They both looked at it.
"I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!"
"And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still. "There's nothing we can do to help them."
Seems like the town is full of machines," said Douglas, running. "Mr. Auffmann and his Happiness Machine, Miss Fern and Miss Roberta and their Green Machine. Now, Charlie, what you handing me?"
"A Time Machine!" panted Charlie Woodman, pacing him. "Mother's, scout's, Injun's honor!"
"Travels in the past and future?" John Huff asked, easily circling them.
"Only in the past, but you can't have everything. Here we are."
Charlie Woodman pulled up at a hedge.
Douglas peered in at the old house. "Heck, that's Colonel Freeleigh's place. Can't be no Time Machine in there. He's no inventor, and if he was, we'd known about an important thing like a Time Machine years ago."
Charlie and John tiptoed up the front-porch steps. Douglas snorted and shook his head, staying at the bottom of the steps.
"Okay, Douglas," said Charlie. "Be a knucklehead. Sure, Colonel Freeleigh didn't invent this Time Machine. But he's got a proprietary interest in it, and it's been here all the time. We were too darned dumb to notice! So long, Douglas Spaulding, to you!"
Charlie took John's elbow as though he was escorting a lady, opened the front-porch screen and went in. The screen door did not slam.
Douglas had caught the screen and was following silently.
Charlie walked across the enclosed porch, knocked, and opened the inside door. They all peered down a long dark hall toward a room that was lit like an undersea grotto, soft green, dim, and watery.
"Colonel Freeleigh?"
Silence.
"He don't hear so good," whispered Charlie. "But he told me to just come on in and yell. Colonel!"
The only answer was the dust sifting down and around the spiral stairwell from above. Then there was a faint stir in that undersea chamber at the far end of the hall.
They moved carefully along and peered into a room which contained but two pieces of furniture--an old man and a chair. They resembled each other, both so thin you could see just how they had been put together, ball and socket, sinew and joint. The rest of the room was raw floor boards, naked walls and ceiling, and vast quantities of silent air.
"He looks dead," whispered Douglas.
"No, he's just thinking up new places to travel to," said Charlie, very proud and quiet. "Colonel?"
One of the pieces of brown furniture moved and it was the colonel, blinking around, focusing, and smiling a wild and toothless smile. "Charlie!"
"Colonel, Doug and John here came to--"
"Welcome, boys; sit down, sit down!"
The boys sat, uneasily, on the floor.
"But where's the--" said Douglas. Charlie jabbed his ribs quickly.
"Where's the what?" asked Colonel Freeleigh.
"Where's the point in us talking, he means." Charlie grimaced at Douglas, then smiled at the old man. "We got nothing to say. Colonel, you say something."
"Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft."
"Ching Ling Soo," suggested Charlie casually.