Jonathan Hunt, a journalist from New York, arrives in the city of Eger in Hungary for a break. He has local ancestry and speaks the language, but this is not the only motive for his visit. In the heritage of his great-grandfather, the globetrotter professor Samuel Hunt, he found two letters dated back in 1898. The letters were written by a professor Ábray, an apparently lunatic Hungarian scientist, about a time machine he claimed to have been working on. The references point to Eger, and Hunt wants to find out what happened to the man’s preposterous invention. But he soon…