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So he decided to branch into time travel. Not surprisingly, he had problems getting state funding. With his meager savings he built a time machine himself. (To avoid ridicule, Chernobrov and his team didn't actually call it a time machine. They preferred "Prospective Space Transportation System.") It was small: slightly larger than a basketball, in fact, and covered, apparently, in papier-mache ("electromagnetic skins," Chernobrov explained). It had the look of a science project thrown together the night before it was due.

The orb had a top panel that could lift up, revealing a tangle of wires and several small clocks. One wire poked out, connecting the device to an electrical transformer. Since the Prospective Space Transportation System was small, Chernobrov & Co. couldn't send people back, or even forward, in time. So they tossed in mice instead. For an hour at a time the rodents would skitter about among the wires, and then Chernobrov would remove them and conduct tests. The mice, he somehow determined, had aged merely 3,560 seconds -- 40 seconds fewer than the 3,600 ticks Chernobrov and the rest of the world had experienced outside the ball. The electromagnetic fields, he said, altered the passage of time. "Don't be frightened," the Russian man said. "Some of us are a bit slower or accelerated under normal circumstances. Give or take 40 seconds, who's going to notice?"

But Chernobrov sensed he was on the verge of something that could change our world. After all, Einstein, in his special theory of relativity, had shown that time slows down for objects moving close to the speed of light. In fact, said Chernobrov, a time traveler has already appeared on earth. He is Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor viewed by many Chinese as the founder of the country 6,000 years ago. According to Chernobrov, Huang Di came in a cone-shaped UFO. When I looked puzzled, Chernobrov said: "The Chinese could explain it to you better."

Who knows, the future may regard Chernobrov as a visionary. The present hardly knows he exists. "This is dangerous work -- unless you know how to control it," he said. "To a certain extent I'm taking risks with my reputation."

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