The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection

by Harry Harrison

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘My name is Brown, John Brown. From America. And what is your name?’

  ‘Brewster.’ Then, without changing the level tone of his voice: ‘Can you give me reason why we should not kill you for the spy you are?’

  I smiled calmly to show him how foolish the thought was. Inside, I was not calm at all. Spy, why not? What could I say? Think fast, Jim, because a knife kills just as thoroughly as an A-bomb. What did I know? French soldiers were occupying Oxford. Which meant that they must have invaded England successfully and occupied all or part of it. There was resistance to this invasion, the people holding me proved that, so I took my clue from this fact and tried to improvise.

  ‘I am here on a secret mission.’ Always good. The knife still pressed against my throat. ‘America, as you know, sides with your cause ….’

  ‘America helps the Frenchies; your Benjamin Franklin has said so.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Mr. Franklin has a great responsibility. France is too strong to fight now, so we side with her. On the surface. But there are men like me who come to bring you aid.’

  ‘Prove it?’

  ‘How can I? Papers can be forged, they would be death to carry in any case, and you wouldn’t believe them. But I have something that speaks the truth, and I was on my way to London to deliver it, to certain people there.’

  ‘Who?’ Had the knife moved away the slightest amount?

  ‘I will not tell you. But there are men like you all over England, who wish to throw off the tyrant’s yoke. We have contacted some of the groups, and I am delivering the evidence I spoke of.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Gold.’

  That stopped them all right, and I felt the grip on my arms lessen ever the slightest. I pressed the advantage.

  ‘You have never seen me before and will probably never see me again. But I can give you the help you need to buy weapons, bribe soldiers, help those imprisoned. Why do you think I assaulted those soldiers in public today?’ I asked with sudden inspiration.

  ‘Tell us,’ Brewster said.

  ‘To meet you.’ I looked slowly around at their surprised faces. ‘There are loyal Englishmen in every part of this land who hate the invaders, who will fight to hurl them from these green shores. But how can they be contacted and helped? I have just shown you one way – and have provided you with these arms. I will now give you gold to carry on the struggle. As I trust you, you must trust me. If you wish, you will have enough gold to slip away from here and live your lives out happily in some kinder part of the world. But I don’t think you will. You risked your lives for those weapons. You will do what you know is right. I will give you the gold and then go away. We will never meet again. We must go on trust. I trust you ….’ I let my voice dwindle away, allowing them to finish the sentence for themselves.

  ‘Sounds good to me, Brewster,’ one of the men said.

  ‘Me too,’ said the other. ‘Let’s take the gold.’

  ‘I’ll take the gold if there’s any to be taken,’ Brewster said, lowering the knife but still uncertain. ‘It could all be a lie.’

  ‘It could be,’ I said quickly, before he started punching holes in my flimsy story. ‘But it isn’t – nor does it matter. You’ll see that I’m well away tonight, and we will never meet again.’

  ‘The gold,’ my guard said.

  ‘Let’s see it,’ Brewster said reluctantly. I had bluffed it through. After this he couldn’t go back.

  I opened the chest with utmost care while a gun was kept pressed to my kidney. I had the gold; that was the only part of my story that was true. It was divided into a number of small leather bags and intended to finance this operation. That is just what it was doing now. I took one out and solemnly handed it over to Brewster.

  He shook some of the glittering granules into his hand, and they all stared at it, I pushed.

  ‘How do I get to London?’ I asked. ‘By river?’

  ‘Sentries on every lock of the Thames,’ Brewster said, still looking at the golden gravel upon his palm. ‘You wouldn’t get as far as Abingdon. Horse, the only way. Back roads.’

  ‘I don’t know the back roads. I’ll need two horses and someone to guide me. I can pay, as you know.’

  ‘Luke here will take you,’ he said, finally looking up. ‘Used to be a drayman. But only to the walls; you’ll have to get by the Frenchies yourself.’

  ‘That will be fine.’ So London was occupied. And what about the rest of England?

  Brewster went out to take care of the horses, and Guy produced some coarse bread and cheese, as well as some ale, which was more welcome. We talked, or rather they talked and I listened, occasionally putting in a word but afraid of asking any questions that might prove my almost total ignorance. But a picture finally developed. England was completely occupied and pacified, had been for some years; the exact number was not made clear, although fighting was still going on in Scotland. There were dark memories of the invasion, great cannon that did terrible damage, the Channel fleet destroyed in a single battle. I could detect the cloven hoof of He behind a lot of it. History had been rewritten.

  Yet this particular past was not the past of the future I had just come from. My head started to ache just thinking about it. Did this world exist in a loop of time, separate from the mainstream of history? Or was it an alternate world? Professor Coypu would know, but I did not think he would enjoy being plucked out of his memory tape again just to answer my questions. I would have to work it out without him. Think, Jim, put the old brain-box into gear. You take pride in what you call your intelligence, so apply it to something besides crookery for a change. There must be some form of logic here. Statement A, in the future this past did not exist. B, it sure existed now. But C might indicate that my presence here would destroy this past, even the memory of this past. I had no idea how this might be accomplished, but it was such a warm and cheering thought that I grabbed onto it. Jim diGriz history changer, world shaker. It made a pleasant image, and I treasured it as I dozed off on the hay – and woke up not too long afterward scratching at the invading insect life that was after my hot body.

  The horses did not arrive until after dark, and we agreed that it would be best to leave at dawn. I managed to get some bug spray out of my chest to kill off my attackers, so I enjoyed a relatively peaceful night before the ride in the morning.

  The ride! We were three days en route, and before we reached London, even my saddle sores had saddle sores. My primitive companion actually seemed to enjoy the trip, treating it as an outing of sorts, chatting about the country we passed through and getting falling down drunk each evening at the inns where we stopped. We had crossed the Thames above Henley and made a long loop to the south, staying away from all sizable centers of population. When we reached the Thames again at Southwark, there was London Bridge before us and the roofs and spires of London beyond. A little hard to see because of the high wall that stretched along the opposite riverbank. The wall had a crisp, clean look to it, far different from the smoke-stained gray of the rest of the city – and a sudden thought struck me.

  ‘That wall, it’s new, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Aye, finished two years back. Many died there, women and children, everyone driven like slaves by Bony to put it up. Right around the city it goes. No reason for it, just that he’s mad.’

  There was a reason for it, and ego-flattering as it was, I still didn’t like it. That wall was built for me, to keep me out. ‘We must find a quiet inn,’ I said.

  ‘The George, right down here.’ He smacked his mouth loudly. ‘Good ale, too, the best.’

  ‘You enjoy it. I want something right on the river, within sight of that bridge there.’

  ‘Knows just the place, the Boar and Bustard on Pickle Herring Street, right at the foot of Vine Lane. Fine ale there.’

  The foulest brew was fine by Luke as long as it contained alcohol. But the Boar and Bustard suited my needs perfectly. A disreputable
establishment with a cracked signboard above the door depicting an improbable-looking swine and an even more impossible-looking bird squaring off at each other. There was a rickety dock to the rear where thirsty boatmen could tie up – and a room I could have that looked out on the river. As soon as I had arranged for the stabling of my horse and argued over the price of the room, I bolted the door and unpacked the electronic telescope. This produced a clear, large, detailed, depressing picture of the city across the river.

  It was surrounded by that wall, ten meters high of solid brick and stone – undoubtedly bristling with detection apparatus of all kinds. If I tried to go under or over it, I would be spotted. Forget the wall. The only entrance I could see from this vantage point was at the other end of London Bridge, and I studied this carefully. Traffic moved slowly across the bridge because everything and everyone was carefully searched before they were allowed to enter. French soldiers probed and investigated everything. And one by one the people were led through a doorway into a building inside the wall. As far as I could tell, they all emerged – but would I? What happened inside that building? I had to find out, and the ale room below was just the place.

  Everyone loves a free spender, and I was all of that. The one-eyed landlord muttered and snaffled to himself and managed to find a drinkable bottle of claret in his cellar which I kept for myself. The locals were more than happy to consume blackjack after blackjack of ale. These containers were made of leather covered with tar which added a certain novelty to the flavor, but the customers did not seem to mind. My best informant was a bristle-bearded drover named Quinch. He was one of the men who moved the cattle from the pens to the knackers’ yard where he also assisted the butchers in their bloody tasks. His sensibilities, as one might suspect, were not of the highest, but his capacity for drink was, and when he drank, he talked, and I hung on every word. He entered and left London every day, and bit by bit, through the spate of profanity and abuse, I put together what I hoped was an accurate picture of the entrance procedures.

  There was a search; that much I could see from my window. At times a close search, at other times superficial. But there was one part of the routine that never varied.

  Every person entering the city had to put his hand into a hole in the wall of the guardhouse. That was all, just put it in. Not touch anything at all, just in up to the elbow and out.

  Over this I brooded, sipping my wine and ignoring the roars of masculine cheer around me. What could they detect from this? Fingerprints perhaps, but I always wore false fingerprint covers as a matter of routine and I had changed these three times since the last operation. Temperature? Skin alkalinity? Pulse or blood pressure? Could these residents of, what to me was, the dim past differ in some bodily composition ? It was not unreasonable to expect some changes over a period of more than 30,000 years. I had to find out the present norms.

  This was done easily enough. I constructed a detector that could record all these factors and hung it inside my clothing. The pickup was disguised as a ring that I wore on my right hand. The next evening I shook hands with everyone I could, finished my wine, and retired to my chamber. The recordings were precise, accurate to ±0.006 percent and very revealing. Of the fact that my personal readings fell well inside all the normal variations.

  ‘You are not thinking, Jim,’ I accused myself in the warped mirror. ‘There has to be a reason for that hole in the wall. And the reason is a detection instrument of some kind. Now what does it detect?’ I turned away from the accusing stare. ‘Come, come, don’t evade the question. If you cannot answer it that way, turn it on its head. What is it possible to detect?’

  This was more like it. I pulled out a piece of paper and began to list all the things that can be observed and measured, going right down the frequencies. Light, heat, radio waves, etc., then off into vibration and noise, radar reflections, anything and everything, not attempting to apply the things detected to the human body. Not yet. I did this after I had made the list as complete as possible. When I had covered the paper, I shook hands with myself triumphantly and reread it for human applications.

  Nothing. I was depressed again. I threw it away – then grabbed it back. Something, what was it, something relating to something I had heard about Earth. What? Where. There! Destroyed by atomic bombs Coypu had said.

  Radioactivity. The atomic age was still in the future, the only radioactivity in this world was natural background radiation. This did not take long to check.

  Me, creature of the future, denizen of a galaxy full of harnessed radiation. My body was twice as radioactive as the background count in the room, twice as radioactive as the hot bodies of my friends in the bar when I slipped down to check them out.

  Now that I knew what to guard against I could find a way to circumvent it. The old brain turned over, and soon I had a plan, and well before dawn I was ready to attack. All the devices secreted about my person were of plastic, undetectable by a metal detector if they had one working. The items that were made of metal were all in a plastic tube less than a meter long and no thicker than my finger, which I coiled up in one pocket. In the darkest hour before the dawn I slipped out and stalked the damp streets looking for my prey.

  And found him soon enough, a French sentry guarding one of the entrances to the nearby docks. A quick scuffle, a bit of gas, a limp figure, a dark passageway. Within two minutes I emerged at the opposite end wearing his uniform with his gun on my shoulder carried in the correct French manner. With my tube of devices down its barrel. Let them find that metal with a detector. My timing was precise, and when, at the first light, the straggling members of the night guard returned to London, I was marching in the last row. I would enter, undetected, in the ranks of the enemy. A foolproof scheme. They wouldn’t examine their own soldiers.

  More fool I. As we marched through the gate at the far end of the bridge I saw an interesting thing that I could not see with my telescope from my window.

  As each soldier marched around the corner of the guardhouse he stopped for a moment, under the cold eyes of a sergeant, and thrust his hand into a dark opening in the wall.

  TWELVE

  ‘Mayerd!’ I said as I tripped over the uneven footing on the bridge. I did not know what it meant, but it was the most common word the French soldiers used and seemed to fit the occasion. With this I stumbled into the soldier next to me, and my musket caught him a painful blow on the side of the head. He yelped with pain and pushed me away. I staggered backward, hit my legs against the low railing – and fell over into the river.

  Very neatly done. The current was swift, and I went beneath the surface and clamped the musket between my knees so I wouldn’t lose it. After that I surfaced just once, splashing at the water and screaming wordlessly. The soldiers on the bridge milled about, shouting and pointing, and when I was sure I had made the desired impression, I let my wet clothes and the weight of the gun pull me under again. The oxygen mask was in an inside pocket, and it took only seconds to work it out and pull the strap over my head. Then I cleared the water from it by exhaling strongly and breathed in pure oxygen. After that it was just a matter of a slow, easy swim across the river. The tide was on the ebb so the current would carry me well downstream from the bridge before I landed. So I had escaped detection, lived to re-gather my forces and fight again, and was totally depressed by my complete failure to get past the wall. I swam in the murky twilight and tried to think of another plan, but it was not exactly the best place for cogitation. Nor was the water that warm. Thoughts of a roaring fire in my room and a mug of hot rum drove me on for what seemed an exceedingly long time. Eventually I saw a dark form in the water ahead which resolved into the hull of a small ship tied up at a dock; I could see the pilings beyond. I stopped under the keel and worked my tube of instruments out of the musket and also took everything out of my coat. The gun stuffed into the jacket sleeve made a good weight, and both vanished toward the river bottom. After some deep breathing I took off the oxygen mask and stowed that away
as well, then surfaced as quietly as I could next to the ship.

  To look up at the coattails and patched trousers of a French soldier sitting on the rail above me. He was industriously involved polishing the blue-black barrel of a singularly deadly-looking cannon that projected next to him. It was far more efficient looking than any of the nineteenth-century weapons I had seen, which was undoubtedly caused by the fact that it did not belong to this period at all. Out of more than casual interest I had made a study of weapons available in the era I had recently left, so I recognized this as a 75-millimeter recoilless cannon. An ideal weapon to mount on a light wooden ship, since it could be fired without jarring the vessel to pieces. It could also accurately blow any other wooden ship out of the water long before the other’s muzzle-loading cannon were within range. Not to mention destroying armies in the field. A few hundred of these weapons brought back through time could alter history. And they had. The soldier above turned and spat into the river, and I sank beneath the surface again and vanished among the pilings.

  There were boat steps farther downriver out of sight of the French ship, and I surfaced there; no one was in sight. Dripping, cold, depressed, I climbed out of the water and hurried toward the dark mouth of the lane between the buildings. There was someone standing there, and I scuttled by – but then decided to stop.

  Because he put the muzzle of a great ugly pistol into my side.

  ‘Walk ahead of me,’ he said. ‘I will take you to a comfortable place where you can get dry clothing.’

  Only he did not say clothing, it sounded more like cloth-eeng. My captor very positively had a French accent.

  All I could do was follow instructions, prodded on by the primitive hand cannon. Primitive or not, it could still blow a nice hole in me. At the far end of the lane a coach had been pulled up, blocking the lane completely, the door gaping open in unappreciated welcome.