(Author's Note: this story was originally called Turning Point and was written for the 2016 Ooorah Smackdown - an alternative history based around... you'll have to read to find out!

PS If would like to read this story in French, you can find it in the International edition of Tevun Krus 38 - click on the External Link )

"Ban the Baguette!" chanted the unruly crowd as they surged down Oxford Street.

"England for the English!" bellowed a man holding a megaphone from the front of the march. Several hundred people waving banners and shouting slogans, jostled noisily along the road, bringing traffic to a standstill. Many of them carried national flags, white with a red cross in the centre. Police lined the route, hard faces showing no expression.

Two people watched silently from the shelter of a coffee shop, tight-lipped, their coffee growing cold on the table. "It's getting worse, this is the second one this month," said the darkhaired young woman.

"Some people—it's as if they can't bear to live in peace, they have to fight something."

"Now that the war with Bohemia is officially over, they're looking for a new target. And we're it. We're always it—second class citizens. You'd think after all these years they'd have learned to accept us." The young man unconsciously fingered the small scarf which was around his neck. It was dark blue, patterned with three golden fleur-de-lys. He smiled with dark satisfaction. "Well they won't have it all their own way much longer, not if we have anything to say about it!"

The woman glanced at him, then frowned as she saw the scarf. "You're crazy to wear that, today of all days! Tuck it out of sight or, better yet, get rid of it!"

"There's a bloody coffee shop!" yelled a voice from the crowd outside. "Why don't they serve honest English tea? Not good enough for them, isit?"

A rock sailed through the air, putting a large crack in the shop's glass window. As if it was a signal, all hell broke loose and suddenly the police had a riot on their hands.

The couple scrambled to their feet. "Let's go!" said the woman. "We don't want to be trapped in here." They strode to the rear of the shop, where a sturdy middle-aged woman held the door ajar, ready.

"This way. Quickly!" she murmured, looking back over her shoulder at the cracked window and the crowd beyond.

The couple slipped outside then stopped to face the owner, who hadn't followed.

"You should come too, Celeste. They're so angry! It's not safe here."

"I can't leave my shop. Anyway, they'll be past in a minute," she added, optimistically. "Allez." The door shut behind them. Not soon enough to block the sounds of smashing glass.

Unthinkingly, the man twisted the door handle, trying to get back in to help, but his companion grabbed his arm. Her expression was anguished but determined as she tried to break his grip on the handle and pull him away.

"We have to leave her. We can't risk getting caught, our mission is too important. You know that."

He shut his eyes for a second, indecision battling on his face, then gasped and let go. Grim now, he grabbed her hand and they raced down the alley, soon disappearing into the narrow warren of streets which marked the Norman quarter.

~~~

Two men in white lab coats huddled around a black rimmed monitor, watching as a third man shook their hands on the screen then stepped into the Temporal Modification Device. He gave a jaunty wave then disappeared from sight as the door closed. A siren blasted briefly, flashing a red light above the machine. Then silence. Dr Chaucer watched himself go over to the TMD and open the door. It was empty. Still on the screen, he turned to the man next to him and they high-fived, with beaming grins on their faces. "Yes!"

The two men tore their eyes away from the monitor and looked at each other blankly. "So who the fuck was that?"

~~~

Ron Murdoch strode along the passage. Chaucer had news for him. At last! The culmination of years of study and investment. Chaucer had finally come up with a time machine that worked. Sure, he might give it a fancy name, but that's what it was—a time machine. It had taken millions of pounds—rather more millions than he liked to think about, but what the heck? They were his pounds. All for one single purpose. To go back twenty years and stop his daughter from leaving the house that morning. The morning she had been hit by a car and died in his arms.

~~~

"I'm afraid that's definite," declared Dr William Chaucer. "We have to dismantle the machine. It's simply too dangerous."

"What do you mean?" queried the large, grey haired man at his side. He was frowning, unconvinced that the opportunity he'd dreamed of for so long, was about to be withheld from his grasp.

"Going back alters the past, Mr Murdoch. Even a tiny jump. Our first experiment—" he paused, suddenly struck by a nasty thought, "at least we think it was our first experiment, disappeared from this time line completely. The only way we knew he'd ever existed was that we'd taken the forethought to film the event and upload it simultaneously to the computer. Apparently the images remain, even though we can't find a trace of the actual film we used."

"But you had success with those earlier experiments. I remember, I was here," Murdoch protested.

"True enough, but they weren't human. An empty box appearing in the middle of our storeroom, a dog in the middle of the Salisbury plains..." Chaucer sighed. It had all looked so promising.

"Where—I mean, when—did you send him?"

"I don't actually know the answer to that," Chaucer admitted, flushing faintly. "We were taken by surprise. But after that first time, we made sure to film every step. We even wrote the subject's name and destination on a piece of paper and filmed it, in case the original paperwork vanished."

Murdoch shivered, despite himself. "How did you get anyone to volunteer, after you lost the first man?"

"We found a volunteer in the local hospice. Terminal cancer. He'd always wanted to see a volcano in action, so we offered to grant his dying wish I guess you could say. The deal was that we'd send him to San Sebastiano, a small Neapolitan town near Mt Vesuvius, for the 1944 eruption. History shows there was a full week before the lava flow destroyed the town, so we figured that would give him enough time to make a decent record of events, and put it in a specially designed tungsten box for us to retrieve 80 years later. He knew he'd almost certainly die there, but he was willing to give it a shot in return for fifty thousand pounds paid into his wife's account."

"Fifty thousand pounds?"

For the first time Dr Chaucer looked uncomfortable. "Don't worry, the money hasn't left our account. Oh, I'm sure that it did—at that time—but it's back now."

"So what you're saying, is that the people you send back disappear, completely?"

Dr Chaucer's eyes slid sideways for a moment. He cleared his throat. "Not only that. At the time of the experiment, we filmed a few records of the eruption as it existed in 1944... But now, if you check out the same scenes, well... here, see for yourself." He led the way to the silver-grey monitor and brought up a picture of a small town. Hovercars filled with people and stacked high with luggage wound their way down a narrow road. A news headline over the top announced 'San Sebastiano Evacuated at the Twelfth Hour.' That was then. This is what you see now when you look at the history files." The picture changed to a smoking pile of ruins. "San Sebastiano Destroyed," screamed the headline.

Dr Chaucer stared at Murdoch. "And this was a trip we considered harmless. Someone arriving at the scene of a disaster, about to be eliminated without time to change anything, we thought. Just imagine what might happen if we sent someone back to a pivotal event! The start of the last Bohemian War in 1999, or what about the assassination of Prime Minister Cromwell in 1640 which lead to the formation of the Republic of England? Or even further back, to our conquest of France in the 15th Century? The Defeat of Orleans? Who knows what might happen? We have to dismantle the machine and destroy our research."

"We can't! Let's wait a few days. I need time to think," protested Murdoch.

"Sir, with all due respect, there's nothing to think about. We have to dismantle the TMD before the wrong people find out about it." Chaucer shuddered. "Beefeater Security would confiscate the machine in a flash if they knew it existed. And they're the government. Only imagine what might happen if Norman terrorists got their hands on it!"

Murdoch knew Chaucer was probably right but he couldn't bear to give up the dream that had obsessed him for so long.

"Two days, doctor. That's all I'm asking. After all, it is my property," he reminded the scientist.