The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

"A language unit!" I shouted. "How can I speak to the natives if I don't know their language?"

"We don't have one here," Coypu said, tucking a rack of gas containers under my arm. "But here is a memorygram—"

"They give me headaches."

"—that you can use to learn the local tongue. In this pocket."

"What do I do, you haven't explained that yet? How do I arrive?"

"Very high. In the stratosphere, that is. Less chance of colliding with anything material. We'll get you there. After that—you're on your own."

"The front lab is gone!" someone shouted, and popped out of existence at almost the same instant.

"To the time-helix!" Coypu called out hoarsely, and they dragged me through the door.

Slower and slower as the scientists and technicians vanished from sight like pricked balloons. Until there were only four of them left and, heavily burdened, I staggered along at a decrepit waddle.

"The time-helix," Coypu said, breathlessly. "It is a bar, a column of pure force that has been warped into a helix and put under tension."

It was green and glittered and almost filled the room, a coiled form of sparkling light as thick as my arm. It reminded me of something.

"It's like a big spring that you have wound, up."

"Yes, perhaps. We prefer to call it a time-helix. It has been wound up… put under tension, the force carefully calculated. You will be placed at the outer end and the restraining latch released. As you are flung into the past, the helix will hurl itself into the future where the energies will gradually dissipate. You must go."

There were just three of us left.

"Remember me," the short dark technician called out. "Remember Charli Nate! As long as you remember me, I'll never… "

Coypu and I were alone, the walls going, the air darkening.

"The end! Touch it!" he called out. Was his voice weaker?

I stumbled, half fell toward the glowing end of the helix, my fingers outstretched. There was no sensation, but when I touched it, I was instantly surrounded by the same green glow, could barely sec through it. The professor was at a console, working the controls, reaching for a rather large switch.

Pulling it down…

Chapter 3

Everything stopped.

Professor Coypu stood frozen at the controls with his hand locked on the closed switch. I had been looking in his direction, or I would not have seen this because my eyes were fixed rigidly ahead. My body as well—and my brain gave a flutter of panic and tried to bounce around in its bony pan as I realized that I had stopped breathing. For all I knew, my heart wasn't beating either. Something had gone wrong, I was sure of that, since the time-helix was still tightly coiled. More soundless panic as Coypu grew transparent and the walls behind him took on a definitely hazy quality. It was all going, fading before my eyes. Would I be next? There was no way to know.

A primitive part of my mind, the apeman's heir, gibbered and wailed and rushed about in little circles. Yet at the same time I felt a cold detachment and interest; it isn't everyone who is privileged to watch the dissolving of his world while hanging from a helical force field that may possibly whip him back into the remote past. It was a privilege I would be happy to pass on to any volunteers. None presented themselves, so I hung there, popeyed and stiff as a statue while the laboratory faded away around me and I was floating in interstellar space. Apparently even the asteroid on which the Special Corps base had been built no longer had any reality in this new universe.