Of course none of it would have been possible without the properties of the strange substance I had labeled “Plattnerite.” I remembered how, by chance, I had come into possession of a sample of that material: on that night, two decades earlier, when a stranger had walked up to my door and handed me a packet of the stuff. “Plattner,” he had called himself — he was a bulky chap, a good few years older than myself, with an odd, broad, gray-grizzled head, and dressed in peculiar jungle colors. He instructed me to study the potent stuff he handed me, in a glass medicine jar. Well, the stuff had sat uninvestigated on a shelf in the laboratory for over a year, while I progressed with more substantive work. But at last, on a dull Sunday afternoon, I had taken the jar down from its shelf…
And what I had found out had, at last, led to — this!
It was Plattnerite, suffused into quartz rods, which fueled the Time Machine, and made its exploits possible. But I flatter myself to think that it took my own combination of analysis and imagination to realize and exploit the properties of that remarkable substance, where a lesser man may have missed the mark.
I had been reluctant to publicize my work, outlandish as the field was, without experimental verification. I promised myself that direct on my return, with specimens and photographs, I would write up my studies for the Philosophical Transactions; it would be a famous addition to the seventeen papers I had already placed there on the physics of light. It would be amusing, I reflected, to call my paper something dry such as “Some Reflections on the Anomalous Chronologic Properties of the Mineral ’Plattnerite,’ “ and to bury within it the thunderous revelation of the existence of time travel!