Chapter 2

After my little rendezvous with Mrs. Nelson I was hooked. I could actually go back and interact with people. The only drawback was the nausea and black-outs that came with the time travel. I decided that first things first, so I tried to fix that bug in the machine that caused all the disadvantages. I went over my blueprints. It didn't do me any good. I didn't understand why the Machine worked. It must have something to do with the dimensions, I thought. There are three dimensions. Length, Breadth and Thickness. Time. As far as I remembered the latest ideas about it was that it is a wave that moves at a constant speed, or was it a sinuscurve? Never mind. Add it to the other three dimensions and you get... What? A fourth dimension? Yes, I think that is a common idea. OK. That seemed logical. But the closer your speed was to the speed of light the closer time got to zero. And if there wasn't any time would there be a universe? No. That wasn't anything that I had enough knowledge about to speculate on. But if time was a wave and my machine was made out of mirrors, mostly, then maybe the reflection of time was caught in them and when stopped at the right angle would make it possible to get into that time-space. Well, that was a theory that I could live with.

Now, what decided how far back in time the Machine traveled? The only thing that moved was the rotor. If it rotated at a constant speed then maybe it counted seconds... Yes. If I figured the number of seconds to my destination I would be able to get to a specific time at the exact moment. It was worth trying.

I added a piece here and a gizmo there. The main thing I added was a lever that could be set at a certain height so that it moved down at a constant speed and when it hit bottom it would turn the rotor off and hopefully I would be in the right time. The place was no problem, so far. It was fixed. I came to the same location that I started from.

I thought that I would be ready for the next test-drive. I took a trip that took me to the previous day but as I arrived there was the old nausea so I apparently hadn't succeeded in making it better in that regard. The black-out however didn't seem to last as long as it had done previously. I concluded that the side-effects would have to be something that I must learn to live with. The timer-lever worked perfectly however. I could time my arrival exactly and after a few more test-drives I felt confident enough to take my next serious travel. I was too eager to wait any longer for a travel with a purpose. I could always go back to the more scientific work later.

First I had to do something about the lack of clothing at my destination. I went to a lot of second-hand shops and bought clothes from the late fifties. Went back to an appropriate day and hid my clothes, wrapped in an old tarpaulin that I had found.

I had already made up my mind of were I wanted to go. A girlfriend of mine, Anita, had suddenly broken up with me and shortly thereafter moved to her grandmother's whom I didn't know were she lived. I never found out why and wanted to know. I really had been in love. I never got beyond third base with her but the promises that lay ahead was enough for me to go easy on her. I don't think that I was ready for the final step myself although I was sixteen at the time and she was the same age. In fact we had been in the same class ever since first class and had been drawn to each other all the years we went to school.

When I first saw her she was a tawny, dark-haired girl with big brown eyes. She was the only girl in my class that had her hair cut short and maybe that was what attracted me to her. I on the other hand, hated getting a haircut so I had rather long hair while the other boys either were crew-cut or cut short with a side brow. I was delighted when The Beatles turned up and made it legitimate to have long hair.

Over the years Anita changed into a real beauty. Her face matured and her cheekbones grew high, her nose straight, wide mouth with full naturally red lips, slim, feminine shoulders, round breasts that pushed against the blouses she loved to wear. Her waist wasn't all that defined but her hips flowed with womanhood and her ass was a dream come true. Her legs were rather short, but as I found out later very round and smooth, and when you let your hand just glide up them, the distance to the ultimate goal wasn't too far away once you got your hand on her knee.

We started to go steady when we were fourteen. That was in the late fifties. Kissing was OK with her. A little fondling outside the clothes too. But anything else than that was another story. We had been going steady for about a year when she let me feel her soft tits for the first time. After the first time it was a regular happening on our dates. Another six months before I held her hairy mound in my hand and I could feel the protruding lips kiss my hand.

I still remember the difficulty I had spreading them apart, the fumbling. But that seemed to make her the more eager for me to succeed but she never helped out. And the feeling when you dipped the tip of a finger inside a wet pussy for the first time! That feeling was beaten only by the first time she rubbed my cock outside of my pants.

I knew the day when she disappeared from my life all too well and I decided that I should go back to that day but first I would spy on her for a week. Had she met another that I didn't know of?

I took the trip and when I arrived there was the old nausea only a little weaker. Maybe it was like getting your sea-legs, a matter of adjustment. The black-out didn't seem to last as long as it had done previously either so if I was lucky I would suffer less and less from the side-effects the more I traveled.

I searched the place were I had hid the clothes and found them. I had a rather hard time to get them on in the darkness but finally got them on all right and I made my way up to the house where Anita lived with her parents.

It was dark and a rather cold wind blew and there was rain in the air. That was something I didn't remember. I remembered that the weather had been lousy the whole year but I had thought that it was caused by my gloomy mood.

As I slowly sneaked up to the window, where I knew the living-room was, I heard a dog bark in the distance, why he was the only one to know. I peeked into the room.

I don't know what I had expected but not the feeling that flew through me. It was as if I was hit in the stomach! My heart was almost bursting and I could feel tears in my eyes when I again saw Anita. Just as I had remembered her. She hadn't changed! But how could she have? She was the same person with the same looks as the one I knew. The one I had loved. Of course she was. I was in her time-zone.

There they were OK. Anita and her parents. It looked as if they just sat there, no one was talking. No one was reading. They just sat there doing nothing. Maybe they listened to the radio. I couldn't hear anything out here though and that revealed a flaw in my plan. How was I going to hear what they were talking about?

I walked around the house, carefully so I wouldn't step in a flower bed or leave any traces of someone being there in the dark spying on them, to see if I could find something that solved my problem but couldn't find anything, so I went back to the window to at least be able to look at Anita. I stayed there till they went to bed. To add to my misery it started to rain. Not a heavy rain but a drizzle that seemed to find its way down between the collar and onto my skin and up under the sleeves making me shiver a little as it ran down under the collar and followed the spine for a while till it either evaporated or got warmed by my body-temperature. Leaving a wet spot on the back of my shirt.

Slowly, dragging my feet behind me, I made my way back to my machine. Cursing myself the whole way. It had been a bad idea to go back to this event. It only had opened up old wounds and nothing had been gained unless you call it a gain to realize that you still are badly in love with an old girlfriend. I passed the store and forgot that I shouldn't be seen so I walked right pass it and glanced in the window by old habit. When I had followed Anita home after our dates and I went back home by myself I used to stop here for a while and look in the window.

At this moment I didn't give a damn if someone saw me so I just stopped and stood there looking. Not seeing anything actually. I was empty inside beside the thumping heart. I could see my reflection in the window and stared at it. There was nothing to see but some old and damp clothes. What? Yes. There was nothing to see! I wasn't there! All I could see was the clothes! No face. I held out my hands and looked at them. They weren't there. Of course they were there. I could feel them and I knew they were there when I looked down but in the mirror of the window they weren't there! I bent down and scraped up some dirt and smeared it on the upside of my hand and I could see the trampoline-formed shape of my hand. It was there but at the same time it wasn't. I got really frightened at this revelation. What had happened? I started to run toward my machine, ripped the clothes off and just jumped inside and pulled the levers that had to be pulled and after a while I found myself in "my own" time again. Anxiously I looked at my hands. To my relief they were back! I felt one hand with the other. It was solid. I hastily got clothed and hurried home to get to a mirror and when I looked in it I was there. I shed my clothes and looked in the mirror again. I was still there. Carefully I examined every inch of my body but nothing seemed to be wrong with it and I sighed with relief.

What had happened? I had made some adjustments on my Time Machine but mainly I had just adjusted what looked as if it needed to be adjusted. I got my blueprints out and carefully looked at them. I couldn't see anything that would make this side-effect happen. Maybe it wasn't anything the machine did. Maybe it was nature that tried to protect itself from an intruder, an anachronism.