A Time Machine?
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 106993
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Josh just now noticed a large brass contraption near the bookcase in the Staircase Room. Although there had been strange things in that room before, this was unusual even for the room. The machine was large, and it sort of looked like a Victorian bedframe. As in the The Time Machine, the most noticeable part of the machine were the large metal (brass and nickel) bars and ivory levers, along with a mysterious quartz inlay. There was one feature of the machine that was unusual, and also reflected the machine as Wells had described it. The seat was not like that of a car, with a safety harness and flat cushion. Instead, the seat was leather, with a shape that resembled a saddle. Wells had in fact called the seat a saddle, and the traveler in the novel had difficulty staying on at times. Josh speculated that as Wells was born in the nineteenth century, he thought of the machine as being like a mechanical horse. A writer from today would make it a car, like the DeLorean in Back to the Future. When he looked at the display that showed the time, he noticed that it was a group of wheels similar to an analog odometer that manufacturers used to put in cars to keep track of the milage, except that where he would expect plastic, the little wheels were of ivory, with dark numbers and letters engraved on them. The loops of the 3's used a smaller arc of the circle than one would use today, and the oval part of the 6's and 9's did not join with the tail of the number. He had seen numbers of this style while hiking in the Colorado back country, on the beams of an abandoned ore processing mill that was built around 1890.If this was some sort of gag by one of his friends, that person put a lot of work into it. Josh noticed that there were three slots for keys. One of the key slots locked a brass box that he did not see mentioned in the novel. Perhaps this box contained the mechanism that actually made the machine run. It appeared to be very well protected. The other two key slots were next to the base of the two levers that controlled the direction of travel. "It cannot be a real time machine," Josh thought. "Could it?" He gingerly moved the levers. They would not budge. So the machine might need a key to unlock a safety mechanism on the levers. Josh looked at the date on the machine's odometer-like wheels. It read
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