Leaning back in his luxuriously upholstered swivel chair, Barry sighed as he raised his feet and rested them upon the lavish desk before him. A tobacco pipe hung easily from the corner of his mouth and every now and then he sucked upon it, spreading a most delicious scent of peach and cinnamon.

In the corner of the room behind him a section of wall detached itself from the rest and slid slowly, silently forwards, to reveal nothing more than a big red button.

"Oh c'mon!" he exclaimed, though he did so to no one in particular as there was not anyone else there. "Can't a bloke get five minutes' peace?"

With a heavy, elongated sigh, Barry spun the chair around, reached out and with the flat of his hand he hit the big red button.

His body shuddered, just as he knew it would, as his genetic code realigned itself.

"I hate this part," he muttered, or at least he tried to mutter. The sound that actually escaped his mouth was far closer to, "moo."

At that moment his office door jangled open because it had a bell above it, and also because someone was in the process of entering.

Someone was probably a stretch though, given the fact that what had actually just walked through the door, with four legs and udders, was a cow.

"Afternoon," Barry mooed. "How can I be of service?"

"A return to twelve-fifteen," the cow mooed in reply, chewing a vast amount of cud as it did so.

"Twelve-fifteen?" the Barry cow quietly mooed. "Shouldn't be a problem, there's a thirteenth century window coming up in about six hours."

"Haven't you got anything sooner?" the other cow said with its eyebrows raised in a hopeful manner.

The Barry cow flicked through a few files - well this actually isn't strictly true, you see the Barry cow was not flicking through files on his computer... What he was actually doing was making a dinner reservation for the following Friday night. He had a lady friend, you see, and she was not the kind of lady friend for whom a bottle of Lambrini, twenty Lambert & Butler and a packet of chips eaten upon the seafront would suffice.

"I've got room in the twelfth century pod," said the Barry cow after what was probably too long a time to have feigned flicking through files upon his computer screen. "Thing is, it leaves in seven minutes and when you get there, assuming you manage to secure a drop in eleven ninety-nine, you'll have to wait fifteen years to do whatever it is you need to do in twelve-fifteen."

"Reckon I'll take the thirteenth century, thank you very much."

"Figured you would." The Barry cow smiled a very cow-like smile for he was, after all, a cow.

"I see here we've already got your payment details on file," a brief pause, whilst he hoofed a tablet across the desk towards the soon-to-be-paying cow. "Key your password and we're golden."

Moments later the Barry cow was alone in his office once more and with one of his four hoofs, he hit the big red button once again and moments later still he was no longer a cow; he was simply Barry.

"Three hundred million before lunch," he said out loud, although also to himself because as I'm certain you'll recall, he was alone. "Not bad for half a day's work!"

He got to his feet and strode across the office, out of the door and into the foyer. Ginny was there, she was the receptionist after all and today, she appeared to have selected the guise of a platypus although granted, a platypus with obnoxiously large mammary glands.

"I'm going to lunch, Ginny," he said to the platypus. "No meetings for an hour and a half unless, of course, it's an absolute emergency."

"Of course, Sir," Ginny replied. She was the only person who knew the true identity of the man in the office. To everyone else he was a Time Fixer... If you needed to get somewhen and you needed to do so fast and anonymously, that's who you went to see but to Ginny, Barry was, well... Barry. He was also her dad. "Should I put Hopkins' appointment back an hour?"

"Shit." Barry stopped in his tracks. He had forgotten all about Hopkins. The man was attempting to convince Barry to pay a few billion for the loss of his son, but as Barry said it was hardly his fault that the youth missed the return window from seventy-eight thousand BCE. That's what happens when you take eight of your mates on a stag night to have some fun with Neanderthal women. The actual effects of that were yet to make themselves clear but Barry was merely a facilitator, giving other folk the ability to travel whenever they wished. What they did once there - whenever there, was - was not his concern.

"No, it's fine," he replied with a sigh. "I'll be back in twenty-five minutes."

***

"Ah, Mr Hopkins," said Barry as the antelope entered the office, followed by several other antelope. "I see you brought some friends, and unless I'm very much mistaken they do appear to be quite heavily armed... Of course, it's rather difficult to miss the fact that antelope are carrying what look to be semi-automatic machine guns..."

"Cut the crap, Time Fixer," said the Hopkins antelope. "Unless you take me to the Mesozoic to bring my boy back and hand over one hundred and fifty billion for my wife's heartache, the only thing you'll be fixing is the inside of your coffin."

"Fine, then kill me," said the Barry antelope. "But before you do I have something you might want to consider."

The Barry antelope paused for a moment, more to see if he was actually going to get shot than anything else. When he concluded that was not going to happen, he continued.

"Do you know how much Time I've screwed with? I certainly don't, and I'd hate to think of all that Time unravelling because I was too dead to act as its anchor."

"If Time does unravel," the Hopkins antelope began, his face wearing as thoughtful a face as antelope can manage, "will that bring my boy back?"

"Probably not," replied the Barry antelope with a shrug. "I can't guarantee it, of course, but what I suspect will happen if all that Time unravels is that the history that did happen, won't happen... By killing me you'll be rewriting the very history of the Universe."

"You're joking, right?

"OK, OK... Probably not the Universe but definitely Earth. I would bet the entire contents of every single bank account in my name, that if you kill me and therefore unravel all of that Time, serious shit will ensue."

The Barry antelope paused with the intention of lighting his pipe, but then he remembered he was an antelope and smoking a pipe was not a skill that antelope possessed so instead, he simply opted to continue talking.

"I'm the tether, see? That's the way it works... Whilstever I'm alive then Time will be fine... I mean, sure, one or two slight alterations are bound to happen when who-knows-who goes who-knows-where to carry out who-knows-how-many nefarious deeds. Sometimes these alterations are for the worse but more often than not, surprisingly enough, they're for the better... I mean you remember the Christmas Eve, two-thousand and seven, don't you? The German invasion of London?"

"What are you talking about, Time Fixer?"

"Exactly... Someone went somewhen and whatever they did whilst they were then caused that event not to happen."

The Hopkins antelope shook his head vigorously and said, "So let me get this straight; you're not going to take me back to the Mesozoic?"

"Gladly," the Barry antelope replied. "I'll take you back there, sure, but you're going to have to wait for the next Mesozoic window to open."

"And when will the next Mesozoic window open?"

"What time is it..? One thirty-two... Let's see, the next Mesozoic window will open on the twelfth of June, twenty-seven eighty-one, at just after seven-thirty of the AM."

And then the Barry antelope was shot in the head, twice, and as I'm sure you can imagine, he died, and then because the Time Fixer was dead and therefore unable to act as Time's tether, serious shit ensued...

***

The thing is, and I should warn you know this is quite liable to get complicated and therefore, the author can accept no responsibility should your head explode, when Time - that's right, with a capital 'T,' - unravels, many different things can - and quite often, do - happen.

The last time Time unravelled in such a way, i.e., the last time the Time Fixer was killed leaving the entity, Time, to fend for itself, an unstoppable chain of events was set in place that resulted in, amongst other things, the evolution of the human race.

Now of course, you're going to pooh-pooh the notion that the human race - a race of which you, I would imagine, are part of - only came into being because of the death of a salesman - technically speaking anyway, I mean that plesiosaur was definitely selling something!

But you see, humans were never supposed to exist, certainly not with such dominance and control. In fact we, as a species, were never supposed to be anything more than a sociological experiment but then the plesiosaur, the Time Fixer at the time, died in a freak accident involving a Swedish prostitute and a Volkswagen, thus leaving Time tetherless.

The consequences of the aforementioned event - that event being the untethering of time and not the evolution of an entire species - are not always as severe as, well, the evolution of an entire species. Sometimes, as happened a few thousand years ago in the Middle East when the Time Fixer at the time took a three month vacation to what would eventually become Rickmansworth, the consequences are as negligible as a few obscure and unbelievable weather anomalies or an entire continent mysteriously being erased from every map in all of creation only to be 'discovered,' several thousand years later... That's not to say that had the continent of Oceania not gone missing that it would have made much of a difference, however it's a safe assumption that had that not been the case, the beer industry would have been far more lucrative now than it is...

Anyway...

What you're probably expecting is some kind of resolution, here... Perhaps you're hoping that Ginny will seek revenge for her father's death, that maybe the consequences of the untethering of Time won't really be all that severe and that maybe, just maybe, Leyton Orient will win the FA Cup.

None of the above was the case. Well not really, I suppose it depends upon your point of view. Ginny, certainly, never avenged her father for the simple fact that due to the ensuing of a vast quantity of quantum faecal matter, she was never born and nor was her father, rendering her quite incapable of doing anything about it now matter how much she desired to do so.

And Leyton Orient certainly never won the FA Cup, but that's almost entirely because they were an amateur synchronised swimming team, and most definitely not a team who played Association Football.

The overall consequences of the untethering of Time though, were, in the grand scheme of things, not really that big of a deal. I mean sure, the asteroid that supposedly caused the extinction level event and ended the age of the dinosaurs actually hit Mars, not Earth, thus disturbing the entire equilibrium of the Inner Solar System and kick-starting the re-evolution of life on the Red Planet - which, by the by, meant that a race of vastly intelligent, bird-like hominids dominated the Solar System for several thousand years before being wiped out by a man capable of tracing his lineage back as far as the Allosaurus who put his tail in the duck... At least, that's how the story goes...

So you see, Humanity did evolve in the Sol System, after a fashion... Granted, rather than mammalian they were a reptilian species but they still ate junk food and invented the internet and used it to pay their bills, do internet shopping and watch vast amounts of pornography.

The more things change, eh?