Alton James has a bent for all things mechanical and an interest in dinosaurs, so when his
mathematically minded friend describes how a time machine should be built, Alton builds it
and heads for 65 million B.C. to see what killed off the dinosaurs.
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 mastadon, 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.