The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

Chapter 14

I was taken to a cell. A bare, windowless room whose only furnishing was an empty bucket. A ceiling hook had recently been installed here and my attendant gray man obligingly hooked me up to it.

"There is little chance of my starving to death," I told him. "Because I'll die of thirst first."

He gave no spoken answer but he did return with a soft plastic water bottle and a standard Cliaand field ration. Not the world's most inspiring food, but it would keep me alive.

As I chewed and sipped I clamped hard on that last thought. Keep me alive. They would do anything except kill me. They wanted me, actually needed me. They knew that the Special Corps was breathing hot on their trail and they would have to exert an all-out effort to stop them. Kraj had talked big and half convinced me; I looked at my wrists and shuddered. He had convinced me. But why had he tried so hard?

Because I was obviously more than a pawn in this game. I was the factor that could swing the outcome either way. Right now Cliaand was doing well in the invasion business—but they could be stopped. With what I knew the Special Corps could start work as counterinsurgents and prevent expansion to other planets. Cliaand might even be stopped here. If I were to change sides my specialized knowledge might not defeat the Corps, but it could surely slow it down long enough for the second phase of the invasion operation to go into effect.

Which means the gray men had made a mistake. They should have killed me as soon as they discovered who I was. If I could be tortured and convinced to change my mind I might be a weapon in their hands. Two maybes. That ignored the fact that as long as I was alive I was the most deadly and potent weapon against them.

They had made a mistake. I grabbed to that conclusion and worried it just as I worried the jaw-breaking ration. I did not consider that I was their prisoner in every way. Every way? Ha! Physically, yes. Mentally—a resounding no. They had almost had me there for a while with the nerve torture and the positive assurance that I would fall into their hands. At the thought of amputation my stomach gave a heave and I suddenly lost my appetite. I had put the sight of my severed hands out of my mind. For good reasons.

Now I would have to remember and think about it. But not in the way they wanted. It was a trick, it had to be a trick, and that was the supposition I must hold on to. While I chewed and glugged down the rest of my unappetizing meal I gave myself the hard sell. Listen diGriz, you know enough about reality to be able to tell when it has been tampered with. You are always tampering with it yourself for your own benefit and others' discommoding. So now someone has turned the same trick on you. The severed wrists pumping blood! Down, boy. Drain away some of the emotion. We'll get to the memories after a while. But let us first look at the realities.

Reality. Marvelous as medicine is it cannot repair amputation in a couple of hours or a couple of days.

Now where did that figure come from? At some unconscious level I felt that only a brief time had passed between the amputation and the recovery. We all have a clock ticking away down deep in the brain, it controls the circadian rhythms of sleeping and waking and it works all of the time. Right now it was trying to tell me that only a brief time had passed since I had been brought here by the gray men. But did I have any real evidence to back it up? I felt my face and my hair. I needed a shave, but not badly, and my hair felt about the right length. But I could have had a haircut and a shave, no evidence there.

My fingernails? I kept them trimmed short, and one trimmed fingernail looks like any other one. Wait, think. Memory. Something. Small. Yes—during the landing, plenty of tension, plenty of distractions. I had broken the little fingernail on my left hand. No, don't look yet, sit on the thing and remember. Broken nail… distraction… bit it off. A rather unappetizing bit of self-consumption that most of us indulge in at one time or another. The offending particle of nail torn free, right down to the quick, a minor ouch and a tiny drop of blood. Completely forgotten in the rush of subsequent events.

With careful motions I released my left hand from its prisoning buttock and held it before me. Little finger, short nail—and a tiny clot of blood.

Got you, Kraj, you old faker!

From the look of the thing I had been a prisoner for a day or two at the most, surely no longer than that. The red marks on my wrists were just that—red marks on my wrists. There were a hundred different ways this could have been done. And the amputation? Kraj had tampered with my reality, hypnosis perhaps, it didn't really matter.

Kraj and his crew were not as bright as they looked. They had undoubtedly used this mind-cracking torture many times before and had really impressed themselves with the success of the technique. Perhaps this was the way they converted recruits to their nasty ends on the planets they were to invade. Very possible. But Kraj's cutthroats were used to working on solid citizens, one dimensional peasants who mistook the painted flats and props of their existence as the only reality. Their world was the only real world, their town the really best town. Pull them out of the familiar environment and put pressure on their minds and their brains ran out of their ears, like jelly. Jelly men, prey for the gray men.

Not noble, upright, flexible, dishonest, chameleon-like Slippery Jim diGriz. Man of a thousand faces, familiar of a hundred cultures, linguistically competent in scores of tongues. And they wanted to louse up my reality? It made me laugh. I laughed.

I not only laughed but I scampered and danced. I ran in circles shouting Yippee! and Victory! and other cries of happiness. Because of my collar and cable I was forced to run in circles but I found that I could vary this by swinging in circles. The cable was too thin to climb, deliberately designed so I am sure, but I could coil a loop of it and hang from this. I made the loop as high above my head as I could reach, grabbed it, kicked off and swung freely. At the bottom of the swing I kicked hard and went higher. Great fun. Until my hand slipped and the loop unlooped.

Everything almost ended at that moment as all of my weight came on the metal collar about my neck. That's the way they kill people, you know, by hanging. Not by suffocating them. By giving that sudden jerk to the noose that breaks the spinal cord.

This thought was uppermost in my mind as I clutched and scrabbled at the cable and managed to grip it before the snap came. And it came on the front of my neck, not the side, or I might very well have heard that sharp crack that signals the end. It hurt and everything went around in circles for a minute and when I said Wow! it was in a whispered voice because I had not done my vocal cords any good either.

Eventually I sat up and drank some water and felt a little better—and wondered why no one had come to investigate all the recent nonsense. I was sure they had the room bugged to watch me, but perhaps they were not impressed by my acrobatics. Or maybe they were so busy with the invasion that they did not have time to keep that careful an eye on me. If this latter supposition were correct, then perhaps I might be able to capitalize on it.

The food wrappings and the water bottle wadded together to make excellent padding for my hands. Around this I wrapped a double loop of the cable, close against my neck. Then, clutching the cable tightly, I jumped as high as I could and let my weight crash down on the cable.

And on my arms. By the tenth time I had done this I was beginning to feel as though my arms would be torn off at the sockets before any vital part of my imprisoning mechanism gave way. The theory was certainly sound enough, A metal box, a cable, a handle, a hook, a number of components the failure of any one of which might grant me freedom. Though my components were failing much faster. I panted a bit, wiped my forehead with my forearm, and jumped up for try number thirteen.

Lucky thirteen! Something snapped with a sharp metallic crack and the box came down and bounced off my head.

I was out, how long I don't know, probably only a few moments, and came to shaking my head and trying to stand. Move was the pressing thought, get out of here before they came for me. But first I had to deactivate the torture box since it could be worked by remote radio control. I turned it over and saw that the metal loop by which it was suspended had fractured. There was a control section here with about 50 small red buttons arranged in a grid. I shivered at the thought of pressing any of them. Above the grid were two large buttons, one red, one black. The red was depressed. This seemed obvious enough. Logically I should push the black one and turn the box off, but memories of the pain kept intruding. Finally I stabbed down on the black button.

Nothing happened. That I could feel. With this security I lightly touched one of the small red buttons, then another and another. Nothing. The box was now so much dead metal. I hoped. I coiled up the extra cable until the box dangled handily. Then tried the door. Which proved to be unlocked. Inefficient warders or great faith in their torture machines. Putting my eye close to the edge of the door I opened it a crack.

And closed it even more swiftly. Coming down the corridor towards me were two of the gray men carrying a sinister looking object between them. I had not seen enough of it to capture any details, though what I had seen had given me a definitely crawling sensation. The next step in the diGriz pacification program? This seemed highly probable when the door handle started to turn.

There was a surprise in store for this pair and I wanted to keep it from them as long as I could. As the door opened I stepped behind it and waited while they struggled with the bulky torture machine. Only when I heard one of them gasp in alarm did I put my shoulder to the door and ram it into them with all my weight and strength. As soon as they crunched and howled I jumped around the door, the metal control box swinging at the end of its cable.

One of them was bent over, more interested in the weight of the machine on his foot than in anything else and I let my weapon bounce off the top of his skull. While it rebounded the second man tried for his gun and actually had it halfway out of its holster before my knee caught him low in the stomach and he folded on top of his associate. I plucked the gun from his limp fingers as he went down and now I was armed.

During most of my stay in the building I had been conscious and I thought I knew my way out. Back through the main entrance which was sure to be guarded. It was one flight down and in the opposite direction from Kraj's chambers. The gausspistol had a full charge of power and a filled magazine as well. There was no time to check what kind of ammunition it was loaded with, but it was surely something lethal which was fine by me. I was in a lethal mood. I wrapped the cable up close to the box so it wouldn't swing and get in my way, took a deep breath—and dived out the door.

The hallway was empty, a good beginning. I trotted to the stairs without seeing anyone, then went down them two at a time. The next floor would be the ground floor since they had only taken me up one story. This memory was opposed by the reality that there was a large stairwell beside me that did not end at the next floor. When this fact finally registered on my tardy synapses I skidded to a stop and looked carefully over the edge of the railing.

There were at least eight more stories below this one.

They had been running through my cerebral cortex with their little leaden boots. This certainly proved my theoretical stance that a good deal of what had happened to me was illusion or false memory. What had been real? Was this 'escape' real at the present moment? This was a chilling thought; everything that was happening could be a generated series of unreal events to prove to me that I could not escape. I could keep going down these stairs forever or wake up at any moment back in my room still attached to my pendent box. Well, if this were true, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had to treat this illusion like reality until it proved otherwise. Unless this was an endless dream building these stairs had to end somewhere, and I was going to find out.

Four floors down, just when I was beginning to get dizzy from the constant circling, I met another man coming up. A gray man with a rifle and a very surprised look. Since I had been expecting this encounter and he hadn't I got in the first shot.

Quite a shot. The gausspistol was loaded with explosive slugs. They blasted a gaping hole in the staircase and hurled the gray man against the wall where he slumped, crumpled and unconscious. The echoes were still booming and the dust unsettled when I leaped the gaping hole and buried myself down the stairs at a suicidal pace. It would be more certain suicide to wait around.

The stairs ended, I was at the bottom, and I slammed into the wall I was going so fast. There was much shouting from above me and the hammer of running feet. My gun at the ready I pushed open the door and walked into blackness.

It was a bit of a shock and I almost fired off a couple of rounds on general principle but, as my eyes adjusted, I saw a dim light in the distance. There were rough walls and dust and other indications that I had bypassed the ground floor and ended up in a cellar. Which was all right too since there was undoubtedly a warm reception waiting for me a flight above. If I could get out of the basement I was still one jump ahead of the competition. Gun ready, metal box swinging, shins bruised by unseen obstacles, I stumbled towards the far off light. I was not enthused when I reached it after running the invisible obstacle course. It was a window.

But a small window, high on the wall, coated with insect corpses and dirt. And heavily barred.

Behind me in the darkness there were shouts, running feet, crashing noises and healthy curses. What to do?

Obvious. Get out. I stepped back, raised the gun, shielded my face, and blew the window out. And part of the wall around it and some of the street outside until my gun clicked empty. I dropped it, slung my box over my shoulder and used my free hand to help me scrabble up the slope of rubble and out into the street.

To start running again. Someone saw me and shouted but I did not shout back. I ran harder even though I was getting winded and more than a little fatigued by the effort. It is one thing to escape, it is another thing altogether to stay free once out. Barefooted, dressed in totally transparent clothes with a collar and some meters of wire about my neck, not to mention the control box, I must have presented a rather unusual and unmistakable sight. I needed to hide, hole up, change, get rid of the collar, a lot of things. And I was getting very tired.

I went around a corner as fast as I could and slammed into someone coming in the opposite direction. We both went down and I rolled on my back like a bug, near exhaustion, gasping for air. Then I saw the face of the man I had run into and had a last little burst of hope.

"Otrov." I gasped. "0ld friend, old roommate, old copilot. I am in trouble and need your help. The locals, you see…"

I saw Otrov, a mild man at the worst of times, turn into a very angry animal. Twisted face, bulging eyes, the works. He dived on me and pinned me to the cold ground.

"Locals nothing," he shouted. "Kraj has been asking after you, Kraj wants you. What have you done?"