The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell

Chapter 8

I dropped the gun and the bag of ammunition, the colimicon, and ran—with Sybil right behind me. Bolivar led the way, stumbled to a halt towards the rear of the cave. He looked around, shuffled his feet. "No, more to the left," he mumbled. "Back, back. Good."

"Fast!" he shouted, raising his arms. "Take my hands!"

We weren't arguing. He seized our hands and, with a powerful muscular contraction, pulled us tight against his chest. I opened my mouth to speak——

It was a completely indescribable sensation. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before, had no relation to heat or pain, cold, emotions, electrocution.

Then it ended; bright light flared and there was a thunderous sound.

"Get down!" someone shouted and Bolivar dragged us after him to the floor of the room. Rapid explosions sounded, gunfire. I had a quick glimpse of a man firing a hand weapon, clumsily, for when the gun recoiled he dropped it. From his left hand; his right arm was bandaged. He turned then and ran, followed by other running footsteps.

"James!" Bolivar cried out.

"Fine, fine," a muffled voice answered. He came out from behind the ruins of the burning machine. His face was smeared black and he was brushing glowing embers from his shirt. "Very close. Good thing he wasn't shooting at me. He did a good job on the electronics though."

"Thanks, boys, for getting us back," I said, then coughed raspingly. "My throat hurts like Hell."

There was a hiss of white fumes and the fires were blotted Out by the automatic quenchers. An alarm was ringing in the distance.

"Explain later," James said. "Let's get out before anyone else shows up."

I didn't argue. Still numb from the events of the past day. Day? We ran out of the church, it was night, the van was parked at the curb just where we had seen it last—how long ago?

"Into the back," James ordered. He started the engine as the rest of us struggled in through the open rear doors. Barely had time to close them before he kicked in the power. We sprawled and rolled and heard the sound of sirens getting louder—then dying away as the van broadsided around a corner. He slowed after that, drove at what must have been something like normal speed. Turned a few more times and stopped. James spun his driver's seat around to face us and smiled.

"Drinks, anyone?"

Through the windshield a large rotating sign was visible. RODNEY'S ROBOT DRINKING DEN with CHEAPEST AND MOST ALCOHOLIC DRINKS IN TOWN in smaller lettering below. A robotic face appeared at the window. "Welcome to this drunkards' paradise. Orders, please," it grated.

"Four large beers," I told it, then coughed uncontrollably.

"Tell us what happened," Sybil said when I had gasped into silence.

"Sure," Bolivar said. "But first—are you guys all right?" Looking at us intently, relaxing only when we had nodded our heads. "Good, great. You gave us a scare, Dad, when the alarm went off"

"I didn't think that I had time to actuate it."

"You didn't. We only knew something was wrong your heart stopped. We hit hard then."

"It never stopped!" I said defensively, grabbing at the pulse in my wrist. A nice solid thud—thud.

"That's good to hear. But we didn't know that at the time. We must have broken in just seconds after you went to Hell. Marablis wearing some kooky outfit, was still working the controls. Bolivar got him with the stunner as he was turning around."

"I dropped him—but you were both gone. That explained the stopped heartbeat. You had been moved, transported, sent—to Hell as we found out. James took care of that. Advanced hypnotism, he's very good."

"Been a bit of a hobby for some years. Marablis was an easy subject. Stress and shock. I eased him under and took control. He told us that he had sent you both to Hell. Bolivar said that he would go after you. I had Marablis work the machine and you know the rest. It was a long five minutes but it worked out fine in the end."

I should have been immune to surprises by this time. I wasn't. "Five minutes! We were in Hell for hours—most of a day at least."

"Different time scales?" Bolivar said. "And I'll tell you something else just as outrageous. When I was in Hell I was here at the same time, I mean I could see what Bolivar was seeing, hear him speaking."

"And vice versa—"

"Beer," a tinny voice said and Sybil and I leaped forward.

"Four more," Bolivar said as we drained our glasses. He handed us the two remaining full ones.

The cold liquid helped. Gasping with pleasure, my brain got back into gear and I remembered something else. "James! The shooting when we arrived—what happened?"

"Just that. As you were coming back through, this guy burst in waving a gun. I dived for cover while he shot up the machinery. Then he and Marablis ran for it."

"I had a quick look at him," I said. "It couldn't have been, but.."

James nodded solemnly. "I could see him very clearly. It was Professor Slakey—with a bandage on the stump of his right wrist."

"Then who, who—?" I said, doing a stunned owl imitation.

"Who was at the controls, you mean? Who sent you to Hell and brought you back? That was also Professor Slakey. Working the controls with his good right hand."

"I have more news," I said. "There is a bright—red, long tailed and behorned Slakey in Hell."

The silence got longer and longer as we considered the implications, or lack of them, in this information, until Sybil spoke. "James whistle for the waiter if you please. Order up a bottle of something a bit stronger for the next round."

Nobody argued with that. Everything had happened so fast—and so incomprehensibly—that I had trouble puffing my thoughts together. Then memory struck hard.

"Angelina? Where is she?"

"Not in Hell," James said. "That was the first question I asked Marablis when I put him under. He admitted that much under stress. Fought bard not to answer where she was, almost surfaced from the trance. I put him deep under to bring you two back from Hell. When you were back safe I was going to press him really hard for an answer. But—you know what happened. Sorry..

"No sorry!" I shouted happily. "Angelina is not dead—but has been sent somewhere. Maybe Heaven. We'll find out. Meanwhile, you got us back. Sorry is not the word to use. We'll have to try and work out what happened, what all these puzzles and paradoxes mean. But not right now. There are two things that we must urgently do now. We have to get help. And we've been compromised enough. Slakey knew about Sybil and me when he knocked us out. Now he knows the whole family is after him. He might try and fight back so we have to stay away from the hotel room. Andwe must contact the Special Corps at once."

"All I need is a phone," Sybil said. "I have a local contact number that will be spliced through directly to Inskipp." "Perfect. We outline what has happened. Tell him to order a tight guard around that church. No one is to go either in or out. Then tell him to get Professor Coypu here soonest. Anyone who can build a working time machine as well as many other scientific miracles certainly ought to be able to figure out just what is going on with these Hell and Heaven machines. We'll stay out of sight until the professor has arrived—along with the Space Marines. Never forget—we have been to Hell and we came back. We're going to find Angelina and get her back with us the same way."

I suppose that I should have enjoyed the days of forced relaxation at the Vaska Hulja Holiday Heaven, but I had too much to worry about. Always lurking behind all the pleasures of swimming and sunbathing, drinking and eating, was the knowledge that Angelina was still missing. There was some reassurance in the fact that her kidnappers had admitted that she was alive, though not where she was. Small consolation; she was still gone and that could not be denied. A dark memory that would not go away. I knew that the twins shared these feelings, because behind all the horseplay and vying for Sybil's attention was that same memory. I would catch a bleakness of expression when one of them did not know he was being watched.

Nor was it all fun and games. We went to work. The first thing that we had done after checking into this hotel, with false identities, was to list everything we knew, had seen, had experienced. None of it seemed to make sense—yet we knew that it must. We forwarded all of this material to the Special Corps where, hopefully, wiser heads than ours might make sense of it.

They did. Or it did, a wiser head I mean. Our little trip to Hell seemed to have had a scrambling effect on my brain so at times my thoughts would dribble away. I also kept looking in mirrors to see if I was turning red. After awhile I stopped doing this but I still felt the base of my spine when I was showering to see if I was growing a tail. Disconcerting. This feckless state of affairs ended next morning when I came down early for breakfast and saw a familiar figure at our table.

"Professor Coypu—at last!" I called out in glad greeting. He smiled briefly with his buckteeth popping out between his lips like yellowed gravestones.

"Ahh, Jim, yes. You're looking fit, skin tanned but not red. Any signs of a tail?"

"Thank you, no, I have been keeping track. And you?"

"Fine, fine. On my way here I examined the remains of the destroyed machines at the church and have analyzed all your notes, examined the clothing you wore in Hell, thank you. It all seems fairly straightforward."

"Straightforward~ I see nothing but confusion and obfuscation where you..

"See the forest as well as the trees. I can inform you in full confidence that inventing the temporal helix for my time machine was much more difficult." His teeth snapped off a piece of toast and he chewed it with quick rodent—like enthusiasm.

"You wouldn't care to chop some of that metaphorical wood for me—would you?"

"Yes, of course." He patted his lips with his napkin, giving his protruding teeth a surreptitious polish at the same time. "As soon as I discovered that Jiving Justin was involved in this matter, the shape of future things to come became clear."

"Jiving Justin7' I burbled with complete lack of comprehension.

"Yes," he cackled, flashing his teeth at me. "That's what we used to call him at university."

"Who, who?" I was in owl overdrive again.

"Justin Slakey. He used to play the slide trombone in our little jazz quartet. I must admit to being fairly groovy myself on the banjo as well." "Professor! The point of it all, please—would you kindly return to it?"

"Of course. Even when I first met him, Slakey was a genius. Old beyond his years—which considering the state of geriatrics might have been far older than he appeared. He took the theory of galactic strings, which as you undoubtedly know has been around as theory for a long time. No one had ever come close to tackling it until Slakey invented the mathematics to prove their existence. Even the theoretical wormtubes between galaxies were clear to him. He published some papers on these, but never put everything together into a coherent whole. At least, until now, I thought he hadn't completed his theory. It is obvious that he has."

He washed some more nibbled toast down with a quick swig of coffee. I resisted more owl imitations.

"Stop at once!" I suggested. "Start over since I haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about."

"No reason that you should. The reality of the worm holes between one universe and another can only be described by negative number mathematics. A nonmathematical model would be only a crude approximation—"

"Then crudely approximate for me."

He chewed away, forehead furrowed in thought, unconsciously brushing away a strand of lank hair that floated down in front of his eyes~ "Crudely put.

"Yes?"

Very crudely put, our universe is like a badly cooked fried egg. In a pan of equally badly cooked and stringy eggs." Breakfast had obviously inspired this imagery; I had eaten the eggs here before. "The frying pan represents space—time. But it must be an invisible frying pan since it has no dimensions and cannot be measured. Are you with me so far?"

"Yoke and all."

"Good. Entropy will always be the big enemy. Everything is running down, cooling down towards the heat death of the universe. If entropy could be reversed the problem would be easy to solve. But it cannot. But—" This was a big but since he raised an exclamatory finger and tapped his teeth. "But although entropy cannot be reversed, the rate of entropic decay can be measured and displayed, only by mathematics of course, and can be proven to proceed at a different rate in different universes. You see the importance of this?"

"No."

"Think! If the rate of entropy in our universe were faster than the rate of entropy in universe X, let us say. Then to a theoretical observer in that universe our universe would appear to be decaying at a great rate. Right?"

"Right."

"Then, it also becomes obvious that if an. observer in our universe were to observe universe X, the entropy rate there would appear to be going in the opposite direction, what might be called reverse entropy. Though it does not exist it would be observed to exist. Therefore the equation is closed."

He sat back and smiled happily at his conclusions. I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about. I told him that and he frowned.

"I do wish, diGriz, that you had taken a little more mathematics instead of playing hooky from school. To put it even more simply, a phenomenon that is observed to exist does exist and can be mathematically described. And what can be described can be affected. What can be affected can be altered. That is the beauty of it. No power source is needed to manipulate the wormholes between the universes, although energy is of course needed to establish the interface. The wormholes themselves are powered by the differences in their entropy rate. Justin Slakey has discovered that and I will be the first man to take my hat off to him."

He lifted an invisible hat from his head, then patted it back into place. I blinked quickly and cudgeled my brain hard, trying to understand just what he was talking about. With great difficulty some sort of order began to emerge from his flights of physical fancy.

"Tell me if I have this right. Different universes exist, right?"

"Yes and no..

"Let's settle for the yes—just for a moment. Different universes exist, and if they exist they could be connected by wormholes in space. Then the difference of entropy between these universes might be used to travel through the wormholes from one galaxy to another—and Slakey has invented a machine to do just that. Okay?"

He raised the finger, frowned, shook his head in a very negative no. Thought a bit more, then shrugged. "Okay," he said in a most resigned manner. I hurried on before he changed his mind.

"Hell is a planet in a different universe, with different laws of physics, maybe a different chemistry, where time passes at a different rate. If that is so then Heaven is a different universe connected to ours by wormholes in space and time. There could be more..

"The number of theoretical universes is infinite."

"But with Slakey's machine they can obviously be contacted, over and—over again. And what he can do—you can do?"

"Yes and no."

I resisted the temptation to rip out a handful of my hair. "What do you mean yes and no?"

"I mean yes it is theoretically possible. And no, I cannot do it. Not without the mathematical description of the entropy relationships that was recorded in the machine. The one he destroyed."

"There will be other machines."

"Get me one and I'll build you an intergalactic wormhole subway."

"I will do just that," I promised. Not rashly but because I had to do just that to get to Angelina. Which led to the next obvious question. "Who has these machines?"

"Slakey."

"Which Slakey?"

"There is only one Slakey."

"I can't believe that.—I saw three at least. One bright red with a tail. Another with no right hand—and a third with a good right hand."

"You saw the same man—only at different times. Just as if you were to take a time machine to visit a baby being born, then went on in time to see the same baby grown—then saw him again as an old man. The mathematics is quite clear. In some manner he has managed to duplicate himself at various times during his existence. He, they, him, are all the same individual, just observed at the same time though he is from various different times. Since they are all the same person they have to share the same thoughts. That's how—Slakey no—hand knew that Slakey right—hand was in trouble and came to the rescue. You saw this same phenomenon with your own Sons, the twins. Since they are biological twins and divided from the same original egg, they were at one time exactly the same person, or egg. So when they were in different universes they shared the same thoughts. It is all very obvious."

"What's obvious?" Sybil asked as she came into the breakfast room.

"What is obvious," I said, "is that we now know how to get to Heaven and Hell—or wherever else we want to go. The good professor appears to know all about these various universes."

She nodded. "If you know that Professor—do you know how Jim found his porkuswine in Hell?"

"I do. I read your notes concerning that visit and I agree completely with your first conclusions. Hell is obviously a malleable and unformed universe. It must have been geologically active when Slakey first found it. He mistook it for Hell—so it became Hell. You both found his Hell, but also formed a little bit of your remembered worlds there as well."

"Then a question, please?" Sybil asked. "If we did that—why didn't the other people we found there do the same thing?"

"Also obvious," the professor pontificated, always happy with an expectant audience. "They were normal people—not supernormal Special Corps agents. The force of your personalities and your mental strength enabled you to force your memories upon the fabric of that universe, to bend it to your will. Where normal people might run in fear you turn and growl savagely and rend your enemies." —

"You make us sound like feral terriers, wild dogs!" I growled savagely,

"You are. Any more questions?"

"Yes. What—happens next?" Sybil said.

"I can answer that," I answered. "With Professor Coypu's help we will build a machine to travel to these distant universes. And we will get Angelina back."

"That is wonderful news. But let us not do any of that until after breakfast," she added with womanly practicality. "I'm sure that we will need all our strength to do all of that."