Lew woke up to see Gallegher grinning madly in his face. "I fixed it!"
The laboratory was pretty well demolished, which wasn't as bad as you might think: around here an intact lab said that you weren't trying hard enough. But the ceiling had caved in too, which meant that those chains Lew had attached to the containment lattice really were needed now. Lew gave himself points for proper lab procedures. Then he got up.
It took a moment for him to understand what he was seeing. Somehow... a rocket had burst through the wall of the lab and wrapped itself around the containment lattice. Lew looked at Gallegher, who explained, "I just hot-wired the nearest one in the parking lot. All the inertrium in the rocket's been piled on to the containment sphere." Which was true enough.
The rocket's arrival had also flattened the Chiralitron.
They regarded the floating mass of inertrium in the center of the room. Lew went back to the control panel. He rapped on the dial again. "What is it?" asked Gallegher.
"The gravity's still increasing," Lew told him. "You've bought us some time by adding more inertrium, but it's still going to overcome the containment before long."
The remains of the Chiralitron were smoking in the corner. "And you've destroyed the only machine we had that could turn the central mass back to ordinary inertrium."
The videophone shot out some sparks and Lew heard his own voice say, "Hello, me! This is a message from the past."
"Hey!" said Gallegher. "It works!
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