Three Time Winners

Prologue At one Particular Instant in the Time Span of the Cosmic All, there was a galaxy in a remote stretch of the Universe, about a million light years from Empire Prime, which was known by its humanoid and non-humanoid inhabitants as the "Milky Way". From neighboring Island Universes, its large number of suns and galaxies produced what seemed to be a pale curtain of light, thousands of light years long and thick. Behind the white veil, at the edge of the Eternal Darkness leading to the End of the Universe, there was a very small solar system with a sun named "Sol" by its alien inhabitants on the third planet. The Empire's intelligence section had landed proxies on the third planet to learn about its strange humanoid beings. The name was adopted by the Empire's Imperial cartographers when they obtained the first reports from the Imperial spys, who lived on the planet, posing as native beings of the planet. The third planet of the small sun was known as "Earth" to its humanoid residents. The northern hemisphere of the tiny blue-white planet was just entering its season known as "summer". On that tiny planet "summer" was a time in which the temperatures were higher than any other time of the year, (although not hot enough to melt lead and aluminum, like on some of the Imperial planets that are inhabited). The humanoids of the planet used the term "day" to describe the interval of time needed for the planet to rotate on its axis one time. On the one particular "day" of the planet that occurred during that one Particular Instant, nothing important seemed to happen on the tiny unimportant planet. But celestially, above the planet, it was different! IT was a VERY eventful day! When the time charge wore off, it was "de-ja-voo" all over again! While traveling through time and space, Chance had lost consciousness! When he regained his senses, he was again waking up in a shallow trench. He was mildly disoriented and he found himself dressed in old clothes at the edge of a small ravine with a small creek flowing through it. As he looked around, a band of Comanche Indians on horseback come toward him! Alarmed, Chance stumbled down the ravine and waded through the creek. As the water splashed over him, the last of the "Time Covering" on his body disintegrated and Chance once more lost consciousness! After several hours of very slow travel Matt reached the edge of the forest and looked upon an astonishing sight. Because he did not know exactly where he was, Matt did not realize that the modern concrete roads in the California freeway system that had been in the area were gone, and in their place was what the modern roads evolved from, a dusty trail a few dozen feet wide, covered with what appeared to be mounted cowboys, horse-drawn buggies, and huge covered wagons! It was exactly the kind of scene taht he saw regularly on the "Frontier" channel on his H-D television. The channel exclusively showed old westerns and in between the films featured the footage of local trail rides hapeing in the California area. Not knowing why, Matt followed his instincts and continued to stay hidden in the bushes instead of leaving the protection of the vegetation and trying to hitch a ride with one of the wagons in what he thought was modern-day Los Angeles. As the sun started to set, an old-fashioned Conestoga covered wagon, with several horses tied on behind, pulled off the road and stopped beside the bushes where Matt was hiding. Three men stepped down from the vehicle and started to make camp for the night just inside the bushes. Their western-style clothes were clean and they looked like reputable men, (even if they each were wearing at least one pistol in leather holstrers swung low on each hip), so Matt left the shelter of his hiding place and started slowly walking toward their locaton. The smallest of the three men was faced toward him and was taking the saddle off a paint stallion. When the young man saw him, he dropped the saddle and seemed to instantaneously draw the old-fashioned gun from his holster and point it toward Matt. "Reach for the sky, stranger!" he commanded in a loud voice. Matt was unable to life his injured are which was still in a sling, and managed to raise his other one. The events of the day, the heat, extreme hunger, the violent shaking he received during the earthquake, and the physical exertion of walking several mils, proved too much for him and suddenly everything went black!