Trolley to Yesterday Read Free Page B

black plush.
    "Pretty weird, eh?" asked the professor.
    "It sure is," replied Johnny. "But how does it work?"
    The professor sighed and twiddled one of the brass wheels. "As you may have guessed," he said casually, "this is a time machine. It isn't a terribly good one, because old Townsend—that was his name, Aurelian Townsend—had to use the equipment that was available to him in those days: vacuum tubes, the magneto from a model-T Ford, and batteries from a Reo electric car, and the spring-wound mechanism from an old Regina Polyphon music box. Not very efficient stuff to work with, if you're trying to leap the boundaries of time and space. Luckily, however, old Townsend managed to find the Holes of Time."
    Johnny was startled. "What are those?"
    Fergie shrugged. "Aah, it's just something that he made up. Look, none of this is gonna work—you can bet your bottom dollar on that. He's just tryin' to take us both for a ride."
    The professor turned and glared at Fergie over the top of his glasses. "I'll take you for a ride, all right!" he said through his teeth. "But it won't be the ride that you're expecting, and when you get back you'll realize that I have not been talking through my hat. Unless, of course, you would prefer to go upstairs and wait for us to return."
    Fergie set his jaw and looked grim. "If this piece of tin is goin' anywhere," he muttered sullenly, "then I'm goin' along too. Okay, get it moving. I'll just sit and wait." He slumped into a seat and folded his arms.
    The professor sighed and shook his head. Then he asked Johnny to get out of the driver's seat. Johnny did, and the professor sat down at the controls. He twirled wheels and twiddled knobs and pulled levers, and soon the fan-shaped windows were glowing yellow. They reminded Johnny of the dial on the Atwater Kent radio in his grandparents' parlor. "These holes in time," the professor went on as he adjusted a knob, "occur for no reason in certain places. One of them is in the upper story of a three-hundred-year-old house in Topsfield, Massachusetts. But since nothing interesting ever happened there, the hole is not of much use. There's another hole in a cave at the bottom of the Atlantic, about two miles deep. But you'd need a lot of fancy equipment to visit that hole, so I suppose we can pass it up. A-a-and there's another hole at the temple of Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt, and still another in the crypt of a medieval church in London. But we are not going to any of these places."
    "So where are we going?" Fergie snapped irritably.
    "Be quiet and watch!" the professor said, and he fiddled with more dials. A loud electrical humming filled the air, and the boys noticed that the air inside the car was shimmering. The windows went dark, and they seemed to be hurtling forward at a tremendous speed. The car jolted and bumped, and the boys had to cling to the nickel-plated handles that were mounted next to their seats. The professor clutched the sides of his swivel chair, which vibrated madly, and still the wild ride went on. Johnny was afraid he would get sick, and he remembered the time when he had thrown up after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the local fairgrounds. Still the car jolted, and the humming noise got louder. Then, with a loud, long, ear-piercing screech of metal, the car began to slow down. Outside the windows of the trolley car, endless walls of stone seemed to be hurtling past. With a shuddering bump the car stopped, and Fergie was pitched forward onto the floor.
    "Ow!" he exclaimed as he picked himself up. He felt his arms and legs, but nothing seemed to be broken.
    "Are you okay?" asked Johnny anxiously. He had managed to cling to his seat somehow.
    Fergie winced as he felt his elbow. "Oh, yeah, I guess so. I'll live," he muttered as he turned to look at the professor, who was clutching the safety bar on the dashboard with white-knuckled hands. "Okay," Fergie added in a loud sarcastic voice, "so what do we do now?" He was convinced