Danny returns to 1970 through Twitchell's device

Dan Davis’s return to 1970 turns a forbidden scientific claim into an irreversible passage through time. After testing Hubert Twitchell’s apparatus and deciding that its demonstration is a trick, Dan goads Twitchell into activating a displacement of thirty-one years and three weeks. The machine sends Dan backward from 2001 to 1970, where his shock at the landing gives way to relief: he has arrived in time.

Causes and the Question of Whether Time Travel Is Possible

The return begins as an idea Dan raises with Chuck Freudenberg. Dan is willing to risk a temporal jump because he hopes to investigate what is troubling him and then return through cold sleep. Chuck counters that Dan cannot know whether a jump would send him backward or forward. Dan answers that the future might be preferable to the present, but their discussion also exposes practical and logical obstacles: money from the future could not simply be spent in 1970, and a supposed explosion at the laboratory site would contradict Dan’s memory that he never arrived there in a tree.

Chuck’s argument is not merely that the device may fail. He insists that Dan will not make the jump at all, because the research is classified and the government will prevent it. He proposes abandoning the matter and treating the time-displacement work as an interesting but impractical discussion. That prediction helps set up the later reversal: the jump occurs not through official permission or a planned expedition, but in a confrontation with the scientist who controls the equipment.

Twitchell’s Demonstration

Years later, Dan visits Twitchell’s laboratory. Most of the building is occupied by other researchers, but Twitchell has kept his time laboratory under his control because of its classified status. He has not used the apparatus, yet has neither surrendered the room nor allowed the equipment to be dismantled. The old laboratory’s continued existence turns the possibility Dan and Chuck discussed into a physical, if guarded, reality.

Dan challenges Twitchell over a central scientific question: whether he has ever calibrated the machine well enough to know the exact magnitude of its displacement. Twitchell rejects the suggestion that he could not measure it, and demonstrates the apparatus rather than accepting the criticism. The visible equipment includes a caged temporal locus stage and a control board, alongside familiar components such as a recorder and heavy-duty switches. Dan can recognize the hardware but cannot infer how to operate it without circuit diagrams.

For the demonstration, Twitchell asks Dan for coins, has him scratch his initials onto them, and places them on the stage. He sets the displacement for exactly one week, within an error margin of six seconds. After Twitchell’s countdown, the coins disappear. The disappearance is a crucial change in Dan’s understanding: he has not merely heard a claim about temporal displacement but witnessed an object vanish under a measured setting.

Twitchell explains the coins’ apparent return by describing the same coin as a later segment of its space-time structure. One coin, carried back from a week later, can be present in Dan’s pocket while another version occupies the stage, with the two separated by a week in the object’s history. Dan’s response is to ask Twitchell to send him back by a week. Twitchell refuses, revealing that he has experimented on human beings in the past and resolved never to repeat it. The refusal makes the demonstration’s limits—and its human stakes—plain: the apparatus has moved coins, but Twitchell will not use it on Dan.

From Skepticism to Activation

Dan returns to Twitchell with a more exact request: a displacement of thirty-one years and three weeks. Twitchell says the expected error should be no greater than two hours and adjusts the controls, but notes that the power supply used for the coin demonstration cannot provide enough power to carry out the larger displacement. At this point, Dan believes nothing will happen. He treats the laboratory’s control board as theatrical scenery, the coin demonstration as a parlor trick, and Twitchell’s claims as discredited talk.

To provoke Twitchell, Dan says that the government has not suppressed Twitchell’s report; it has filed it away as a joke. He calls the apparatus a hoax, belittles Twitchell as a faker, and challenges him to press the button. Twitchell looks at Dan and the control but initially does nothing. Dan continues, invoking Colonel Thrushbotham’s dismissal of the scientist. The insult finally breaks Twitchell’s hesitation: he stabs at the button.

Dan tries to shout for him to stop, but the activation has already begun. The reversal is stark because Dan has spent the confrontation insisting that the device is harmless and unreal; the moment he succeeds in eliciting action, he realizes that he did not want the journey after all. He has also recognized too late that he has driven an old man into anger despite Twitchell having done him no harm. The jump follows not from settled confidence but from provocation, disbelief, and an immediate, frightened regret.

Arrival in 1970

The displacement throws Dan onto granite gravel and pine needles. He falls only a few feet but lands unprepared, collapsing onto the ground. A man and a woman stand nearby; the man, about forty and lean, demands to know where Dan came from and treats him as a trespasser on private property. Dan is still disoriented, and his first question is where he is, though he realizes that asking when he has arrived would be more pertinent.

The strangers’ appearance gives Dan an early clue that he is not in 2001: they wear only smooth coats of tan, unlike the clothing he expects there. When he asks the year, the man tells him it is 1970. Dan’s relief confirms the jump’s direction and success. He has not traveled forward, remained in the laboratory, or arrived in some indeterminate past; he has reached the particular year he needed, and his immediate concern shifts from surviving the experiment to explaining his presence and concealing the five-year gap in his life.

Consequences and Significance

The return converts Twitchell’s disputed research into an event Dan experiences firsthand. The coin demonstration first establishes a controlled, limited displacement; the larger jump then carries a person across decades, despite Twitchell’s prior refusal to experiment on humans and Dan’s insistence that the machine is a fraud. The difference between those stages matters: the apparatus does not become credible to Dan through abstract proof alone, but through a test he has helped force into action—and cannot undo once it begins.

The episode also reverses the apparent logic of Dan and Chuck’s earlier discussion. Chuck had argued that classified work meant Dan could not make such a jump. In the laboratory, however, the decisive barrier is neither government permission nor a carefully planned procedure: it is Twitchell’s restraint, which Dan breaks by attacking his credibility. The resulting journey is simultaneously a scientific demonstration, a personal gamble, and a consequence of Dan’s own provocation. Its landing in 1970 changes the question from whether time displacement is possible to what Dan will do now that he has reached the past.