Wilbert inserted the key and pushed the red button on the console. The machine bounced up and down, made a tinny grinding noise with squeals and kuffaws, smoke burst out the sides and filled the Aunt Prudence’s garage, and an odor somewhere between rotten broccoli and bad cabbage invaded Wilbert’s nostrils. He put the gear into forward and set the dial to 2197, Paris. Onward to the future!
The space in front of Wilbert began to make little circles, then bigger circles, and then he felt the machine get sucked into the vortex and whoosh into the black hole in front of him. Wilbert’s heart raced, the butterflies in his stomach pranced left, right, then forward, backward. And his mind simply burst with imaginings of speed, light, and the cosmos. He could feel air sweeping by hs face, and though he couldn’t see anything, he knew he was flying.
He’d never been more excited. To Paris, and in the future!
“Yahoo!” he said, but he didn’t hear a word of it. He’d been sucked into the next dimension, and wherever his voice had gone, it had no meaning here. And then he could feel the machine slowing down, his ears popped, he could feel the descent, and the air became warmer. The machine began to bounce up and down again, he could hear the tinny grinding noise, and then he felt a sharp jolt that sent pressure into his abdomen. The steam cleared, and Wilbert saw what he’d found –
“Damn that time machine,” Wilbert said – it was becoming a tradition when he landed, it seemed, that these were his first words. The machine had landed him in Dubuque, Iowa, right in front of a 1959 Ford Futura. Judging from the Leave It To Beaver-like setting, he must be in the early 1960s.
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