The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection (6 page)

It was a quick trip. I swung down at the first stop for a light and he
gripped my hand. ‘Good luck, kid,’ he called out as the truck pulled away. I couldn’t wish him the same.

I dug out a buck coin as the truck rumbled away. And made a mental note of its registration number. As soon as it was out of sight I headed towards the lights of a phonebox. I felt like a rat as I punched the buttons for the police.

But, really, I had no choice.

Unlike the hapless Stinger, I had a careful escape plan worked out. Part of it was a literal misdirection for my late partner. He was not really stupid so it shouldn’t take him very long to figure out who had blown the whistle on him. If he talked and told the police that I had returned to the fine city of Pearly Gates – why that would be all for the better. I had no intention of
leaving Billville, not for quite a while.

The office had been rented through an agency and all transactions had been done by computer. I had visited it before my hopeless bank job, and at that time had left some supplies there. They would come in very handy right now. I would enter through the service door of the fully-automated building – after turning off the alarms by using a concealed switch
I had been prudent enough to install there. It had a timer built into it so I had ten lazy minutes to get to the office. I yawned as I picked the lock, sealed the door behind me, then trudged up three flights of stairs. Past the dull eyes of the deactivated cameras and through the invisible – and inoperative – infra-red beams. I picked the lock of the office door with two minutes to spare. I blanked
the windows, turned on the lights – then headed for the bar.

Cold beer has never tasted better. The first one never even touched the sides of my throat and sizzled when it hit my stomach. I sipped the second as I tore the tab on a dinpac of barbecued ribs of porcuswine. As soon as the steam whistled through the venthole I ripped open the lid of the stretched pack and pulled out a rib the length
of my arm. Yum!

Showered, depilated and wrapped around a third beer I began to feel much better. ‘On,’ I told the terminal, then punched into the comnet. My instructions were simple; all newspaper records on the planet for the last fifty years, all references to a criminal named The Bishop, check for redundancies around the same date and don’t give me any duplicates. Print.

Before I had picked
up my beer again the first sheets were sliding out of the fax. The top sheet was the most recent – and it was ten years old. A not too interesting item from a city on the other side of the planet, Decalogg. The police had picked up an elderly citizen in a low bar who claimed that he was The
Bishop. However it had turned out to be a case of senile dementia and the suspect had been ushered back
to the retirement home from which he had taken a walk. I picked up the next item.

I tired towards morning and took a nap in the filing cabinet which turned into a bed when ordered to do so. In the grey light of dawn, helped by a large black coffee, I finished placing the last sheet into the pattern that spread across the floor. Rosy sunlight washed across it. I turned off the lights and tapped
the stylo against my teeth while I studied the pattern.

Interesting. A criminal who brags about his crimes. Who leaves a little drawing of a bishop after scarpering with his loot. A simple design – easy enough to copy. Which I did. I held it out at arm’s length and admired it.

The first bishop had been found in the empty till of an automated liquor store sixty-eight years ago. If The Bishop had started his career of crime as a teenager, as I have done, that would put him in his eighties now. A comfortable age to be, since life expectancy has now been pushed up to a century and a half. But what had happened to him to explain the long silence? Over fifteen years had
passed since he had left his last calling card. I numbered off the possibilities on my fingers.

‘Number one, and a chance always to be considered, is that he has snuffed it. In which case I can do nothing so let us forget about that.

‘Two, he could have gone offplanet and be pursuing his life of crime among the stars. If so, forget it like number one. I need a lot more golden bucks, and experience,
before I try my hand on other worlds.

‘Three, he has gone into retirement to spend his ill-gotten gains – in which case more power to him. Or four, he has changed rackets and stopped leaving his spoor at every job.’

I sat back smugly and sipped the coffee. If it were three or four I had a chance of finding him. He had certainly had a busy career before the years of silence; I looked at the list
with appreciation. Plane theft, car theft, bank emptying. And more and more. All of the crimes involving moving bucks from someone else’s pockets to his pockets. Or real property that could be sold quickly, with forged identification, for more bucks. And he had never been caught, that was the best part of it. Here was the man who could be my mentor, my tutor, my university of crime – who would
one day issue a diploma of deviltry that would eventually admit me to the golden acres I so coveted.

But how could I find him if the united police forces of an entire world, over a period of decades, had never been able to lay a finger on him? An interesting question.

So interesting that I could see no easy answer. I decided to let my subconscious work on this problem for a bit, so I pushed
some synapses aside and let the whole thing slip down into my cerebellum. The street outside was beginning to fill up with shoppers and I thought that might be a good idea for me as well. All the rations I had here were either frozen or packaged, and after the sludgy prison food I felt that urge for things that crackled and crunched. I opened the makeup cabinet and began to prepare my public persona.

Adults don’t realise – or remember – how hard it is to be a teenager. They forget that this is the halfway house of maturity. The untroubled joys of childhood are behind one, the mature satisfactions of adulthood are still ahead. Aside from the rush of blood to the head, as well as other places, when thoughts of the opposite sex intrude, there are real difficulties. The hapless teenager is expected
to act like an adult – yet has none of the privileges of that exalted state. For my part I had escaped the tedious tyranny of teendom by skipping over it completely. When not lolling about in school or trading lies with my age group, I became an adult. Since I was far more intelligent than most of them – or at least I thought that I was – adults that is, I had only to assume the physical role.

First an application of crowsfooter around my eyes and on my forehead. As soon as this colourless liquid was applied wrinkles appeared and the calendar of my age rushed forward a number of years. A few wattles under my chin blended in well with the wrinkles, while the final touch was a nasty little moustache.
When I pulled on my shapeless, under-office-clerk jacket, my own mother would not have
recognised me if she had passed me in the street. In fact this had happened about a year ago and I had asked her the time and even then no spark of recognition had brought a glint to her bovine eyes. Taking an umbrella from the closet, since there was absolutely no possibility of rain, I stepped from the office and proceeded to the nearest shopping mall.

I must say, my subconscious was really
working fast this day, as I shortly found out. Even after all the beers I still had a thirst. That dry stay in the barn had left its mark. Therefore I turned smartly under the platinum arches of Macswineys and marched up to the serving robot that was built into the counter. The plastic head had a permanent grin painted on it and the voice was syrupy and sexy.

‘How can I be of service, sir or
madam?’ They could have spent a few bucks on a sex-recognition program I thought as I scanned the list of TUM-CHILLER YUMMY DRINKS on the wall.

‘Let me have a double-cherry oozer with lots of ice.’

‘On the way, sir or madam. That will be three bucks, if you please.’

I dropped the coins in the hopper and the serving hatch flipped open and my drink appeared. While I reached for it I had to listen
to a robotic sales pitch.

‘Macswineys is happy to serve you today. With the drink of your choice I am sure you would like a barbecued porcuswineburger with yummy top-secret sauce garnished with sugarfried spamyams …’

The voice faded away from my attention as my subconscious heaved up the answer to my little problem. A really simple and obvious answer that was transparent in its clarity, pristine
pure and simple …

‘Come on, buster. Order or split, you can’t stand there all day.’

The voice gravelled in my ear and I muttered some excuse and shuffled off to the nearest booth and dropped into it. I knew now what had to be done.

Simply stand the problem on its head. Instead of me looking for The Bishop I would have to make him look for me.

I drank my drink until my sinuses hurt, staring
unseeingly into space as the pieces of the plan clicked into place. There was absolutely no chance of my finding The Bishop on my own – it would be foolish to even waste my time trying. So what I had
to do was commit a crime so outrageous and munificent that it would be on all the news channels right around the planet. It had to be so exotic that not a person alive with the ability to read – or
with a single finger left to punch in a news channel – would be unaware of it. The entire world would know what had happened. And they would know as well that The Bishop had done it because I would leave his calling card on the spot.

The last traces of drink slurped up my straw and my eyes unfocused and I slowly returned to the garish reality of Macswineys. And before my eyes was a poster. I
had been staring at it, without seeing it, for some time. Now it registered. Laughing clowns and screaming children. All rapt with joy in slightly faulty 3-D. While above their heads the simple message was spelled out in glowing letters:

SAVE YOUR COUPONS!! GET THEM WITH EVERY
PURCHASE!!
FREE ADMISSION TO LOONA PARK!!

I had visited this site of plastic joys some years before – and had disliked
it even as a child. Horrifying rides that frightened only the simple. Rotating up-and-down rides only for the strong of stomach; round-and-round and throw up. Junk food, sweet candy, drunk clowns, all the heady joys to please the very easily pleasable. Thousands attended Loona Park every day and more thousands flooded in at weekends – bringing even more thousands of bucks with them.

Bucks galore!
All I had to do was clean them out – in such a very interesting way that it would make the top news story right around the planet.

But how would I do it? By going there, of course, and taking a good hard look at their security arrangements. It was about time that I had a day off.

For this little reconnaissance trip it would be far wiser for me to act my age – or less. With all the makeup removed I was a fresh-faced seventeen again. I should be able to improve upon that; after all I had taken an expensive correspondence course in theatrical makeup. Pads in my cheeks made me look more cherubic, particularly when touched up with a bit of rouge. I put on a pair
of sunglasses decorated with plastic flowers – that squirted water when I pressed the bulb in my pocket. A laugh a second! Styles in dress had changed which meant that plusfours for boys had gone out of fashion, thank goodness, but shorts were back. Or rather a reprehensible style called short-longs which had one leg cut above the knee, the other below. I had purchased a pair of these done in
repulsive purple corduroy tastefully decorated with shocking-pink patches. I could scarcely dare look at myself in the mirror. What looked back at me I hesitate to describe, except that it looked very little like an escaped bank robber. Around my neck I slung a cheap disposable camera that was anything but cheap, disposable – or only a camera.

At the station I found myself lost in a sea of lookalikes
as we boarded the Loona Special. Screaming and laughing hysterically and spraying each other with our plastic flowers helped to while away the time. Or stretched it to eternity in at least one case. When the doors finally opened I let the multichrome crowd thunder out, then strolled wearily after them. Now to work.

Go where the money was. My memories of my first visit were most dim – thank goodness!
– but I did remember that one paid for the various rides and diversions by inserting plastic tokens. My father had furnished a limited and begrudging number of these, which had been used up within minutes, and of course no more had been forthcoming. My first assignment then was to find the font of these tokens.

Easily enough done for this building was the target of every pre-pubescent visitor.
It was a pointed structure like an inverted icecream cone, bedecked with flags and mechanical clowns, topped with a golden calliope that played ear-destroying music. Surrounding it at ground level and fixed to its base was a ring of plastic clown torsos, rocking and laughing and grimacing. Repellent as they were they provided the vital function of
separating the customers from their money. Eager
juvenile hands pushed buck bills into the grasping palms of the plastic Punchinellos. The hand would close, the money vanish – and from the clown’s mouth a torrent of plastic tokens would be vomited into the waiting receptacle. Disgusting – but I was obviously the only one who thought so.