And another thing. My family and Dennis’s family live in the same end of town and from the time we were toddlers, Dennis and I played together. Later on, we just kept on together. We didn’t have a choice. For some reason or other, none of the kids would play with us. Unless we wanted to play alone, we had to play together. I guess we got so, through the years, that we understood each other.
I don’t suppose there’d have been any time machine if I hadn’t been so interested in paleontology. Not that I knew anything about it; I was just interested. From the time I was a kid I read everything I could lay my hands on about dinosaurs and saber-tooths and such. Later on I went fossil hunting in the hills, but I never found nothing really big. Mostly I found brachiopods. There are great beds of them in the Platteville limestone. And lots of times I’d stand in the street and look up at the river bluffs above the town and try to imagine what it had been like a million years ago, or a hundred million. When I first read in a story about a time machine, I remember thinking how I’d like to have one. I guess that at one time I thought a little about making one, but then realized I couldn’t.
Dennis had a habit of coming to my shop and talking, but most of the time talking to himself rather than to me. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but after a while I realized that he had stopped talking about anything but time. One day he told me he had been able to figure out everything but time, and now it seemed he was getting that down in black and white, like all the rest of it.
Mostly I didn’t pay too much attention to what he said, for a lot of it didn’t make much sense. But after he’d talked, incessantly, for a week or two, on time, I began to pay attention. But don’t expect me to tell you what he said or make any sense of it, for there’s no way that I can. To understand what Dennis said and meant, you’d have to live with him, like I did, for twenty years or more. It’s not so much understanding what Dennis says as understanding Dennis.
I don’t think we actually made any real decision to build a time machine, it just sort of grew on us. All at once we found that we were making one.
We took our time. We had to take our time, for we went back a lot and did things over, almost from the start. It took weeks to get some of the proper effects—at least, that’s what Dennis called them. Me, I didn’t know anything about effects. All that I knew was that Dennis wanted to make something work a certain way and I tried to make it work that way. Sometimes, even when it worked the way he wanted it, it turned out to be wrong. So we’d start all over.
But finally we had a working model of it and took it out on a big bald bluff, several miles up the river, where no one ever went. I rigged up a timer to a switch that would turn it on, then after two minutes would reverse the field and send it home again.
We mounted a movie camera inside the frame that carried the machine, and we set the camera going, then threw the timer switch.
I had my doubts that it would work, but it did. It went away and stayed for two minutes, then came back again.
When we developed the camera film, we knew without any question the camera had traveled back in time. At first there were pictures of ourselves standing there and waiting. Then there was a little blur, no more than a flicker across a half a dozen frames, and the next frames showed a mastodon walking straight into the camera. A fraction of a second later his trunk jerked up and his ears flared out as he wheeled around with clumsy haste and galloped down the ridge.
Every now and then he’d swing his head around to take a look behind him. I imagine that our time machine, blossoming suddenly out of the ground in front of him, scared him out of seven years of growth.
We were lucky, that was all. We could have sent that camera back another thousand times, perhaps, and never caught a mastodon—probably never caught a thing. Although we would have known it had moved in time, for the landscape had been different, although not a great deal different, but from the landscape we could not have told if it had gone back a hundred or a thousand years. When we saw the mastodon, however, we knew we’d sent the camera back 10,000 years at least.
I won’t bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time.
I’ve already told you I’d read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was.
So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed.
Dennis gave me no argument. He didn’t even want to go. He didn’t care no more. He never was really interested in the time machine. All he wanted was to prove out his math. Once the machine did that, he was through with it.
I worried a lot, going as far as I meant to go, about the rising or subsidence of the crust. I knew that the land around Willow Bend had been stable for millions of years. Sometime during the Cretaceous a sea had crept into the interior of the continent, but had stopped short of Wisconsin and, so far as geologists could determine, there had been no disturbances in the state. But I still felt uneasy about it. I didn’t want to come out into the Late Cretaceous with the machine buried under a dozen feet of rock or, maybe, hanging a dozen feet up in the air.
So I got some heavy steel pipes and sunk them six feet into the rock on the bald bluff top we had used the first time, with about ten feet of their length extending in the air. I mounted the time frame on top of them and rigged up a ladder to get in and out of it and tied the pipes into the time field. One morning I packed a lunch and filled a canteen with water. I dug the old binoculars that had been my father’s out of the attic and debated whether I should take along a gun. All I had was a shotgun and I decided not to take it. If I’d had a rifle, there’d been no question of my taking it, but I didn’t have one. I could have borrowed one, but I didn’t want to. I’d kept pretty quiet about what I was doing and I didn’t want to start any gossip in the village.
I went up to the bluff top and climbed up to the frame and set the time-meter to 63-1/2 million years into the past and then I turned her on. I didn’t make any ceremony out of it. I just turned her on and went.
I told you about the little blur in the movie film and that’s the best way, I suppose, to tell you how it was. There was this little blur, like a flickering twilight. Then it was sunlight once again and I was on the bluff top, looking out across the valley.
Except it wasn’t a bluff top any longer, but only a high hill. And the valley was not the rugged, tree-choked, deeply cut valley I had always known, but a great green plain, a wide and shallow valley with a wide and sluggish river flowing at the far side of it. Far to the west I could see a shimmer in the sunlight, a large lake or sea. But a sea, I thought, shouldn’t be this far east. But there it was, either a great lake or a sea—I never did determine which.
And there was something else as well. I looked down to the ground and it was only three feet under me. Was I ever glad I had used those pipes!
Looking out across the valley, I could see moving things, but they were so far away that I could not make them out. So I picked up the binoculars and jumped down to the ground and walked across the hilltop until the ground began to slope away.