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It was Sir Willoughby who unwittingly
provided the perfect machine: his old
Norton motorbike and sidecar. It met
absolutely all Justin’s time machine
design criteria: the sidecar made the
ideal chronopod; he could run wires
to the subatomic wormhole-vortex
accelerator; and there was easily
enough room under the seat for the
negative energy generator and the
anti-gravity unit.

It needed an inbuilt computer capable
of pin-pointing the precise Minkowski
space-time coordinates of anywhere
in the past. Then, finally, all he had to
do was line the pod with something
that gave complete chronology
insulation, something his father had
overlooked with disastrous
consequences.

There was one thing that he
knew for certain: a degree of
mobility would be useful.
The logical solution was to
adapt an existing vehicle.

Justin’s initial preference was to design a device
that avoided all contact with the earth’s surface.
He thought about how Foucault’s pendulum moved
in relation to the earth’s rotational plane. The scale
made it impracticable, of course, but it was a good
starting point. He suspected a huge gyroscope
might work, if he could make it hover – though
stability would doubtless become an issue.