timequake n.

The concentrated energy must have tipped some unstable time-fault. Like a rock fault. We’re always starting earthquakes. But a time quake... Interesting. That’s what happened, I think. The release of energy, the destruction of matter, sucked your house into the future. Carried the house seven years ahead.

At 8:04½ p.m. on Monday, April 16, 1979, there was a sudden timequake affecting all the Solar System. A fault in the space-time continuum, an old warp that had existed for billennia, abruptly slipped, and it instantly became 8:04½ a.m. again that same day in every time zone, with everything just as it had been that morning.

He was, he instructed Hank, from the year 831 S.M.—roughly 1200 years from our time, a closer approximation being difficult owing to the Great Timequake.

He waits patiently, and he thinks. He has never been in a timequake. His surveys always stress triple stabilizers where there’s the slightest danger. So there is absolutely no reason for concern. So why is he worried? Perhaps because he is just a little insane. If you stay in this business long enough your mind turns to mush. You get off by yourself, and you think. And what do you think? You think you have solved one (or all!) of Ratell’s Paradoxes.

Three stolen segments of parallel Time, three versions of the same City were laid out around them on the inner sphere. An equivalent of Dante’s Circles of Hell. One new, one ageing, one crumbled into ruin. Temporal tectonic plates set to grind together along their faultlines in a gargantuan timequake. It would crush his ship. His TARDIS, dying and already patterned throughout by a phosphorescent web of flowers when he hadn’t even ordered a wreath.

In Timequake One, Kilgore Trout wrote a story about an atom bomb. Because of the timequake, he had to write it twice. The ten-year rerun following the timequake, remember, made him and me, and you, and everybody else, do everything we’d done from February 17, 1991, to February 13th, 2001, a second time.

Got off the plane in San Francisco, caught a Greyhound south, curled up to sleep, and the San Andreas time-fault let loose. It was the first big timequake and I woke up three years later.