time trap by rog phillips

“In a kitchen designed for modern living he fell in love with Nelva instantly, in her red checkered house dress.”

a year before “world’s within” rog phillips published the equally alliterative “time trap,” but with a far superior cover! that cover smokes!

inventor ray bradley has accidentally created a device which sends telephone signals through time. to calibrate it he dials the same random number several times in the future and asks for the correct time and date. to the lady who answers years pass between these calls, so that by the last call she is 75. ray makes the mistake of dialing that number just one more time. the lady is now dead. a man answers. ray asks for the correct time and date. the man jokingly asks, “what is the correct time and date on your end?” ray tells him, not suspecting that he has just opened up a whole jumbo can of super-temporal three-eyed alien invasion whoop ass.

in the year 1999 three-eyed aliens called vargians have taken over the earth. ray has just revealed to a vargian that he is onto the secret of time travel, which they intend to keep for themselves. ray receives a telepathic warning (so he thinks) from a future woman calling herself nelva. she tells him he must use the principles he has discovered to create a real time machine and find her in 1999.

phillips wisely avoids making a bunch of silly predictions about the future. he does mention that there was a big zoot suit craze in the 1970’s. well, even that would have been better than disco. he solves a great mystery about the past, too. it turns out humans have not evolved and all those so-called cro-magnon fossils are merely the bones of ordinary men no different from modern day wrestlers.

ray falls in with a group of rebels plotting against the vargian invaders, lead by the erstwhile president of the united states. nelva is the president’s daughter and she’s been abducted by vargians. ray must rescue her. all this sounds pretty trite, but wait. the rebels aren’t really rebels, they are working for the vargians, who they feel are a boon to mankind because they have prevented wars. nelva isn’t the president’s daughter she’s the younger sister of the vargian queen. she hasn’t been kidnapped she is hiding—hiding in time not space. and the vargians aren’t really aliens they are mutant humans from the future. except they aren’t mutants and they are from the past. nothing is what it seems, including the book itself. it appears to be a science fiction adventure, what with time travel and aliens and ray guns, but nothing ever happens. it’s basically 160 pages of people chatting.