To The Future!

To The Future! (299w)

I can’t find it anywhere, thought Samson, rummaging around in his messy workshop, the machine won’t work without it.

He looked under a pile of copper wire, then behind the smoking furnace, and he turned all the drawers and cupboards inside out.

Oh, for heavens sake, where is it? He looked at his dog Max – a stubby Fox Red Labrador. Max tilted his head, concluded no food was present and went back to sleep.

Samson’s machine, which from the outside looked like a giant uncrackable safe, was a marvellous work of ingenuity, for it did more than meets the eye – well, it would if Samson could only find the final bit to get it working.

“All for nothing,” he said, waking up Max again. Max stretched out on his rug by the furnace, then rolled over to lie in a more comfortable position, revealing a single hairy sherbet lemon on the spot where he had been sleeping.

“Ah-ha!” cried Samson. “Max, I could kiss you.” He plucked the sherbet lemon from the floor, gave it a blow, then polished it a bit with his sleeve.

Samson carefully put the sherbet lemon into a compartment on the back of the machine’s door. “Max, come,” he said. Max jumped up, tail wagging, and plodded over to sit at Samson’s side. “Where shall we go first?”

Max said: “Woof?”

“Hmm,” said Samson. “Right you are, Max. The future it is!” There were three rotary combination locks on the outside of the machine’s door, and Samson twiddled them, slowly, with careful precision. “In we get. Come on, boy.”

They climbed into the machine, the door shutting behind them with a mechanical click. Samson’s machine went ‘BOING’ and was there one second, gone the next, disappearing in a flash of bright blue light.