 What don't they know about the time machine?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951. There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with ... You will, you know, so why quibble about it? Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You've seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are. Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. You still feel gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still. "What century is this, anyway?" "As near as I can guess, it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an interstellar civilization." It gives out a coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the future.
 who invented it
 who invented it  what the third set of buttons do  where it gets stored when not in use  how to make it go back and forth in time