Pickford was located in the mid-state route from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri. Bounded by farms and woodland, it was just one of numerous picturesque cities that seemed to come from out of the artwork of Norman Rockwell. It looked like the quintessential Hollywood back-lot representation of suburban America with perfectly manicured yards, kids playing in the park, old timers sitting and talking before the local barber shop and a steady flow of traffic from a mix of different cars reflecting the personalities of their drivers. The town had a lot to be proud of. The Harvest Festival was coming up and a new restraunt was opening in town. The city council was going to turn the old elementary school into a museum after the new school was built. Old Historical Stoddard House, a local reputed haunted house, stood at the end of Stoddard Park in the more affluent part of town. Postal carrier Gary Manoux traveled walked down Auburn Drive and dropped off the mail for the Buckner family. Looking up, he waved hello to Raviv and Alyson Ullman, one of a few Jewish families on his route, but Manoux slowed his step as he neared the Diffy house. There was something odd about this family he just couldn't figure out. Objects vanished and appeared here, things flew over their house, a weird relative lurked the neighborhood clad in animal skins and the daughter was always promising to get even with the world. Slowly leaving the Diffy's their mail, Manoux heard another explosion from the ranch-style house and fled down the street. His cousin didn't have the problems he had delivering mail to that Munster Family in Mockingbird Heights, California.
"Lloyd, do you have to do that on the kitchen table?" Barbara Diffy was a raven-haired beauty with the grace of adulthood and the complexity of a young girl. She had fallen in love with and married Lloyd Diffy because he was romantic and could make her laugh. She didn't care that his hair had slightly receded or that he didn't have the body of a Greek god anymore, but if he forgot to leave the toilet seat down again, she was going to kill him! Lloyd just looked up with his round brown eyes obscured behind magnifying goggles and grinned his "aw shucks" smile. He tilted back the goggles on his head.
"Barb," He spoke with a masterful tone of knowledgeable intellect to his voice merged with a knack for comedic undertone. "I am so close to getting the dimensional interface unit rebuilt. Once it's done, I'll be that much more closer to getting us back to our own time and getting back our money on it."
"So, that's why you've been taking so long fixing the time machine." Barbara Diffy made that face that showed she was upset. "You're trying to get your security deposit back on this thing!" They had been stranded in the past that was now 2005 for about two years. Their kids were putting up with the situation as best as possible wearing these out of style clothes and pretending to be average kids despite their high I.Q's. The school lessons in this time were so easy and not much of a challenge for two teens used to five-dimensional physics and accelerated tenth level calculus. Resembling a young version of Donny Osmond with a small trace of the boyish charm of James Dean, Phil Diffy quickly acclimated to this time period with the help of local beauty Keely Teslow who looked pretty much how he figured a young Marilyn Monroe would look and behave. Unlike Marilyn, Keely was a renaissance woman in her own right. She could be forceful and determined and unwillingly to conform to any female stereotype. Phil treated her as an equal and as a confidante and she appreciated that from him by keeping his secret. That secret made her feel special to her regardless of this time on earth when women were expected to live down their potential.
Phil's sister was another person altogether. Almost attractive with her baby doll blue eyes and long blonde hair, Pim Diffy was both frustrated by this time period yet intrigued by its devotion to materialism. She knew how to manipulate others to get her way and she wasn't afraid to say what she thought. Everyone around her, even her own family, could be used to get what she wanted and what she wanted was power over her future. She wanted all she could get, but Phil was the nail that flattened her car tire on the drive to dominating all that she could see. Somewhere in Pim, Phil was sure the sister he once had was still there, but the more ruthless she became, he slowly realized she was no longer the young girl he once knew.
"Hi, dad…" Pim stood at the kitchen table and leaned over it to stare down her father over the dimensional interface unit. "Playing with your tinker toys?"
"Pim," Lloyd looked up to his daughter and longer for the days she couldn't talk. "I'm trying to fix the time machine so we can back to the present, er, I mean, the future. I'm almost positive that if I could align the signals in the dimensional interface unit that I'll be that much more closer to fixing it."
"Dad," Phil turned round from the refrigerator with a glass of orange juice. "Didn't you say the same thing when you over-hauled the drive for the flex capacitor?" Pim took his orange juice while he made a face and turned to pour another glass.
"Phil, this isn't nuclear physics…" Lloyd made a face of his own. "Well, technically it is…. But it's a step-by-step process. I have to be careful or else we could blow up the whole neighborhood. We're sitting on the Twentieth Century's version of a miniaturized nuclear reactor."
"Is that a two-headed squirrel?" Barbara looked out the kitchen window.
"Dad, look…" Phil sipped his juice and picked up a phase inducer. "Just take off the catalytic converter and route the port around to the causality generator. It's basically just an appendix. You don't need it."
"Phil," Lloyd rolled his eyes. "It's there for a reason. I'm quite sure the Time Variance Authority wouldn't install anything that they didn't need."
"But they don't need to know…" Phil started altering connections. "We just need to get home and then we can put it back. In fact, I'm sure it will work a lot better without…." There was a hiss from the dimensional interface unit and an odd droning from the device. Phil jumped back and Lloyd dropped his jaw just as a shimmering energy field flung itself from the component. It looked like a glimmer of pocketed air. Through it, the color in the room was more vibrant like the image through a gasoline vapor. The energy field floated up unfettered and uncontained and wafted up into the room.
"Great!" Lloyd lightly held on to the dimensional interface unit while looked nervously round the room in abject fear. "Phil, you just unleashed a causality field in the house!"
"A what?" Pim's eyes rolled around the room for something she couldn't see.
"A causality field." Phil nervously reached into the air around the dimensional interface unit with his father for the wayward field. "It's a field of dimensional energy linking two areas in time and space. The time machine works by opening and containing the field wild enough for it to carry us through…"
"And it only stays open until something passes through it from this side or the side its linked." Lloyd reached looking for the energy field and sniffed for new scents wafting from another point in the time stream. If he smelled ozone, he could step through to the future, but if he smelled the odor of blood and sweat, it was likely linked to a brutal time of war in the planet's history, and he didn't want a gladiator from the Trojan War or a knight from the Crusades to add to their pet caveman Curtis. "If I can find it before something crashes through it…."
There was a loud crash and a groan in the living room behind Pim as the four heads of the time-transplanted Diffy family turned round hesitantly to the source of the disaster. It was just out the corner of Barbara's eyes. It looked as if someone had fallen through a hole in the living room ceiling from the master bedroom upstairs above them. There was a sound of whooshing from the closing field sealing up the movement of air from two separate areas of space in two separate time periods. Pim looked to Phil and Phil looked to his father. Groaning and moaning in pain, the figure on the floor rose up grousing from the eight-foot drop that had dropped him through the floor of his home and into this Twenty-First Century home. He didn't look that far out of style for the time. He could have been yanked from the 1980s or even the 1970s, but he was definitely confused. He was possibly in his late thirties or early forties in age with the vigor of a mature man in his prime: a figure of normal height with dark hair and a mustache and goatee wearing a dark blue shirt and worn light blue jeans. Cracking his back and spine into place as he stood, he looked round the room with his back to the Diffy family behind and reacted to the modern family home with vague recollections of how he got here. Yet, why did this house look familiar?
"How did I get back here?" He asked himself and slowly turned around. When he saw the Diffy family looking at him, he froze in disbelief. Lloyd just twisted his face into his proud but cocksure face ready to introduce himself. Barbara hung by his side while Phil and Pim stood behind their father against the guest in their home.
"Hi," Lloyd reached forth slowly to start off on good terms with this guy. "I'm Lloyd, this is my lovely wife, Barb…."
"Hello…" Barbara responded graciously polite despite the awkwardness of the situation.
"And my kids Phil and Pim Diffy." Lloyd continued the introductions. "Welcome to my home, Mister……"
"Dad," The stranger spoke. "It's me…. Phil…."
"What?" Phil then realized the guy looked like his dad's younger brother, Weam, a relative he himself was supposed to resemble. Could this be himself from the future? Again?
"What?" Pim didn't want one brother, but now she him twice!
"Phil?" Barbara realized that a mother always knew her children regardless of where or how they appeared.
"What?" Lloyd looked to his teenage son, to the dimensional interface unit on the table, then to his son's adult counterpart yanked from out of twenty years into his future. Pim's head was reeling. Her eyes rolled back and she fell backward to the floor annoyed by the situation into a disgusted unconscious state.