Slowly, with great trepidation, he turned on the machine, and then pushed the lever forward an inch. Nothing happened. He looked down at his watch, and then cursed himself for forgetting to check on the time beforehand. He pushed the lever forward again, a bit further this time, and the screen glowed into life, and the Mudcat site appeared. He scanned a few lines, and then, almost without thinking about it, looked down at his watch. Three hours had passed!! He looked beyond the confines of the great machine that encompassed him. Nothing had changed, it was still night.

He took a deep breath, and pushed the lever forward again. The Mudcat image glowed, the threads unravelled, he got caught up in a discussed of dropped-D tuning, and he suddenly saw the sun come through the curtains of his study, and he knew that it was day. He kept on, and then it was dark again; and he took his heart in his hands, and pushed the lever strongly forward. Now the day and the night supplanted each other with a gathering swiftness, and he continued to read thread after thread, and then, out of the corner of his eye he saw the walls of his study disappear, and then he was in the yard, which had grown up fantastically within instants, and now it engulfed him, and then just as suddenly there was bare light, and he looked up from his machine, stopped the lever, and everything slowed to a halt.

He gingerly stepped out of his machine, and walked to the front gate, which was no longer there. In front of him stretched a vast road in all directions upon which innumerable vehicles strangely propulsive whirred and honked. It was stifling hot, and the sky was strangely pierced with light. He looked down at his feet, and there he saw a wayward piece of a yellowed newspaper, which he eagerly picked up. It was torn, but one corner remained, and he read: "President Jefferson Davis Bush greets his grandparents George W. and Hilary Bush at his Inaugural Powwow." The picture was of three people in protective radiation suits waving at a crowd of people all also in protective radiation suits. This shook him for a moment. By brief calculation he decided that he must be approximately 80 years into the future. So the machine had worked after all!!

He turned, and went back into his machine, and pushed the lever all the way forward. The screen glowed brightly, and he began to read threads once more. Around him, time blurred, quickened, and he hurtled ever faster through unnumbered centuries . Night and day blurred into shades of gray, and then he was submerged underwater, and then there was a vast explosion, and he was hurtled and buffetted from side to side. He held onto the machine for dear life, and endless waves of time rolled over him. And then the screen went black. The machine stuttered, and stopped, somewhere in the unexplored aeons of futurity!!