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Sands of Time 2

Coils of Time

by P. Schuyler Miller
You’ll need some patience with “Coils of Time," seeing as how it takes the hero, Rutherford Bohr Adams, twenty-some pages before you’ll realize that the story is a sequel to “The Sands of Time,” and it’s going to fall to space pilot Adams to travel through the 60-million-year coils of times into the future and the past, saving Earth from the evil Martians and their zombies, while also saving his own boss’s beautiful daughter from a fate worth than death.
— Michael Main
It’s another form of the space-time field that I use in the Egg to bridge the gap between the coils of time.
DEBUT
“Coils of Time,” Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1939.
VARIANTS
1 English variant
TAGS(SPOILERS!)
Time Periods Time Travel Methods
  • Big Time Machines: The Golden Glow is never fully explained, but it creates time portals wide enough to swallow an entire invasion fleet, including the miles-wide space dredge.
  • Time Portal: “A black hole seemed to have been bored is space—a tunnel of blackness into which he looked for interminable distances, and into which the ships were moving one by one—and vanishing!"
  • Time Spheres, Cubes, etc.: The original egg from “The Sands of Time” is still around.
  • Wearable Time Object: “The space armor Donovan had given him was self-powered, a miniature spaceship in which he could live for several days. It operated on the principle of the Time Egg, creating new geodesics in the space-time continuum and riding them as a comet rides its orbit.”
Themes
  • Helical Time: “Time is coiled like a spring. Some other age in earth’s history lies next to ours, separated only by an intangible boundary, a focus of forces that keeps us from seeing into it and falling into it.”
  • Long Life: “I’m going on two hundred and forty-five and I feel like thirty.”
  • Time Invaders: Baldar’s space pirates
Fictional Tags
  • Future Wars: Lana’s people vs. Baldar’s
  • Zombies: “His zombie army would swarm over Lana’s citadel and crush it by sheer force of numbers.”
Groupings
TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)
  1. From somewhere in the solar system, circa AD 2137 ⋙ to a metal city in a Trojan orbit with Venus and the sun, circa AD 60,000,000. Note: The Ourobouros and Adams are about 200 years after “Sands of Time” when space turns inside out, and they are unwittingly taken to the next spot on the coil of time, sixty million years in the future.
  2. From an unknown time ⋙ to the past location of Kansas, circa 60,000,000 BC. Note: Donavan and Adams travel two coils (120 million years) back in time.
  3. From an unknown time ⋙ to the metal city again, circa AD 60,000,000. Note: Adams goes to rescue Pat.
  4. From an unknown time ⋙ to the past location of Kansas again, circa 60,000,000 BC. Note: Adams hitches a ride back on the Ourobouros, as part of Baldar’s motley fleet.
  5. From an unknown time ⋙ to somewhere in the solar system, circa AD 2137. Note: Off-stage, Adams and others return to the 22nd century.