Harry Harrison: The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted

I am too young to die. Just eighteen years old - and now I'm as good as dead. My grip is weakening, my fingers slipping, and the elevator shaft below me is a kilometer deep. I can't hold on any longer. I'm going to fall…

Normally I am not prone to panic - but I was panicking now. Shaking from head to toe with fatigue, knowing that there was just no way out of this one.

I was in trouble, mortal trouble, and I had only myself to blame this time. All the good advice I had given myself down through the years, the even better counsel The Bishop had given me, all forgotten. All wiped away by sudden impulse.

Perhaps I deserved to die. Maybe a Stainless Steel Rat had been born - but a very rusty one was about to snuff it right now. The metal door frame was greasy and I had to hold on hard with my aching fingers. My toes barely gripped the narrow ledge - while my unsupported heels hung over the black drop below. Now my arches began to ache with the effort of standing on tiptoe - which was nothing compared to the fire in my throbbing forearms.

It had seemed such a logical, simple, good, intelligent plan at the time.

I now knew it to be irrational, complex, bad and moronic. "You are an idiot, Jimmy diGriz," I muttered through my tightly shut teeth, realizing only then that they were clamped into my lower lip and drawing blood. I unclamped and spat - and my right hand slipped. The great spasm of fear that swept over me rode down the fatigue and I grabbed a new hold with an explosion of desperate energy.

Which faded away as quickly as it had come, leaving me in the same situation. Tireder if anything. There was no getting out of this one. I was stuck here until I could no longer hold on, until my grip loosened and I fell. Might as well let go now and get it over with… "No, Jim, no surrender".

Through the thudding of blood in my ears my voice seemed to come from a great distance, to be deeper in register than my own, as though The Bishop himself were speaking. The thought was his, the words might very well be his. I held on, though I didn't really know why. And the distant whine was disturbing.

Whine? The elevator shaft was black as the grave and just as silent. Was the maglevlift moving again? With muscle-tight slowness I bent my head and looked down the shaft. Nothing.

Something. A tiny glimmer of light. The elevator was coming up the shaft.

But so what? There were two hundred and thirty-three floors in this government building. What were the odds that it would stop at the floor below me so I could step neatly back onto its top? Astronomical I was sure, and I was in no mood to work them out. Or perhaps it would come up to this floor and scrape me off like a bug as it went by? Another nice thought. I watched the light surge upward towards me, my eyes opening wider and wider to match the growing glow. The increasing whine of the centering wheels, the rush of air exploding at me, this was the end…

"The end of its upward motion. The car stopped just below me, so close that I could hear the door swoosh open and the voices of the two guards inside.

"I'll cover you. Keep your safety off when you search the hall."

"You'll cover me, thanks! I didn't hear myself volunteer."

"You didn't - I did. My two stripes to your one mean you take a look."

One-stripe muttered complaints as he moved out as slowly as he could. As his shadow occulted the light from the open door I stepped down onto the car with my left foot, as gingerly as I could. Hoping that any movement to the car caused by my climbing onto it would be masked by his exiting.

Not that it was easy to do. My thigh muscle spasmed with cramp and my fingers were locked into place. I stepped slowly back with my vibrating right foot until I was standing on top of the elevator. My cramped fingers still gripped the frame: I felt very much the fool. "Hall is empty," a distant voice called out. "Take a reading from the proximity recorder." There were muttered grumbles and clattering from outside as I wrenched my right hand free of the greasy metal, reached over with it to grapple with my still recalcitrant left hand.

"Got a reading for myself. Other than that the last movement in the corridor was at eighteen hundred. People going home."

"Then we do have a mystery," two-stripes said. "Come on back. We had a readout that showed this car going up to this floor. We called it back from this floor. Now you tell me that no one got out. A mystery."

"That's no mystery, that's just a malfunction. A glitch in the computer. The thing is giving itself instructions when no one else will."

"Much as I hate to agree - I agree. Let's go back and finish the card game."

One-stripe returned, the elevator door closed, I sat down as quietly as I could, and we all dropped back down the shaft together. The guards got out at the prison floor and I just sat there in creaking, silence as I kneaded the knots out of my muscles with trembling fingers. When they were roughly under control again I opened the hatch that I was sitting on, dropped down into the car and looked out slowly and carefully. The card players were out of sight in the guardroom, where they belonged. With infinite caution I retraced the route I had taken during my abortive escape. Slinking guiltily along the walls - if I had a tail it would have been between my legs - making a fumbled hash of opening the locked corridor doors with my lockpick. Finally reaching my own cell, unlocking and relocking it, slipping the lockpick back into my shoe sole - dropping onto my bed with a sigh that must have been heard around the world. I did not dare speak out loud in the sleeping silence of the cell block, but I did shout the words inside my head.

"Jim, you are the dumbest most moronic idiot who ever came down the pike. Don't, and I repeat, don't ever do anything like that again."

I won't, I promised in grim silence. That message had now been well drilled into my medulla oblongata. The truth was inescapable. I had done everything wrong in my eagerness to get out of prison. Now I would see if I could get it right.

I had been in too much of a rush. There should never have been any hurry. After he had arrested me, Captain Varod, strongman of the League Navy, had admitted that he knew all about the lockpick that I had hidden. He did not like prisons, he had told me that. Although he was a firm believer in law and order he did not believe I should be incarcerated on my home planet, Bit O'Heaven, for all of the troubles that I had caused there. Neither, for that matter, did I. Since he knew I had the lockpick I should have bided my time. Waited to make my escape during the transfer out of this place.

During the transfer. It had never been my intention of doing anything but serve my time here in this heavily guarded and technologically protected prison in the middle of the League building in the center of the League base on this planet called Steren-Gwandra - about which I knew absolutely nothing other than its name. I had been enjoying the rest, and the meals, a real pleasure after the rigors of war on Spiovente and the disgusting slop that passed for food there. I should have kept on enjoying, building my strength in preparation for my imminent freedom. So why had I tried to crack out of here?

Because of her, a woman, female creature briefly seen and instantly recognized. One glimpse and all reason had fled, emotion had ruled and I had attempted my disastrous escape. I grimaced at the memory, recalling all too clearly how this idiot adventure had begun.

It had been during our afternoon exercise period, that wildly exciting occasion when the prisoners were let out of their cells and permitted to shufile around the ferroconcrete yard under the gentle light of the double suns. I shuffled with the rest and tried to ignore my companions. Low foreheads, joined eyebrows, pendulous and droolflecked lips; a very unsatisfactory peer group of petty criminals that I was ashamed to be a part of. Then something had stirred them, some unaccustomed novelty that had excited their feeble intellects and had caused them to rush toward the chainlink fence emitting hoarse cries and vulgar exhortations. Numbed by the monotony of prison life even I had felt a twinge of curiosity and desire to see what had caused this explosion of unfamiliar emotion. It should have been obvious. Women. That, and strong drink and its aftereffects, were the only topics that ever stirred the sluggish synapses of their teeny minds.