched whirring workings and went frantic. His bladder emptied. The resultant fire as the dog-pee hit the electronics and the sudden grinding crashing noise as the machine slowed from excess of light speed to nothing in minutes told them all that maybe the use of the well labeled pre-installed safety harnesses and belts might have been worthwhile after all. The sleek black metallic cabinet machine rolled and bucked as men and beast were flung around within the wardrobe wide box. Jeremy had told them that unlike Dr. Who the inventors of this time machine had not yet mastered the art of making such a devise bigger inside than out. Jeremy banged his head several times as the machine virtually disintegrated around him, and then lost consciousness.

He woke in a ditch staring into the face of a royalist pikeman who prodded him with the base of a sixteen foot staff. "This one lives," the man said. The man had several companions who roughly hoisted Jeremy upright, and his screaming agony told them that his legs were broken. Thoughts of leeches and pre-anaesthesia surgery surged through his mind, and Jeremy winced and cried, but the men took this to be mere additional symptoms of his injuries.

"Spare me the doctors until I have spoken with the King, " Jeremy begged them.

The leading pikeman halted the stretcher bearers who were now easing their charge to the crude wooden board that would convey him from the place of injury.

"Your accent is a s strange as the remains of your burnt and ragged clothes. Where be you from?"

"I am from a London five hundred years into your future, and from Marston Moor, about a year before now," Jeremy said, matter of factly.

The men laughed so much the stretcher bearers dropped him.

"Delirium I have seen, but not so pronounced as this," one bearer said.

"I'm not delirious," Jeremy shouted. "Look at me. Have you seen my like before? See my wrist. Have you seen a sundial like this before?" The men looked at the digital watch in wonder. It bore the time of day with some accuracy at 11.33 am.

"What alchemy and sorcery have you indulged in?" asked the pikeman who served as chief-rescuer, taking on the air of a would be jailer and interrogator as the sentence flowed from his lips.

"No alchemy, but science, and study, of the kind Lord Francis Bacon would have approved in the years before your struggles. Look at the remains of the machine that brought me here, and you will see further proofs of the truth I speak."

through the heavily guarded city entrance way into the Royalist camp the leader of the rescue party spoke of the machine. "You say you came in the devise? We thought it some strange new mortar shell that had landed upon you, and your now dead companions as you walked here. If you were cast up with such a weapon from its firing mechanism it is a miracle that you yourself survived the flight at all. "

Jeremy asked about the men who had been with him. "Dead, you say?"

The commander of the pike nodded affirmatively, and Jeremy felt sorry for them. They had been simply men of no questions asked principles, who wanted a life of Reiilly, and had no qualms against helping to steal an experimental time machine from a scientific laboratory that Jeremy had worked in briefly as a technician. Their deaths, however, could save many more lives, so Jeremy was quite intent to continue his mission. "It is no mortar, and no weapon, though it carries a cargo of weapons that could help your King and commander to win the war."

The Pikeman patted him on the shoulder. "Indeed, the metal plating of the infernal machine will make good plate. We are short of musket-ball and there is enough metal there to melt down to support such a cause..."

Jeremy was alarmed.... "No you mustn't. The machine must take me back to the futu..." he stopped, realizing that the time machine was too badly wrecked to salvage already. He was marooned here. "Ok, make plate of the workings if you must, but tell me, is the large wooden crate that it bears in good condition?"

The Captain of pike questioned his men and then returned to answer the question. "It appears to be a little charred and chipped but otherwise unharmed. What of it?"

"Thank God," Jeremy said, "That is the gift I bring for Charles the First. I must see the King, .....My King..... our King, in person to discuss that."

"The King is busy at this critical time. I cannot simply take you to him now." the Pikeman said. Jeremy was in process of making fruitless complaint and realising that he would have to negotiate his arms trade with lesser men than Charles the First personally when a man ran up shouting with great sadness in his voice, that Boy had been found, and bearing the pathetic corpse of the young dog with him. Before he knew it, Jeremy Forester was lying in a bed in a cold rat infested cell, and his King had come to talk to him personally to discuss how the pet dog of his once favourite nephew had fallen into his hands so many months after its disappearance. Jeremy was overawed by his King's presence. He had never seen his own time's royals other than from television and news reports and once from afar at the Changing of the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Jeremy bowed before the King in all deference, and for a moment spoke in gibbering, faltering excitement, coupled with the pain of his as yet untreated injuries. He had been given no food and precious little water as yet, but seeing the King looking so well, and so self-assured, he seemed the happiest man on the planet.

"How came Boy into your company?" The King asked him, clearly eager for quick, no nonsense answers.

"By chance, my King, and I am sorry that he both died and prevented me taking you to see the future I hoped to help you change."

preposterously unlikely nature, the King had him tell it without interrupting once, hearing how Jeremy had become increasingly infatuated with the concept of pure monarchy, seeing his own time period King Charles the 4th reduced to a mere figurehead who opened supermarkets and got jeered against by the media, at every turn, while the nation was ruled by increasing corrupt politicians who bleated on about a democracy that simply wasn't. By chance, Jeremy had stumbled in his work upon a new top secret 'time travel machine' study, which had been intended for looking to the future fate of humanity, but which he had 'liberated' in order to bring about a better human past.

"Why here? " asked the King. "Why not go to the time of the crucifixion and save our lord, Jesus Christ? Why did you not come to me before I attempted to take Pym and the four other members of Parliament under arrest? Why not stop my hand before I condemned noble Lord Strafford to be beheaded? Why not stop the years of madness before so many people in our fair land perished to cannon, sword, bullet and pike-blow? Why now? It seems to me that there were so many times and places you could have changed my fate and possibly even your own before this moment."

Jeremy struggled for an answer. He really didn't know. "Had my machine not crashed, we could have gone back to whatever time you chose to make the changes there according to your wishes. Sadly, now is the time we are stuck in and I can no more go back or forward from this time than any of us, but I do bring a gift from the future that can still yet change our destiny fate for the better. Have you seen the crate that I brought with me."

The King's men had indeed inspected the crate, finding some heavy looking cumbersome musket type devises there. One such was brought before Jeremy and the King asked for a name, description and demonstration of what was quite obviously a gun.

Jeremy took the gun in hand, and pointed out that it was not yet loaded with the shells he had also brought with him in large quantity in his crate along with instructions on making more of the same. "It is a machine gun, a musket that fires repeated rounds, hundreds of bullets between reloadings. I believe that this could well change your destiny at the impending battle at Naseby... Without this, you are doomed to lose, and your fate will be as I described before, capture, decapitation, and your royal descendants reduced increasingly to media buffoonery while the country goes to the dogs under an indifferent regime of Parliament spin and sleaze."

The King decided to have the gun tested, and Jeremy finally received some painful medical treatment that fortunately did not involve leeches or amputation, and also received food in the way of a surprisingly good strong broth-stew mix. He was not present at the gun trials, but rumours told him that these had involved tests on Roundhead prisoners as well as on more conventional targets. He hoped not.

After this he heard nothing for days, while he remained under virtual house arrest, but well fed and watered, but with precious little company, until the King ordered him to a horse and to accompany his journey to and through Naseby. Jeremy, barely able to walk after his legs had been crudely reset, had little riding ability and yet he took well to the horse once he had finally been lifted bodily onto the back of one saddleless but particularly docile white mare, which was pressed in closely by accompanying riders. He was kept close tot he King's side.

"It seems we are to meet our mortal brother enemies at Naseby and I remember you prophesized with your knowledge of our future as your past that this day would come. I fear we must put your terrible new toys to the test this day."

"You will have cause to rejoice such a wise decision, Your Majesty," Jeremy said.

The King shook his head, almost in disgust. "I hear such platitudes daily from my servants, Mister Forester, and I take it for sycophantic patronizing insincerity, but you are a genuine fanatical Royalist, a groveler and a man who lets such passion over-ride all sense and reason. I'm not sure if I like you less than those who speak this way to me merely in a quest for favour and privilege."

Jeremy was taken aback and so saddened by such comments that he had nothing to say and it was now clear that the battle lines were drawn so there was no chance to speak anyway. Jeremy had seen such sights in films and even in civil war re-enactments of the kind he had taken part in with The Sealed Knot. There were however differences. The Cavalry of the Royalist forces seemed to hang back, withdrawn and almost indifferent to what could come, and the musketeers were now but a single line of entrenched men with Thompson machine-guns.

be identified as Cromwell, but he never saw him, as the battle commenced and the guns rattled out almost at once, and in an instant a whole block of New Model Army Pikemen fell as the gunfire scythed them away, and then the event happened again.. It wasn't a second pike block that fell, but the same one, as the event looped in on itself... and then it happened again, and again and again and again....... The instant of sweeping historic change was trapped in a permanent loop of deja vu. Jeremy had cancelled his own future and he had an instant to shout 'Shit!" as he realized it, a shout that repeated throughout infinity as the record needle of time froze up on him and all. The Royalist change of fortunes meant different plague victims for 1666, and an end to the family line that would have led to Jeremy Forester's conception. His non-existence meant that he had never been into his past, so the future he was creating was now cancelled out, but by having truly stolen a time machine and going back, he had made this happen, so paradoxically the transition between two futures from that point hence were locked in a battle of mutual extinction, that would last an eternity. The King was grinning in his sense of impending victory, while Jeremy simply mouthed the word 'Shit' over and over again, and they would continue to do so forever.......