The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection

by Harry Harrison

  Had He won? I felt the first touch of worry; the effects of the drug must be wearing off. I looked hard, but it was almost impossible to see the indicator dials in the dim light. Had one of them moved just before the helix was actuated? I could not be sure. And it didn’t really matter, not to me here. Whether the future was hell or a paradise of peace could not affect me. With the return of emotions I felt a desire to know if my world would ever exist. Would there be a Special Corps and would my Angelina someday be born? I would never know. I tugged sharply at the chains, but of course they held fast.

  The end. End of everything. The emotions that were returning were only the blackest and most depressed, but I could not help it. End.

  SIXTEEN

  Have you ever been trapped in St. Paul’s Cathedral in the year A.D. 1807 with the entire world vanished into nonexistence outside, alone and welded to a steel post and soon to vanish yourself? Not many people can answer yes to that question. I can – but can truthfully add that I do not enjoy this singular distinction.

  Without much reluctance I am forced to admit that I felt somewhat depressed. I struggled a bit against the metal cuffs that held my wrists, but my heart wasn’t really in it. They were too tight and secure, and I knew this kind of helpless thrashing about would be just the sort of thing that He would enjoy with mad passion.

  For the first time in my life I felt utter and absolute defeat. It had a darkening and dulling effect on my thoughts – as though I already had one foot in the grave – that removed any idea of struggle and suggested instead that the easiest thing would be to simply give in and await the final curtain. The sensation of defeat was so strong that it blanketed almost all feelings of rebellion against this untimely fate. I should be fighting, thinking of a way out, yet I just didn’t want to try. I was more than a little amazed at my submission.

  It was while I was engrossed in this navel-examining introspection that the sound began. A distant whine just on the edge of audibility, so weak that I would never have heard it had it not been for the absolute silence of nonexistence wrapped about my cathedral-sized tomb. The sound grew and grew, as annoying as an insect, making me aware of it although I did not wish to be made aware of anything except my sensation of overwhelming defeat. In the end it was quite loud, coming from empty space somewhere high above beneath the dome. I looked up despite my lack of interest just as there was the loud bang of displaced air.

  A figure appeared in the darkness above, someone in a space suit. Wearing a grav-chute because he drifted down slowly before me. I was stunned and ready for almost anything when he opened the dark faceplate of his space suit.

  Ready for almost anything other than the fact that he was not a he.

  ‘Get rid of that silly chain,’ Angelina said. ‘You always manage to get into trouble as soon as I leave you alone. You’re coming away with me right now, and that is all there is to it.’

  There was very little to say even had I been unstunned enough to say it. So I did a fine moronic gaping act and rattled my chains a bit as, light as a falling leaf, she drifted down to the floor. In the end her undoubtedly physical presence jounced my open synapses closed, and I did my best to rise to the occasion.

  ‘Angelina, truly named. You descend from above to save me.’

  She opened the faceplate of her space suit wider so she could kiss me through the opening, then took an atomic lance from her belt and began to cut away my chains. ‘Now tell me what all this mysterious time-travel nonsense is about. And talk fast, we have only seven minutes; at least that is what Coypu said.’

  ‘What else did he tell you?’ I asked, wondering just how much she knew.

  ‘Now don’t you start being mysterious with me, Slippery Jim diGriz! I’ve had enough of that with Coypu.’

  I jumped back hastily as she waved the atomic lance under my chin, then beat out the fire that was smoldering on the front of my garments. An angry Angelina can be quite dangerous.

  ‘My love,’ I said emotionally, attempting to embrace her while keeping an eye on the lance at the same time. ‘I conceal nothing from you, nothing! I know better. It is just that my brain is tied in knots from all this time traveling, and I want to know where your knowledge leaves off before I continue with the complete story.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that I talked to you last on the phone. Big rush, you said, top priority, get over fast you shouted – then rang off. So I did, to Coypu’s lab, where everyone was running about and playing with the machinery and too busy to tell me anything. Back in time, they shouted, nothing else. And that horrid Inskipp no better. He said you vanished, just vanished out of his office while he was reading the riot act to you. Apparently he found out about that little bit of money you are putting aside for a rainy decade or two. There was a lot of babble about you saving the world or the galaxy or something, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. And all of this went on for a very long time, until they could send me back here.’

  ‘Well, I did,’ I said modestly. ‘Saved you, saved the Corps, saved the whole thing.’

  ‘I was right, you have been drinking.’

  ‘Not in entirely too long a time,’ I muttered petulantly. ‘If you want to know the truth, you all vanished, poof, just like that. Coypu was the last one to go, so he can tell you about it. The Corps, everyone, they were never born, never existed, except in my memory ….’

  ‘My memory is slightly different.’

  ‘It would be. Since through my efforts He’s evil plan was foiled ….’

  ‘His not he’s. All that drinking has affected your speech.’

  ‘He is his name – and I haven’t had a drop in hours. Can you possibly listen without interrupting? This story is complicated enough in any case ….’

  ‘Complicated and possibly alcoholically inspired.’

  I groaned. Then kissed her, longer and warmer this time, a distraction we both enjoyed. This softened her a bit, so I rushed on before she remembered that she was supposed to be angry at me.

  ‘A time attack was launched against the Special Corps, so Professor Coypu whisked me back in time to foil the nefarious scheme. I did all right in 1975, but He got away, went back to whenever he came from, then set up an elaborate trap here in 1807 to trap me. Which he did. But his plans didn’t work completely because I managed to change the setting on the time-helix so he was sent to a different time from that he had planned. This must have defeated his time-war plans because you appeared to rescue me.’

  ‘Oh, darling, how wonderful of you. I knew you could save the world if you really tried.’

  Mercurial of mood is the word for my Angelina. She kissed me with what can only be described as true passion, and I, clanking my lengths of chain, got my arms around her in happy response when she squawked and straight-armed me, so I reeled back, choking.

  ‘The time!’ She looked at her watch and gasped. ‘You made me forget. There is less than a minute left. Where is the time-helix?’

  ‘Here!’ Hugging my still-painful midriff, I showed her the machine.

  ‘And the controls?’

  ‘These.’

  ‘How ugly. Where is the readout?’

  ‘These dials.’

  ‘This is the setting we must use, down to the thirteenth decimal position Coypu said, most insistent about that.’

  I played the keys like a mad pianist and sweated. The dials spun and hesitated, then gyrated wildly.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Angelina said sweetly, to encourage me. I sweated harder.

  ‘There!’ I gasped as she announced ten seconds. I kicked in the timer and threw the master switch. The time-helix glowed greenly at us as we rushed to its protruding end.

  ‘Stay close and hug me as hard as you can,’ I said. ‘The time field has a surface effect, so we must be close.’ She responded with pleasure.

  ‘I only wish I weren’t wearing this silly space suit,’ she whispered, nibbling my ear. ‘It would be so much more fun.’

  ‘It might be, but it mig
ht also be a little embarrassing when we arrived back at the Special Corps in that condition.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, we’re not going back yet.’

  There was a sudden stab of anxiety just below my sternum.

  ‘What do you mean? Where are we going?’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know. All Coypu said was that the hop would be about 20,000 years into the future, just before this planet is to be destroyed.’

  ‘He and his mad mob again,’ I wailed. ‘You’ve just sent us off to tackle an entire planetary insane asylum – where they’re all against us!’

  Everything froze as the time-helix actuated and I was whipped into time with that pained expression on my face. That expression lasted 20,000 years, which was exactly how I felt.

  SEVENTEEN

  Blam! It was like falling into a steam bath – and falling was the right word for it. Hot clouds of vapor rushed past us, and the invisible surface could be ten meters or ten miles below us.

  ‘Switch on your grav-chute,’ I shouted. ‘Mine’s back in the nonexistent nineteenth century.’

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have shouted because Angelina turned the thing on at full lift and slithered up out of my fond embrace like an oiled eel. I clutched madly and managed to grab one of her feet with both hands – whereupon the boot part of the one-piece space suit promptly came off her foot.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she called down to me.

  ‘I agree with you completely,’ I answered incoherently through tight-clamped and grating teeth.

  The suit stretched and stretched until the leg was twice its normal length and I bobbed up and on down as though I were on the end of a rubber band. I took a quick look, but there was still only fog visible below. Space suit fabric is tough, but it was never designed to take a strain like this. Something had to be done.

  ‘Cut your lift!’ I called out, and Angelina responded instantly.

  We were in free fall, and as soon as the tension was relieved, the leg fabric contracted and snapped me back up to Angelina’s waiting arms.

  ‘Yum,’ I said.

  She looked down and shrieked and hit the grav-chute power again. This time I wasn’t ready and I slipped right down and out of her embrace and was falling toward the solid-looking landscape that had suddenly appeared below.

  In the small fraction of a second left to me I did what little I could. Twisting in the air, spreading my arms and legs wide, trying to land square on my back. I had almost succeeded when I hit.

  Everything went black, and I was sure I was dead, and darkness overwhelmed my brain as well, and my last thought flashed before me. Not only did I not regret anything I had ever done, but there were a few things I wished I had done more often.

  I could not have been unconscious more than a few instants. There was foul-tasting mud in my mouth, and I spluttered it out and rubbed even more of it from my eyes and looked around me. I was floating in a half-liquid sea of mud and water from which large bubbles rose and broke with slow plops. They stank. Sickly-looking reeds and water plants grew on all sides.

  ‘Alive!’ I shouted. ‘I am alive.’ I had struck flat out on the syrupy surface, dividing the blow over the entire back surface of my body. There were some aches and bruises, but nothing seemed to be broken.

  ‘It looks very nasty down there,’ Angelina said, hovering a few feet above my head.

  ‘It’s just as nasty as it looks so, if you don’t mind, I would like to get out of it. Can you sort of drop down so I can grab your ankles, which will permit you to drag me out with a wet sucking sound?’

  It was a large wet sucking sound as the decaying quagmire fought to hold onto me, parting only reluctantly with a slobbering sigh. I hung from my love’s ankles as we drifted over an apparently endless swamp which vanished in the fog in all directions.

  ‘There, over to the right,’ I called out. ‘Looks like a channel with running water. I think a wash and brush-up are in order.’

  ‘Since I am upwind of you, I couldn’t agree more.’

  The current was moving slowly, but still moving as I could tell by a tree trunk that drifted by. In the middle of the sluggish stream was a golden sandbar that seemed made for us. I dropped as Angelina came low, and even before she had settled down herself, I was out of the noisome clothes and scrubbing the muck off in the water. When I bobbed up, spluttering, I saw that she had peeled off the sweltering space suit and was combing out her long hair, which happened to be blond at the present moment. Very lovely and I was thinking the most romantic thoughts when fierce fire pierced my gluteus maximus, and I shot straight up out of the water, yiping like a dog whose tail has been caught in the door. As attractive and feminine as she was, Angelina was still Angelina, and the comb vanished to be replaced by a gun, and almost before I touched the sand, she had fired a single well-aimed shot.

  While she was applying a bandage to the double row of tooth marks in my derriere, I looked at the fish, half blown apart but still twitching, that had mistaken me for lunch. Its gaping mouth had more teeth than a dental supply house, and there was a definitely evil look in its rapidly clouding eye. Grabbing it by the tail to evade its still-gnashing jaws, I threw it far out into the water. This started a tremendous flurry of action under the surface, and from the size of some of the things that leaped out and smacked back down I saw that I had been attacked by one of the smaller ones.

  ‘Twenty thousand years has done no good at all to this planet,’ I said.

  ‘Finish rinsing off that mud, and I’ll stand guard. Then we’ll have some lunch.’ Ever the practical woman.

  While I scrubbed, she shot up the piscatorial predators who came after me, including one large fish with fat flanks and rudimentary legs that waddled out of the water in an attempt to have me for lunch. We had it instead; the flanks concealed some fine thick filets that roasted well over a low-set heat projector. Angelina had had the foresight to bring a flask of my favorite wine, which made the meal a memorable one. After which I sighed, eructated, and wiped my lips with satisfaction.

  ‘You have saved my life more than once in the last twenty thousand years,’ I said. ‘So I no longer am brimful of anger for being whisked to this steam bath world rather than back to the Corps. But can you at least tell me what happened and what Coypu told you?’

  ‘He tends to mumble a good deal, but I got the gist of it. He has been working on his time tracker or whatever he calls it and followed your jumps through time, as well as someone he referred to as the enemy, the one you call He. The enemy did something with time, created a probability loop that lasted about five years, then terminated. Then He left this collapsing loop – and you didn’t. That’s why Coypu sent me back, to the minutes just before it ended, to bring you out. He gave me the setting for the time-helix that would enable us to follow He to this time. I asked him what we were supposed to do here but he kept muttering, “Paradox, paradox”, and wouldn’t tell me. Do you have any idea of what is supposed to happen?’

  ‘Simple enough. Find He and kill him. That should put paid to the entire operation. I’ve had two tries at him, shooting once and thermite bombs the second, and haven’t succeeded. Maybe this will be lucky three.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to let me take care of him,’ Angelina said sweetly.

  ‘A fine idea. We’ll blast him together. I have had just about enough of this temporal paper chase.’

  ‘How do we find him?’

  ‘Simplicity itself, if you have a time energy detector with you.’ She did, Coypu’s foresight, and passed it over. ‘A simple flick of this switch and the moving needle points to our man.’

  The switch flicked but did nothing more than release a little condensed water that ran out into my palm.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be working,’ Angelina said, smiling sweetly.

  ‘Either that or they are not using the time-helix at this particular moment.’ I rummaged in my equipment. ‘I had to leave my space suit and some other things back in 1807, but
Slippery Jim is never without his snooper.’

  I was proud of the gadget and had designed it myself, and it was one of the few things He hadn’t taken from me. Rugged, it could resist almost anything except being dropped into molten metal. Compact, no bigger than my hand. And it could detect the weakest of flickerings of radiation across a tremendous range of frequencies. I turned it on and ran my finger over the familiar controls.

  ‘Most interesting,’ I said, and tried the radio frequencies.

  ‘If you don’t enlighten me quick, I’ll never save your life again,’

  ‘You have to because you love me with an undying passion. I get two sources, one weak and very distant. The other can’t be too far and is putting out on a number of frequencies, including atomic radiation and energy transmission, as well as a lot of radio. And something of more pressing urgency. Get out the sunburn cream – solar ultraviolet radiation is right up at the top of the scale. You can bet I’ve been well cooked already.’

  We creamed and, despite the heat, put on enough clothing to shield us from the invisible radiation that was pouring out of the clouded sky.

  ‘Strange things have happened to the Earth,’ I said. ‘The radiation, this soggy climate, the wildlife in this river. I wonder—’

  ‘I don’t. After completing the mission, you can do your paleogeologic research. Let’s kill He first.’

  ‘Spoken like a pro. I hope you don’t mind if I rig a harness so we can share the benefit of the grav-chute equally this time?’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ she said, loosening the straps.

  The airborne Siamese twin arrangement lifted and took us low over the sea of gunk in the direction of all the activity. Mud and swamp continued for a boringly long time, and I was beginning to chafe in the straps and worry about the power supply when the higher land finally appeared. First some rocks sticking up out of the water, then sheer cliffs. It took more juice to lift us up the side of these, and the indicator on the power pack dropped quickly.