Time Leap by Steve Howrie Page A

the same red rose was
appearing like magic. It was incredible!”
    “ That’s,
that’s… amazing!” I said.
    When it was finished,
Junior showed Nik her finished article.
    “ It’s
beautiful. Nik replied, “thank you for giving it to me.”
    “ To you?”
Junior queried.
    “ Yes – take a
look.” She lifted her skirt to show the same tattoo.
    “ You’ve got
the same! But yours looks a little older. When did you have it
done?”
    “ Oh, about
sixteen years ago,” Nik smiled.
    Junior stared into Nik’s
eyes. “I know who you are,” she said, “but I don’t understand
it.”
    “ You will,” I
said. “Sometime in the future, you’ll know everything. But now we
have to go…”
    “ I want to go
with you!” Junior suddenly exclaimed, grabbing Nik’s
hand.
    “ You can’t –
it’s not your time. You’re needed here. Without you, I am nothing…
so look after yourself – and follow your dreams.” Nik released her
hand from Junior’s whilst I changed the date on the phone, holding
Nik’s hand tightly.
    “ See you in
the future,” I said. And we were gone.
     
    ***

Eleven
     
    Having proved that
whatever physical changes we make to ourselves in the past can
affect us in the present, we now turned our thoughts to bigger
matters.
    I’d voiced my concerns to
Niki about the current Middle East situation and how I thought it
would be a good idea to jump forward to the future to see where
this was leading. Having bumped off both Bush and Blair because of
my intervention in the past, I felt a little bit responsible for
the new World situation and thought our first priority was to put
matters straight in this area. Niki agreed.
    However, whilst jumping
back to the past means entering a known universe (to the finest
detail), venturing into the future is entirely different. Okay, if
we don’t go too far forward, we can be pretty certain that building
are going to get taller, populations are going to increase, and
money will be worth less. Or even worthless one day. But once we
make bigger jumps into the future, it gets more difficult. The
treatment of our environment (forest and ozone depletion, pollution
of air, sea and land); hunting certain species of animals to
extinction (or merely destroying their habitats); use and reliance
on fossil fuels, and the melting of the polar ice–caps… etc etc
could all add up to not only a changed World, but one in which Man
may not even exist.
    However, we didn’t think
we’d have to jump so very far forward in time to see the effects of
the present Hussein–Gaddafi alliance. Niki suggested ten year
jumps, which sounded reasonable. Having decided when, the next
thing to decide was ‘where.’ Obviously, London was most convenient,
but we couldn’t be sure we’d be living in the same apartment in ten
years’ time, and we didn’t want to give anyone a heart attack again
by just appearing from nowhere. So instead, we thought about a
location that would change very little over a period of, say, fifty
years – and Hyde Park came to mind. It seemed unlikely that
anyone’s going to be given planning permission to build a
supermarket on Hyde Park in the near future (it’s protected area),
so that seemed a safe bet.
    “ What should
we take with us?” Niki asked on the morning of our planned jump. It
was a good question, but I didn’t really know how to answer
it.
    “ It’s
difficult to say…”
    “ What about a
gun?”
    “ A
gun!”
    “ Yeah… we
don’t know how dangerous it’s going to be in the
future.”
    “ Well to start
with, I don’t know where we’d get one…”
    “ That’s
easy.”
    “ It
is?”
    “ You find a
gun shop, jump back one day, steal a gun, and then jump forward to
the present.”
    “ You want
to steal a real
gun?” I said.
    “ Not me,
you.”
    I explained that guns are
kept in locked cupboards… you can’t just walk in and pick one up –
not in England. And anyway, I’ve never used a gun before – and
neither had