The Time Machine

The evening unfolded in the peculiar warmth of the Time Traveller's drawing room, where firelight danced against silver fixtures and champagne bubbles rose through crystal glasses like tiny planets ascending through space. We reclined in those remarkable patent chairs of his invention—chairs that seemed almost sentient in their comfort—while our host, his grey eyes glittering with barely contained excitement, prepared to overturn everything we thought we understood about the nature of existence itself.

He began, as he so often did, with what appeared to be simple geometry, though nothing about his conclusions would prove simple at all. The mathematical abstractions we had all accepted without question in our schooldays—lines without thickness, planes without depth—these, he argued, were merely the beginning of a far grander deception. For if a cube required length, breadth, and thickness to exist, must it not also require *duration*? An instantaneous cube, he insisted, was no cube at all. Time, therefore, was nothing less than the Fourth Dimension.

Filby, predictably, resisted with all the stubborn vigour one expects from argumentative men with red hair. The Provincial Mayor struggled valiantly to follow, his lips moving silently as though repeating an incantation. The Medical Man posed sensible objections about why we cannot move freely through Time as we move through Space, to which our host countered with observations about gravitation's constraints upon vertical movement—before balloons, after all, mankind was similarly imprisoned.

But here lay the germ of his great discovery: that we are not so fixed in Time as we imagine. Memory itself, he suggested, represents a kind of temporal travel—those vivid moments when recollection transports us backward, leaving us absent-minded in the present. If civilisation had conquered gravity with balloons, why should it not eventually master the drift along the Time-Dimension? Why should a man not accelerate, decelerate, or even reverse his passage through Time altogether?

The company entertained itself with fanciful speculations—historians verifying the Battle of Hastings, scholars learning Greek from Homer's own lips, investors depositing fortunes to collect in some distant future. I myself ventured that such a traveller might discover society rebuilt upon strictly communistic principles, though the notion seemed as fantastical as any other that evening.

When Filby dismissed the entire theory as contrary to reason, the Time Traveller's response carried a weight we had not anticipated. He spoke of a machine—one that might travel indifferently through any direction of Space and Time. More remarkably still, he claimed experimental verification.

The room fell into sceptical silence. The Psychologist demanded to see this experiment, declaring it humbug even as curiosity betrayed him. And so, with that faint smile playing about his lips and his hands thrust deep into his pockets, the Time Traveller shuffled off toward his laboratory, leaving us to wonder whether we sat in the company of a madman, a charlatan, or something far more extraordinary.

We had not long to speculate before we heard his returning footsteps, and Filby's half-told anecdote about a conjuror dissolved into irrelevance against what our host was about to reveal.

The Time Traveller produced his evidence that evening—a delicate contraption of glittering metal, ivory, and crystalline substance, scarcely larger than a small clock, yet wrought with extraordinary precision. He set it upon one of the octagonal tables before the fire, positioning the thing beneath the bright glow of a shaded lamp while candles illuminated the room from mantel and sconces alike. The assembled company drew close: the narrator in a low armchair nearest the flames, Filby peering over the inventor's shoulder, the Medical Man and Provincial Mayor observing from the right, the Psychologist stationed at the left, and the Very Young Man hovering behind. All were watchful, alert to any possibility of deception, yet the conditions seemed to preclude trickery of any conceivable sort.

The Time Traveller explained his model with the calm authority of a man who has laboured two years upon a single purpose. He drew attention to the curious askew quality of the device, the odd twinkling unreality of one particular bar, and demonstrated the function of two small levers—one to send the machine gliding into the future, the other to reverse its motion. Then, with deliberate showmanship, he invited the Psychologist to participate directly, guiding that gentleman's finger to the lever so that no accusation of sleight-of-hand might follow.

What happened next defied all rational expectation. The lever turned. A breath of wind stirred the room, the lamp flame leapt, and a candle guttered out upon the mantel. The little machine swung round, grew indistinct, flickered like a ghost of brass and ivory—and vanished utterly, leaving the table bare save for the lamp itself.

Silence held the company for a long moment before Filby broke it with a profanity. The Psychologist, recovering himself, peered beneath the table as though suspecting some hidden compartment, while the Time Traveller laughed and calmly filled his pipe. The Medical Man demanded earnest confirmation; the Time Traveller gave it without hesitation, adding that a full-sized machine stood nearly complete in his laboratory, ready for his own voyage through the ages.

A debate ensued regarding the model's destination—future or past. The Psychologist reasoned it must have travelled backward, since an object moving into the future would remain present throughout intervening time. The narrator countered that a machine arriving from the future ought to have been visible on previous visits. The Time Traveller dismissed these objections with talk of threshold perception, and the Psychologist, grasping the concept, explained that an object moving through time at tremendous speed would create only the faintest impression upon observers—much as a spinning wheel spoke or a flying bullet escapes the eye.

The Medical Man counselled patience, suggesting that morning's common sense might dispel the evening's plausibility. Yet when the Time Traveller offered to show them the actual machine, curiosity proved irresistible. He led them down the long draughty corridor, lamp held aloft, his broad head casting strange shadows upon the walls. In the laboratory stood the larger apparatus—nickel and ivory and rock crystal, substantially complete though certain twisted bars remained unfinished upon the workbench. The Medical Man, recalling some Christmas ghost illusion, pressed once more for assurance of sincerity. The Time Traveller, holding the lamp high above the machine, declared he had never been more serious in his life.

None of the company quite knew how to receive such a pronouncement, and as the narrator caught Filby's eye across the room, that gentleman offered only a solemn, knowing wink—the gesture of men standing at the threshold of something they could neither credit nor dismiss.