An Afterward from the archivist: This story was begun around the time CommHex BBS went down. Temporal Vortex BBS (or TLVX for short), the board this story was being written on, was actually the sister board to CommHex. It was running the same software as the Hex, in fact. This was, of course, because the two sysops actually WROTE the software together. Trouble is, about the time Part One ("A Real Scorcher") was finished, the Unix-PC that TLVX was running on was wrecked by lightning! Grrrrrrr....! Part One probably would have been a bit longer, actually, since the point it got to was not really INTENDED as the end of part one, it was simply a lesser plot climax, building towards other plot events. The replacement BBS for TLVX, the Amiga version of C-Net, was not really suited for setting up a story sub, so the story was put on hold for awhile. Then Gary Wolfe switched to a combination of TAG and Waffle, on an IBM clone, so I decided to continue the story on the Waffle system. Unfortunately, Temporal Vortex never had the number of callers that CommHex had, and now virtually everyone that calls does so only to read the Usenet newsgroups on Waffle. I was not able to get much participation in the remaining story. We got up to the part where the baddies locked onto the pseudoTARDIS with something and stopped their escape... and then participation stopped entirely. I waited more than a year, occasionaly "nudging" the participants to post one or two more posts... which they never got around to... and I finally gave up and posted a quicky ending. I've decided I probably won't attempt another story on TLVX: there simply isn't enough participation. Instead, I'll wait for another BBS that has a lot of users who like to participate in these things, and who were the kind that used to call CommHex when it was up. Then again, Gary Wolfe has been working on getting the old CommHex software ported to the PC. He's thinking of maybe going with a multi-line kind of system, one where each line would function as a separate "node," and in doing so we might even be able to get CommHex, the BOARD, back online! That may be enough to attract a buncha callers of the kind I need. Who knows? As for this archive, I would have had it completed somewhat earlier, except that about the time I finally finished the story, my Amiga 500 decided to fail completely! And when I went to order an Amiga 1200 as a replacement, it turned out they were backordered to the middle of next decade! Aaarrrrghhhh!!! Oh well, I've got a 1200 now -- used -- so.... --Nomad of Norad, August 1994