Book excerpt: E. Rick Jones was stoically living out his final days in an old folks' home when a young woman dropped a time-travelling device onto the tartan rug which encased his withered limbs. This did not surprise him because he had written about something of the sort in a short story. The opportunity to travel in time presented him with the chance to repair the injustices of a lifetime and revenge himself on the literary establishment which had ignored him. The only flaw in his plan was that the people to whom the device belonged wanted it back and the young woman who had stolen it kept reappearing at inopportune moments. The one chance he had of survival was to adjust time itself so that the story of his life reached a satisfactory conclusion. But if he did that the terrifyingly ruthless owners of the device would immediately know which timeline he was hiding in and come hunting for him. Given all the time in eternity there surely had to be a solution.