Retroactive Time Machine — Ted Reynolds

[At an informal weekly Thursday gathering of acquaintances in a London suburb in 1895, the host (AKA the time traveller) expatiates on the nature of time, demonstrates a small model time machine which disappears (into past or future?), and states that he intends making personal temporal voyages on a larger machine. The six guests depart somewhat bemused. {See H.G. Wells The Time Machine, chapter 1}A professor, intrigued by the psychology of their host, and a doctor, rather wishing to debunk the host's claims, decide to invite a mutual ratiocinative acquaintance (later known facetiously as Mr Whom) to the next Thursday meeting, as he is "interested in intellectual puzzle. Phillip Filby, a professional dilettante, at a suggestion from Garth, his coachman, visits the time traveller's house the next morning, and pilfers the model time machine, which was set to return to normal time in a few hours, thus saving expenses. He himself then tries to send it on a trial run, but accidentally sends it towards the past, thus losing it forever. An aspiring writer (nameless) seizes upon the host's ideas, and at once begins to write a fictional account based upon them, which he plans to title The Time Machine" Griffin, a very young and ambitious medical student is fascinated by the possibilities inherent in time travel (including some morally questionable ones) and determines to get a look at the time traveller's designs for the machine. And a provincial mayor, although consciously utterly uninterested by the host's invention, has a run of very unnerving dreams about manipulated histories. At the following Thursday meeting a Silent Man (Mr Whom) appears among the guests, but the host himself appears very late and disheveled. He tells his guests that he has just returned from a far future (802,701 AD) in which vicious underground Morlocks prey upon degenerate simple-minded Eloi. The next morning he and his time machine have both vanished. The aspiring writer claims that he actually saw