Dell Sweet

The air hung thick with the smell of ozone and burnt plastic, a lingering scent of their near-death experience. Lonnie ran a hand over the smooth, cool surface of the repaired temporal resonator, its green glow a constant, reassuring presence in the otherwise dim Quonset hut. The weeks spent battling the machine, deciphering Finch’s cryptic notes, had left them gaunt and exhausted, their faces etched with the strain of their ordeal. But the pervasive anxiety had shifted; the fear of catastrophic failure was replaced by a new, equally potent fear: the fear of failure to return.Tommy, ever the pragmatist, began meticulously checking the power supply. He meticulously tested each vacuum tube, his brow furrowed in concentration. He’d scavenged the tubes from a junkyard, a graveyard of discarded electronics, and their reliability was questionable at best. He replaced a flickering tube, the replacement salvaged from an old radio, its glass casing brittle with age. Each connection was carefully soldered, double-checked, and triple-checked. There was no room for error. Their lives, quite literally, depended on the flawless functioning of this cobbled-together contraption.Lonnie, meanwhile, focused on the chronometer, a jury-rigged device built from scavenged parts. It was crude, primitive compared to the sleek, digital chronometers of their time, but it was their only way to accurately gauge the temporal displacement. He adjusted a tiny potentiometer, a whisper-thin metal rod, his breath held in anticipation. He’d spent hours calibrating it, using astronomical charts painstakingly copied from a tattered 1969 almanac. Even the slightest miscalculation could mean a landing in the wrong century, or worse, nowhere at all.A science fiction trip through time travel as three men learn the ropes of something they were never meant to know…

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