Chapter 2: Time Machine
The old man used to be a ballet dancer. He never did have much of a mind for science. That was why it had been so hard for him to build the time machine.
The man's name was Johnny Minonic, and he was standing next to the first and only successful time machine ever created. Johnny scratched his head with one black-greased finger as he examined his work. Yes, it was a fully-functional time machine, and it had enough buttons to confuse an airline pilot.
This is going to be interesting, Johnny thought nervously as he climbed inside, buckled his seatbelt securely, returned the food tray to its regular upright position, and began poking at the dashboard. Darnit, I should have labeled these things! As Johnny pushed random buttons, various unexplainable things happened: the windshield wipers began spraying purple toothpaste on all the windows, little mechanical gnomes came out to clean off the purple spray with greenish tongues, the big red light on the top of the machine started flashing madly, and a foghorn began bellowing in a fashion similar to the shriekings of a rare mountain goat as it is slowly blugeoned to death with a dead herring.
"Hmmm..." Johnny sat back and merely looked at the dashboard setup, rather than touching it and risking accidentally hitting the self-destruct button that he had so cleverly disguised as every one of the other un-labeled orange keys. He held his hand, palm down, directly above the board and closed his eyes. He began humming "Wonderful Tonight" in a Yoga-master-on-a-mountaintop-trying-to-meditate sort of way. His hand started to quiver, tipping back and forth slightly. He hummed louder. Johnny's hand suddenly slammed down in a fist on one of the buttons and his eyes flew open.
The time machine suddenly lit up from the inside as the monitors flashed on, all operations go. Something booped on one of the screens, and the time machine began to spin around sickeningly, faster and faster and faster -- then it stopped suddenly, landing on the ground a foot below with a loud thunk.
Looking around, Johnny found himself and his machine suddenly somewhere else. He scratched his head again and pulled out the handy instruction manual. "Let's see... Chapter 567: Where are you now... page 8000042." He flipped to a page near the center of the book and began reading.
"Where are you now? A mini-guidebook for the scientifically inept. Have you gone to the past? You can only go into the past to specific times where nothing you do will matter. There are only three of these in the past, so it will be very easy to tell where you are from the following descriptions:
"1. You are at the beginning of time. You see nothing, hear nothing, and most likely are nothing. Nothing is happening and nothing will happen for several million years, when you will eventually be transported back to the future. Have a nice day!
"2. You are in the time of the dinosaurs. Near you is a dinosaur about to blow up, catch fire, and sink into the tar pit beside your time machine. Another dinosaur to your right is about to get ejected into space by an extremely powerful volcanic blast. If you do anything to these dinosaurs it won't matter because in five minutes they will pretty much have never existed. These creatures are the first of their kind, and the last. Do as you will, but when the five minutes are up you will be transported back to the present.
"3. You are at your prom. You can do anything you like, but that girl still won't dance with you. You will be transported back at midnight."
The book went on to describe various scenes in the future where Johnny might be, which were mostly speculations that lasted for several thousand pages, but he didn't bother reading any of those. This was because of the big blue-skinned reptilian creature staring in through the windshield of his time machine. "Ooh..." said Johnny quietly, "ooh dear..."
A smarter man might have left the dinosaurs alone and waited quietly to be transported back to the future, but Johnny was a ballet dancer and not a scientist, so he decided he would have to take the dinosaurs with him. His reasoning was, "Why not?" and that seemed to be good enough for him so he popped open the trunk on his time machine (by some miracle he found the right button on the first try) and proceeded to load the dinosaurs into it.
How could he have fit two fully grown dinosaurs in his trunk?
Umm... we'll just call it "magic."