Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You

“This is impossible,” he finally said.

“That’s what I like about you, Inskipp, ever the optimist.” I plucked the message from his soggy fingers and read it myself, then checked the coordinates on the chart behind his desk. He was right. Almost.

The spacewarp leech had done its job well. I had fired the thing off in time and it had homed on the satellite gobbler and attached itself to whatever the thing was. They had zipped off together into warpspace where the leech simply held on until emerging into normal space again. Even if there had been multiple jumps the leech was programmed to stay close until it either detected atmosphere or the mass of a planet or a space station. At which point it had come unglued and drifted away; it was wholly nonmetallic and virtually undetectable. Once it had arrived it used chemical rockets to leave the vicinity of its arrival while it checked for a League beacon. As soon as it found the nearest one it had warped there and announced its arrival. Needless to say it had taken photographs in all directions when it arrived at its original target area. At that point the computers chortled over the star sights and determined the point in space from which they had been taken. Only this time the answer they came up with was impossible.

“Or very improbable,” I said, tapping the chart. “But if the location is correct I have the nasty feeling we are in for some trouble.”

“You don’t think it was just a coincidence that it was the admirals who got kidnapped?”

“Ha-ha.”

“Yes, I thought you would say that.”

To understand our problem you have to ponder the physical nature of our galaxy for a moment. Yes, I know it’s boring stuff, and best left for the astrophysicists and other dull sods who enjoy this sort of thing. But explanation is necessary. It if helps, think of the galaxy as being shaped like a starfish. It isn’t really, but that’s good enough for this kind of simplistic stuff. The legs and center of the starfish are groups of stars, with some other stars in between the legs, along with space gas and random molecules and such. Hope I haven’t lost you because I know I’m confusing myself. Anyway, all of the League stars are situated in one arm right up at the top there, sticking straight up. A few other surveyed suns are near the hub and a scattered few more in the arms to the left and right. Got that? Okay. Now it seems that our toothy satellitenapper had come from the way down in the lower left leg.

Well why not, you might say, it’s all part of the same galaxy. Well, aha, I say right back. But it is a part of the galaxy we have never been to, have never contacted, have never explored. There are no inhabited planets way down there.

Inhabited by human beings, that is. In all the thousands of years that mankind has been hurtling around the galaxy we have never found another intelligent life form. We have found traces of long-vanished civilizations, but millions of years separate us from them. During the days of colonial expansion, the Stellar Empire, the Feudal Follies and such bits of nonsense, ships went off in all directions. Then came the Breakdown and the bustup of communications for many thousands of years. We are coming out of that now. Contacting planets in all states of civilization—or lack of it. But we’re not expanding. Maybe we will again, someday, but meanwhile the League is busy picking up the pieces from the first expansion.

Except now there is a new ball game.

“What are you going to do?” Inskipp asked.

“ Me? I’m going to do nothing except watch you issue orders to investigate this interesting situation.”

“Right. This is order one. You, diGriz, get out there and investigate.”

“I’m overworked. You have the resources of a thousand planets to draw upon, entire navies, albeit minus the admirals usually in charge, agents galore. Use some of them for a change.”

“No. I have the strong feeling that feeding a normal patrol ship into this situation will be like asking them to take a stroll through the guts of an atomic pile.”

“A confused description—but I get the message.”

“I hope so. You are the crookedest agent I know. You have a sense of survival that, so far, has made you unkillable. I am banking on that and the hideously twisted convolutions of your warped mind to get you through. So get out there and see what the hell is happening, and get back with a report.”

“Do I have to bring the admirals back?”

“Only if you want to. We have plenty more where they came from.”

“You are heartless and cruel, Inskipp, and as big a crook as I am.”

“Of course. How else do you think I run this outfit? When do you leave and what do you need?”

I had to think about that. I couldn’t go without telling my Angelina, and once she learned how dangerous it would be she would insist on coming. Fine. I’m a male chauvinist pig at heart, but I know true talent when I see it and I would rather have her with me than all of the rest of the Special Corps. But what about the boys? The answer to that was obvious as well. With their natural bent and inherited characteristics they were fit only for lives of crime or careers in the Corps. They would have to be blooded sometime and this looked very much like the time. So it was settled. I unglazed my eyes and realized that I had been muttering to myself for some minutes and that Inskipp was looking at me in a very suspicious manner and reaching slowly for the scramble button on his desk. I groped through my memory for the question he had asked me before I had sunk into my coma.

“Ahh, yes, hm, of course. I leave soonest, I have my own crew, but I want a fully automated grinder class cruiser with all armaments, etc.”

“Done. It will take twenty hours to get one here. You have that long to pack and write a new will.”

“How charming of you. I will need but one psi call.”

I set it up with the communication centre who were on to the operator on Blodgett like a flash and a line hooked through seconds later to Angelina. “Hello, my sweet,” I said. “Guess where we are going for our holiday?”

“It’s a fine ship, Dad,” Bolivar said, running his eyes appreciatively over the varied controls of the L. C. Gnasher.

“I hope so. Those grinder class cruisers are supposed to be the best in space.”

“Central fire controls and all, wow,” James said, thumbing a button before I could stop him.

“You didn’t have to blast that hunk of space rock, it wasn’t doing you any harm,” I complained, switching the gun controls to my pilot’s position before he could cause any more trouble.

“Boys will be boys,” Angelina said, looking on with motherly pride.

“Well, they can be boys with their own pocket money. Do you know how many thousands of credits it costs every time those energy cannon are fired?”

“No, nor do I care.” She raised one delicate eyebrow. “And since when have you cared, Slippery Jim, plunderer of the public pocket?”

I muttered something and turned back to the instrument displays. Did I really care? Or was it just fatherly reflex? No—it was authority! “I’m in charge here,” I grated in my best spacedog voice. “I’m captain and the crew can but obey.”

“Shall we all walk the plank, dear?” Angelina asked in her most unreasonable tones. I changed the subject.

“Look. If you will all kindly sit over there I will order up a bottle of champagne and a chocolate cake and we will relax a bit before this mission begins and I start cracking the whip.”

“You’ve already told us the whole deal, Dad,” James said. “And could you make that a strawberry shortcake?”

“I know you all know all about what has happened and where we are going, but just what we will do when we get there is yet to be determined.”