3 The Time Traveler’s Story—in His Own Words

CHAPTER 3 The Time Traveler's Story— in His Own Words Last Thursday, I told some of you about time travel. And I showed you the machine I was building. It's still in my workroom. But it's been knocked about since last week. One of the ivory bars is cracked. A brass rail is bent. But it still works. When I showed it to you a week ago, it wasn't finished. I thought it would only take me another

day or so to complete it. But it turned out that it wasn't ready until this morning at ten o'clock. I wrote notes inviting each of you to dinner tonight and asked my housekeeper to have them delivered. Then I went into my workshop. I looked over my machine one last time, climbed in, and sat in the chair.

When I am sitting in my machine, there is a set of dials in front of me that tells me where I am in time and how fast I am traveling. One dial shows days; another, thousands of days; another, millions of days; and another, billions of days. Each has a hand—like the hand of a clock—that counts the days. Beside the dials is the lever for

starting the machine. I have spent years thinking about time travel and working on my invention, but I could still only guess what was about to happen. After all, I was trying to do something that no one had ever done before. I took the lever in one hand and pushed it ever so slightly. Suddenly I felt dizzy, as if I was falling. Right away, I pulled the lever back to its starting position. I looked around the room. Everything looked exactly the same. Had anything happened? Then I saw the clock sitting on my workbench. I'd climbed into the machine at ten o'clock in the morning—it was now three-thirty in the afternoon! To me, it felt as if only seconds had passed. But to the outside world, five and a half hours had gone by! I took a deep breath and pushed the lever forward again. There was a thud, and the room became blurry. It was as if I were looking at everything through water. I saw my housekeeper

come in and walk to the garden door. She didn't even look at me. It was as if I was invisible. But the strangest sight was how swiftly she was crossing the floor. It took her only a second or two to enter, walk to the other side of the workshop, and leave again. My Time Machine worked! I was thrilled and pressed the lever as far forward as it would go. Suddenly it was night. Then, just as quickly, the light coming in the windows returned and it was tomorrow. The room grew faint and blurry. Tomorrow night came, then day again, night again, day again. As the days and nights came faster and faster, a humming sound filled my ears. I looked at the dial that measured days. The hand was counting them off like the second hand of a clock counts off seconds. It's hard to describe time travel. I felt as if I was in a runaway carriage, being tossed back and forth. I was dizzy and felt as if I was about to crash into something.

Days and nights passed in the blink of an eye. At one point, the walls of the workshop disappeared and I could see outside. The house must have been torn down. I could now see the sun flashing across the sky during the day, followed by the moon at night. I saw the moon go from full, to new, to full in only seconds. That was how quickly a month raced by. I also caught a glimpse of the stars as they whirled overhead. I was traveling faster and faster into the future. Night and day blurred into a deep blue, like the color of the sky at sunset. The sun was flashing by so quickly, it looked like a streak of light across the sky. The moon looked like a fainter streak. Inside my machine, the dials were spinning around faster and faster. I saw the streak of the sun's path move from low in the sky, to high in the sky, and back in less than a minute. When the path of the sun was high in the sky, it was summer. When it was low in the sky, it was