The Chronocide Mission
Lloyd Biggle Jr.Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old student at Mount
Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday afternoon, March 24,
2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring fever and cut his
classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus.
Even after fifty
years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it as vividly as
though it had happened an hour before. It was a warm, fresh day with a
promise of spring--the first really pleasant day of the year after the
usual vagaries of a midwest winter. He strolled leisurely through the
park, thinking with shameless delight of the stuffy classrooms he was
avoiding.
Eventually he seated himself on a patch of greening grass with
a convenient tree to lean against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the
peaceful surroundings while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked
up. He felt sleepy. Probably he dozed off. Then came a tremendous jerk,
like having a chair pulled from under him at the same instant that a
truck hit him, and he almost lost consciousness. He landed with a
painful bump and skidded for a short distance along a very rough wood
floor. For a moment he sat gazing about him dazedly.
He had been
abruptly translated from his seat on the ground in a pleasant park on a
lovely spring day to a seat on a wood floor in a large, dim room with a
thunderstorm raging outside. He had a distinct impression that the two
scenes had been linked by an earthquake. He tried hard to focus his
thoughts, staring first at a table where a candle burned brightly and
then at an animal tied to one of the table's legs by a short leash. It
was a hairy pig. He raised his eyes to the room's two small,
water-streaked windows and saw nothing beyond but branches swaying in a
strong wind...