The asteroid passing tumultuously overhead, dinosaurs howling in despair in the distance as if sensing their doom – it was more than a young girl could bear, and as time tensed its muscles and dragged us into the present, they all abandoned themselves without hesitation into my arms. Those at the Time Research Institute, where the first time generator had been discovered and developed, were relentless in their criticism of time-bike racing, arguing that it altered the intimate structure of time. After much research and simulations, they were able to pinpoint the exact time and place where life had begun on Earth, and I was going to travel to the calculated time, take pictures and see what I would find there: a meteorite filled with the seeds of life or a space probe launched by aliens. And they deduced from the photographs they brought back that the asteroid was not ten kilometers in diameter at all, as had been calculated, but almost double that.
