The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World (2 page)

2

“FIRST WE MUST find out where you are going. And when.”

Professor Coypu staggered across the laboratory, and I followed, in almost as bad shape. He was mumbling over the accordion sheets of the computer print-out that were chuntering and pouring out of the machine and piling up on the floor.

“Must be accurate, very accurate,” he said. “We have been running a time probe backward. Following the traces of these disturbances. We have found the particular planet. Now we must zero in on the time. If you arrive too late, they may have already finished their job. Too early and you might die of old age before the fiends are even born.”

“Sounds charming. What is the planet?”

“Strange name. Or rather names. It is called Dirt or Earth or something like that. Supposed to be the legendary home of all mankind.”

“Another one? I never heard of it.”

“No reason you should. Blown up in an atomic war ages ago. Here it is. You have to be pushed backward thirty-two thousand five hundred and ninety-eight years. We can’t guarantee anything better than a plus or minus three months at that distance.”

“I don’t think I’ll notice. What year will that be?”

“Well before our present calendar began. It is, I believe, A.D. 1975 by the primitive records of the aborigines of the time.”

“Not so aboriginal if they’re fiddling with time travel.”

“Probably not them at all. Chances are the people you are looking for are just operating in that period.”

“How do I find them?”

“With this.” One of the assistants handed me a small black box with dials and buttons on it, as well as a transparent bulge that contained a free-floating needle. The needle quivered like a hunting dog and continued to point in the same direction no matter how I turned the box.

“A detector of temporal energy generators,” Coypu said. “A less sensitive and portable version of our larger machines. Right now it is pointing at our time-helix. When you return to this planet Dirt, you will use it to seek out the people you want. This other dial is for field strength and will give you an approximation of the distance to the energy source.”

I looked at the box and felt the first bubbling and seething of an idea. “If I can carry this, I can take other equipment with me, right?”

“Correct. Small items that can be secured close to your body. The time field generates a surface charge that is not unlike static electricity.”

“Then I’ll take whatever weapons or armament you have here in the lab.”

“There is not very much, just the smaller items.”

“Then I’ll make my own. Are there any weapons technicians working here?”

He looked around and thought. “Old Jarl there was in the weapons sections. But there is no time to fabricate anything.”

“That’s not what I had in mind. Get him.”

Old Jarl had taken his rejuvenation treatments recently so he looked like a world-soiled nineteen-year-old with an ancient and suspicious look in his eye as he came closer.

“I want that box,” I said, pointing to the memory unit on his back. He whinnied like a prodded pony and skittered away clutching at the thing.

“Mine, I tell you mine! You can’t have it. Not fair to even ask. Without it I’ll just fade away.” Tears of senile self-pity rose to his youthful eyes.

“Control yourself, Jarl! I don’t want to fade you out; I just want a duplicate of the box. Get cracking on it.”

He shambled away, mumbling to himself, and the technicians closed in.

“I don’t understand,” Coypu said.

“Simple. If I am gunning after a large organization, I may need some heavy weapon. If I do, I’ll plug old Jarl into my brain and use his memories to build them.”

“But—he will be
you
, take over your body, it has never been done.”

“It’s being done now. Desperate times demand desperate measures. Which brings us to another important point. You said this would be a one-way trip through time and that I couldn’t return.”

“Yes. The time-helix hurls you into the past. There will be no helix there to return you.”

“But if one could be built there, I could return?”

“Theoretically. But it has never been tried. Much of the equipment and materials would not be available among the primitive natives.”

“But if the materials were available, a time-helix
could
be built. Now who do you know that could build it?”

“Only myself. The helix is of my own construction and design.”

“Great. I’ll want your memory box, too. Be sure you boys paint your names on the outside so I don’t hook up with the wrong specialist.”

The technicians grabbed for the professor.

“The time-fixator is losing power!” one of the engineers shouted in a voice filled with rising hysteria. “When the field goes down, we die. We will never have existed. It can’t be. . . .” He screamed this, then fell over as one of his mates gave him a faceful of knockout gas.

“Hurry!” Coypu shouted. “Take diGriz to the time-helix, prepare him!”

They grabbed me and rushed me into the next room, shouting instructions at one another. They almost dropped me when two of the technicians vanished at the same moment. Most of the voices had hysterical overtones as well they might with the world coming to an end. Some of the more distant walls were already becoming misty and vague. Only training and experience kept me from panicking too. I finally had to push them away from the emergency space suit they were trying to jam me into in order to close the fastenings myself. Professor Coypu was the only other cool one in the whole crowd.

“Seat the helmet, but leave the faceplate open until the last minute. That’s fine. Here are the memories, I suggest the leg pocket would be the safest place. The grav-chute on your back. I assume you know how to operate it. These weapon canisters across your chest. The temporal detector here. . . .”

There was more like this until I could hardly stand. I didn’t complain. If I didn’t take it, I wouldn’t have it. Hang on more.

“A language unit!” I shouted. “How can I speak to the natives if I don’t know their language?”

“We don’t have one here,” Coypu said, tucking a rack of gas containers under my arm. “But here is a memorygram—”

“They give me headaches.”

“—that you can use to learn the local tongue. In this pocket.”

“What do I do, you haven’t explained that yet? How do I arrive?”

“Very high. In the stratosphere, that is. Less chance of colliding with anything material. We’ll get you there. After that—you’re on your own.”

“The front lab is gone!” someone shouted, and popped out of existence at almost the same instant.

“To the time-helix!” Coypu called out hoarsely, and they dragged me through the door.

Slower and slower as the scientists and technicians vanished from sight like pricked balloons. Until there were only four of them left and, heavily burdened, I staggered along at a decrepit waddle.

“The time-helix,” Coypu said, breathlessly. “It is a bar, a column of pure force that has been warped into a helix and put under tension.”

It was green and glittered and almost filled the room, a coiled form of sparkling light as thick as my arm. It reminded me of something.

“It’s like a big spring that you have wound up.”

“Yes, perhaps. We prefer to call it a time-helix. It has been wound up . . . put under tension, the force carefully calculated. You will be placed at the outer end and the restraining latch released. As you are flung into the past, the helix will hurl itself into the future where the energies will gradually dissipate. You must go.”

There were just three of us left.

“Remember me,” the short dark technician called out. “Remember Charli Nate! As long as you remember me, I’ll never. . . .”

Coypu and I were alone, the walls going, the air darkening.

“The end! Touch it!” he called out. Was his voice weaker?

I stumbled, half fell toward the glowing end of the helix, my fingers outstretched. There was no sensation, but when I touched it, I was instantly surrounded by the same green glow, could barely see through it. The professor was at a console, working the controls, reaching for a rather large switch.

Pulling it down. . . .

3

EVERYTHING STOPPED.

Professor Coypu stood frozen at the controls with his hand locked on the closed switch. I had been looking in his direction, or I would not have seen this because my eyes were fixed rigidly ahead. My body as well—and my brain gave a flutter of panic and tried to bounce around in its bony pan as I realized that I had stopped breathing. For all I knew, my heart wasn’t beating either. Something had gone wrong, I was sure of that, since the time-helix was still tightly coiled. More soundless panic as Coypu grew transparent and the walls behind him took on a definitely hazy quality. It was all going, fading before my eyes. Would I be next? There was no way to know.

A primitive part of my mind, the apeman’s heir, jibbered and wailed and rushed about in little circles. Yet at the same time I felt a cold detachment and interest; it isn’t everyone who is privileged to watch the dissolving of his world while hanging from a helical force field that may possibly whip him back into the remote past. It was a privilege I would be happy to pass on to any volunteers. None presented themselves, so I hung there, popeyed and stiff as a statue while the laboratory faded away around me and I was floating in interstellar space. Apparently even the asteroid on which the Special Corps base had been built no longer had any reality in this new universe.

Something moved. I was tugged in a way that is impossible to describe and moved in a direction I never knew existed before. The time-helix was beginning to uncoil. Or perhaps it had been uncoiling all the while and the alteration in time had concealed my awareness of it. Certainly some of the stars appeared to be moving, faster and faster until they made little blurred lines. It was not a reassuring sight, and I tried to close my eyes, but the paralysis still clutched me. A star whipped by, close enough so that I could see its disk, and burned an afterimage across my retina. Everything speeded up as my time speed accelerated, and eventually space became a gray blur as even stellar events became too fast for me to see. This blur had a hypnotic effect, or my brain was affected by the time motion, because my thoughts became thoroughly muddled as I sank into a quasi-state somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness that lasted a very long time. Or a short time, I’m not really sure. It could have been an instant, or it could have been eternity. Perhaps there was some corner of my brain that remained aware of the terrible slow passage of all those years, but if so, I do not care to think about it. Survival has always been rather important to me, and as a stainless steel rat in among the concrete passages of society I look only to myself for aid. There are far more ways to fail than to succeed, to go mad than to stay sane, and I needed all my mental energies to find the right course. So I existed and stayed relatively sane during the insane temporal voyage and waited for something to happen. After an immeasurable period of time something did.

I arrived. The ending was even more dramatic than the beginning of the journey as everything happened all at once.

I could move again. I could see again—the light blinded me at first—and I was aware of all the bodily sensations that had been suspended so long.

More than that, I was falling. My long-paralyzed stomach gave a twist at this, and the adrenalin and like substances that my brain had been longing to pour into my blood for the past 32,598 years—give or take three months—pumped in and my heart began to thud in a healthily excited manner. As I fell, I turned, and the sun was out of my eyes, and I looked out at a black sky and down at fluffy white clouds far below. Was this it? Dirt, the mysterious homeland of mankind? There was no telling, but it was still a distinct pleasure to be somewhere and somewhen without things dissolving around me. All my equipment seemed to still be with me, and when I touched the control on my wrist, I could feel the tug of the gravchute taking hold. Great. I turned it off and dropped free again until I felt the first traces of thin atmosphere pulling at the suit. By the time I came to the clouds I was falling gently as a leaf, plunging feetfirst into their wet embrace. I slowed the rate of fall even more as I dropped blind, rubbing at the condensation on the faceplate of the space suit. Then I was out of the clouds, and I turned the control to
hover
and took a slow look around at this new world, perhaps the home of the human race, surely my home forever.

Above me the clouds hung like a soft wet ceiling. There were trees and countryside about 3,000 meters below with the details blurred by my wet faceplate. I had to try the atmosphere here sooner or later, and hoping my remote ancestors were not methane breathers, I cracked the faceplate and took a quick sniff.

Not bad. Cold and a little thin at this height, but sweet and fresh. And it didn’t kill me. I opened the faceplate wide, breathed deeply, and looked down at the world below. Pleasant enough from this altitude. Rolling green hills covered with trees of some kind, blue lakes, roads cutting sharply through the valleys, some sort of city on the horizon boiling out clouds of pollution. I’d stay as far away from that as possible for the time being. I had to establish myself first, see about. . . .

The sound had been pushing at my awareness, a thin humming like an insect. But there shouldn’t be insects at this altitude. I would have thought of this sooner if my attention hadn’t been on the landscape below. Just about the time I realized this the humming grew to a roar and I twisted to look over my shoulder. Gaping. At the globular flying craft supported by an archaic rotating airfoil of some kind, behind the transparent sides of which there sat a man gaping back at me. I slammed the wrist controller to
lift
and shot back up into the protecting cloud.

Not a very good beginning. The pilot had had a very good look at me, although there was always the chance that he might disbelieve what he saw. He didn’t. The communicators in this age must be most sophisticated, the military’s preparedness or paranoia equally so, because within a few minutes I heard the rumble of powerful jets below. They circled a bit, roaring and bellowing, and one even shot up through the clouds. I had a quick glimpse of an arrowlike silver form; then it was gone, the clouds roiling and seething in its wake. It was time to leave. The lateral control on a grav-chute isn’t too precise, but I wobbled off through the clouds to put as much room between myself and those machines as I could. When I had not heard them for some time, I risked a drop down just below the cloud level. Nothing. In any direction. I snapped my faceplate shut and cut all the power.

The drop in free fall could not have taken very long, though it seemed a lot longer. I had unhealthy visions of detectors clattering, computers digesting the information and pointing mechanical fingers, mighty machines of war whistling and roaring toward me. I rotated as I fell, squinting my eyes for the first sight of shining metal.

Nothing at all happened. Some large white birds flapped slowly along, veering off with sharp squawks as I plunged by. There was the blue mirror of a lake below, and I gave a nudge of power that moved me toward it. If the pursuit did show up, I could drop under the surface and out of detection range. When I was below the level of the surrounding hills with the water rushing up uncomfortably close below, I slammed on the power. I shuddered and groaned and felt the straps cutting deep into my flesh. The grav-chute on my back grew uncomfortably warm, though I began to sweat for a different reason. It was still a long fall, to water hard as steel from this height.

When I finally did stop moving, my feet were in the water. Not a bad landing at all. There was still no sign of pursuit as I lifted a bit above the surface and drifted toward the gray cliff that fell directly into the lake on the far side. The air smelled good when I opened the faceplate again, and everything was silent. No voices, no sounds of machines. Nor signs of human habitation. When I came closer to the shore, I heard the wind in the leaves, but that was all. Great. I needed a place to hole up until I got my bearings, and this would do just fine. The gray cliff turned out to be a wall of solid rock, inaccessible and high. I drifted along its face until I found a ledge wide enough to sit on, so I sat. It felt good.

“Been a long time since I sat down,” I said aloud, pleased to hear my voice.
Yeah
, my evil subconscious snapped back,
about thirty-three thousand years
. I was depressed again and wished that I had a drink. But that was the one essential supply I had neglected to bring, a mistake I would have to rectify quickly. With the power cut the space suit began to warm up in the sun, and I stripped it off, placing all the items of equipment against the rock far from the edge.

What next? I felt something crunch in my side pocket and pulled out a handful of hideously expensive and broken cigars. A tragedy. By some miracle one of them was intact, so I snapped the end to ignite it and breathed deep. Wonderful! I smoked for a bit, my legs dangling over the drop below, and let my morale build up to its normal highly efficient level. A fish broke through the surface of the lake and splashed back; some small birds twittered in the trees, and I thought about the next step. I needed shelter, but the more I moved around to find it, the more chance I had of being discovered. Why couldn’t I stay right here?

Among the assorted junk I had been draped with at the last minute was a laboratory tool called a masser, I had started to complain at the time, but it was hung on my waist before I could say anything. I considered it now. The handgrip that contained the power source blossomed out into a bulbous body, which thinned again into a sharp, spikelike prod. A field was generated at the end that had the interesting ability of being able to concentrate most forms of matter by increasing the binding energy in the molecules. This would crunch them together into a smaller space, though they of course still had the same mass. Some things, depending upon the material and the power used, could be compressed up to one-half their original size.

At the other end the ledge narrowed until it vanished, and I walked along it as far as I safely could. Reaching out, I pressed the spike to the surface of the gray stone and thumped the button. There was a sharp crack as a compressed slab of stone the size of my hand fell from the face of the cliff and slid down to the ledge. It felt heavy, more like lead than rock. Flipping it out into the lake, I turned up the power and went to work.

Once I got the knack of the thing the job went fast. I found I could generate an almost spherical field that would detach a solid ball of compressed stone as big as my head. After I had struggled to roll a couple of these heavyweights over the edge—and almost rolled myself with them—I worked the rock away at an angle, then cut out above this slope. The spheres would crunch free, bang down onto the slope, and roll off the edge in a short arc, to splash noisily into the water below. Every once in a while I would stop and listen and look. I was still alone. The sun was close to the horizon before I had a neat little cave in the rock face that would just hold all my goods and myself. An animal’s den that I longed to crawl into. Which I did, after a quick floating trip down to the lake for some water. The concentrates were tasteless but filling, so my stomach knew that I had dined, though not well. As the first stars began to come out, I planned the next step in my conquest of Dirt, or Earth, whichever the name was.

My time voyage must have been more fatiguing than I had thought because the next thing I realized was that the sky was black and a great orange full moon was sitting on the mountains. My bottom was chilled from contact with the cold rock, and I was stiff from sleeping in a cramped sitting position.

“Come, mighty changer of history,” I said, and groaned as my muscles creaked and my joints cracked. “Get out and get to work.”

That was just what I had to do. Action would bring reaction. As long as I holed up in this den, any planning I might do would be valueless since I had no facts to operate with. As yet I didn’t even know if this was the right world, or the right time—-or anything else. I had to get out and get cracking. Though there was one thing I could do—that I should have done first thing upon arrival. Mumbling curses at my own stupidity, I dug through the assorted junk I had brought with me and came up with the black box of the time energy detector. I used a small light to illuminate it, and my heart thudded down on top of my stomach when I saw that the needle was floating limply. Tune was not being warped anywhere on this world.

“Ha-ha, you moron,” I called out loudly, cheered by the sound of the voice I liked the most. “This thing would work a lot better if you turned on the power.” An oversight. Taking a deep breath, I threw the switch.

Still nothing. The needle hung as limp as my deflated hopes. There was still a good chance that the time triflers were around and just happened to have their machine turned off at the present moment. I hoped.

To work. I secreted a few handy devices about my person and disengaged the grav-chute from the space suit. It still had about a half charge in its power pack, which should get me up and down the cliff a number of times. I slipped my arms through the straps, stepped off the ledge, and touched the controls so that my free fall changed to an arc that pointed in the direction of the nearest road I had seen on the way down. Floating low over the trees, I checked landmarks and direction constantly. The outsize and gleamingly bedialed watch I always wear on my left wrist does a lot more things than tell the time. A touch of the right button illuminated the needle of the radio compass that was zeroed in on my home base. I drifted silently on.

Moonlight reflected from the smooth surface that cut a swath through the forest, and I floated down through the trees to the ground. Enough light filtered through the boughs so that I didn’t need my flash as I made my way to the road, going the last few meters with extreme caution. It was empty in both directions, and the night was silent. I bent and examined the surface. It was made of a single slab of some hard white substance, not metal or plastic, that appeared to have tiny grains of sand in it. Most uninteresting. Staying close to the edge, I turned in the direction of the city I had glimpsed and started walking. It was slow, but it saved the power in the grav-chute.