But a time machine? There was no such thing. And yet, if there were—
He looked at the jumble of equipment speculatively.
"I still don't know how a time machine might work," he said finally. "Do you have any sort of handbook, operating manual, anything like that? Or do they have such things in your time?"
"Operating manual? I don't think so. There are some pictures—" Brown stepped over to the machine and touched a large flattened sphere which grew out of the base. "This is the power unit. If you press these studs, various pictures—'schematics', I believe you would call them—are projected on the surface. Is that what you want?"
"That sounds like it," Dolan said. "But I did press those studs. Nothing happened."
"That is because the power unit is not operating. It does not come on, as it should, when we press this button." He indicated a stud on the cubicle control unit. "That, I suppose, is one of the major things wrong with the machine."
"Ummm, yeah, I see," Dolan said. He squatted and examined the power unit more closely. "One of these pairs now—" he traced them with his finger up to the control unit, "must be the control pair." He took a piece of chalk and began numbering the terminals rapidly.
"Now," he said, "if the control pair is shorted, the power should be on, but there must be overload protection of some kind, that's probably kicked out, so let's just cut all this junk loose and then short the possible control pairs one at a time, see what happens then."
He reached for a pair of side-cutters. The three gun runners looked at each other. Brown nodded slightly. They moved quickly back out of Dolan's way.