Friday Flash Fiction 43
Filed under Flash Fiction • Friday Flash Fiction • 05-09-2008 •
HOT RATS
By Gareth L PowellThe four rats appeared high in the upper atmosphere. For a few seconds, they burned like meteors. Then they were back in the lab, smoking and smelling and setting off every alarm we had.
You see, we tried to send them into the past but we forgot: the Earth is rotating at around 1,000 miles per hour, and moving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. Plus the sun itself is rotating around the centre of the galaxy.
We sent them a couple of minutes into the past. They travelled in time but they stayed in the same physical location – a location the Earth hadn’t reached when they arrived. It hadn’t got there yet. It was still spinning around the sun, a few minutes behind.
But it was coming.
The rats were tumbling through space at 67,000 miles per hour when the Earth’s gravity caught them. There were four of them in the cage. They hit the upper atmosphere at many times the speed of sound.
It’s amazing we got anything back at all.
That’s probably the funniest take on the time travel/absolute position idea I’ve ever read – nice one!
That could spawn an exclusive new cooking method: “I’ll have the Earth-frazzled sea bass.”