The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

Chapter 22

There was very little satisfaction to be gained from blowing up the recording machine that had He's hateful voice coiled in its guts, but I did it anyway, one shot. The thing exploded in a cloud of plastic bits and electronic components, and the insane laughter was cut off in mid-cackle. Angelina patted my hand.

"You did your best," she said.

"But just not good enough. I'm sorry I got you involved in this."

"I wouldn't want it any other way. What happens to us happens together."

"This sounds like something very terrible will be done to your people," Diyan said. "I am very sorry."

"Nothing to feel sorry about. We're all in the same boat."

"In one sense, yes. One hour from now. But Mars is saved, and we who die here know that we accomplished at least that much. Our families and our people will live on."

"I wish I could say the same," I said with utmost gloom, borrowing his gun and picking off two of the enemy who tried to rush in through the broken door. "When we lost here, we lost for all time. I'm surprised we are still around at all, should have snuffed out like candles."

"Isn't there anything we can do?" Angelina asked. I shrugged.

"Nothing I can think of. You can't outrun H-bombs. The time-helix equipment is kind of melted, so that is out. What we need is a new time-helix, which we are not going to get unless one appears out of thin air."

In echo to my words there was the sudden crack of displaced air above, and I rolled and ducked, thinking it was a new attack. It wasn't. It was a large green metal case that hung, unsupported in midair. Angelina looked at me in the strangest manner possible.

"If that is a time-helix, you must tell me how you did it."

For once in my outspoken life I was silent, even more so when the box began to drift down before us, and just before it grounded, I read the lettering on the side.

"Time-helix—open with care."

I didn't move. It all seemed too unbelievable. The two grav-chutes strapped to the top of the case, the timing device that had caused them to lower the whole thing to the floor, the small recording apparatus also fixed to the case with the boldly lettered words "Play me" lettered across it. I boggled and gaped and it was ever practical Angelina who stepped forward and pressed the starting button. Professor Coypu's rotund voice rolled out to us.

"I suggest you get moving rather quickly. The bombs, you know, go off quite soon. I have been asked to tell you Jim, that the bomb control apparatus is concealed in a cabinet on the far wall behind the dehydrated rations. It has been disguised to look like a portable radio because it really is a portable radio. With additions. If mishandled, it will set all the bombs off now. Which would be uncomfortable. You are to set the three dials to the numbers six six six, which, I believe, is the number of the beast. Set them in sequence from right to left. When they have been set, press the off button. Now turn me off until you have done that. Be quick about it."

"All right, all right," I said, irritated, and switched him off. He had quite a commanding tone for an individual who wouldn't be born for another 10,000 years or so. And how come he knew so much? I complained, but I went and did the job, hurling the dehydrated rations to the floor, where they obviously belonged. They looked like lengths of yellowish-green desiccated octopus tentacles. Suckers and all. The radio was there. I did not attempt to move it but set the dials as instructed and pressed the button. Nothing happened.

"Nothing happened," I said.

"Which is just the way we want it," Angelina said, standing on tiptoe to give me an appreciative kiss on the cheek. "You have saved the world."

Feeling very proud of myself, I swaggered back to the recorder before the admiring gazes of the Martians and switched it on again.

"Don't think you have saved the world," Coypu said. Party-pooper. "You have just averted its destruction for approximately twenty-eight days. Once activated, the bombs wait that period, then self-destruct. But your Martian associates can profit from this delay. I believe they have supply ships on the way?"

"Due in fifteen days," Diyan said, hushed awe in his voice at the disembodied oracular powers before him.

"Fifteen days, more than enough time. The Earth will be destroyed, but when its present condition is considered, this is more of a blessing than a tragedy. It is time to open this case now. On top of the controls is a molecular disrupter. If this is pointed at the outside wall, where the small windows are high up, and angled downward at fifteen degrees, it will cut a tunnel that will exit outside the walls. I suggest this be done as soon as possible. The Martians can get out that way. Now press button A, and the time-helix will form. James, Angelina, strap on the grav-chutes and leave as soon as the ready light comes on."

Still partially unbelieving I did as instructed. The time-helix crackled into existence and groaned and sparked as it wound itself up. Diyan stepped forward, his hand out to take mine.

"We will never forget you or what you have done for our world. Generations yet unborn will read your name and about your exploits in their schoolbooks."

"Are you sure you have the spelling right?" I asked.

"You make light of this because you are a great and humble man." First time I have ever been accused of that." A statue will be erected with 'James diGriz, World Saver' inscribed upon it."

Each Martian shook my hand in turn; it was very embarrassing. There was an admiring gleam in Angelina's eye as well, but women are simple creatures and enjoy basking even in reflected attention. Then the ready light came on, and after a few more good-byes, we put on the grav-chutes as directed and—for the last time I sincerely hoped—were bathed in the cool fire of the time force. Our contact must have triggered the apparatus because before I could make the very apropos remark that was on my lips everything went zoing.

No worse than any other time trip, certainly no better. This was one kind of transportation I would never get adjusted to. Stars like speeding bullets, spiral galaxies whirling around like fireworks, movement that was no movement, time that was no time, all the usual things. The only thing that was good about the trip was its ending, which was in the gymnasium of the Special Corps base, the largest open chamber there. We floated in midair, my Angelina and I, smiling madly at each other and oblivious to the cries of amazement from the sweating athletes below. We held hands in the simple happiness of knowledge that the future still lay ahead of us.

"Welcome home," she said, and that was really all there was to say.

We floated down, waving to our friends and ignoring their questions for the moment. Coypu and the time lab first, to report. There was a quick feeling of unhappiness that He had escaped me and the hope that this time, when he was tracked through time, a few very large bombs could be sent in the place of me or any other volunteer.

Coypu looked up and gaped. "What are you doing here?" he said. "You are supposed to be eliminating this He person. Didn't you get my message?"

"Message?" I asked, blinking rapidly.

"Yes. We made ten thousand metal cubes and sent them back to Earth. Sure you would get one of them. Radio direction and such."

"Oh, that old message. Received and acted upon, but you are a little out of date. What is that doing here?" I'm afraid my voice rose a bit on this last as I pointed with vibrating finger at the compact machine across the room.

"That? Our Mark One compact folding time-helix? What else should it be doing? We have just finished it."

"You've never used it?"

"Never."

"Well, you are now. You have to strap a couple of grav-chutes to it—here, use these—and a recorder and a molecular disrupter and shoot it right back to save Angelina and me."

"I have a pocket recorder, but why…" He took a familiar looking machine from his lab coat.

"Do it first, explanations later. Angelina and I are about to be blown up if you don't do this right."

I grabbed some paint and wrote "Play me" on the recorder, then "Time-helix open with care" on the machine. The exact moment when He had left Earth was determined by the time tracer and the arrival for this cargo set for a few minutes later on the big helix. Coypu dictated the tape under my instruction, and it wasn't until the whole bundle was whisked back into the past that I heaved a grateful sigh of relief.

"We are saved," I said. "Now for that drink you promised me."

"I didn't promise…"

"I'll have it anyway."

Coypu was muttering to himself and scratching on a pad while I prepared some hefty drinks for Angelina and myself. We clunked glasses and were baptizing our throats when he came over, smiling genially.

"I needed that," I said. "It must be ages since I last had a drink."

"It is all coming clear at last," Coypu said, tapping his protruding teeth with contained excitement.

"Is it all right if we sit while we listen? It's been a busy couple of hundred thousand years."

"Yes, by all means. Let me retrace the course of events. A time attack was launched upon the Corps by He, a most successful one. Our numbers were quite reduced…."

"Yes, like down to two. You and me."

"Quite right. Though as soon as I had dispatched you to the year 1975, I found that all things were as they had been. Most sudden. All alone one instant, the next the laboratory full of people who never knew they had been gone. We put a lot of work in on improving the time-tracking techniques, took almost four years to get it the way we wanted."

"Did you say four years?"

"Nearer five before we got it operational. The trails were distant and hard to follow, most tangled as well."

"Angelina!" I cried with sudden realization. "You never told me you had been here alone for five years."

"I didn't think you liked older women."

"I love them as long as they are you. You were lonely?"

"Hideously. Which is why I volunteered to go after you. Inskipp had another volunteer, but he broke his leg."

"My darling—I'll bet I know how that happened!" She is not the blushing type, but she did lower her eyes at the thought.

"We are getting ahead in sequence," Coypu said. "But that is what happened. We traced you from 1975 to 1807—and traced He and his minions as well. There was a loop in time there, an anomaly of some kind that eventually sealed itself off. We could tell that it was about to collapse with you sealed inside of it and succeeded at last in forcing enough power into the helix to penetrate the sealed time loop just before it went down. That is when Angelina went back with the coordinates for your next skip in time, the long twenty-thousand-year jump after He. You had to go after him because the time paths were there to prove that you had followed him. Though of course history was clear by that point, and we knew how it would all end."

"You knew?" I asked, feeling I had missed the point somewhere.

"Of course. The entire nature of the attack was clear, though you all of course had to fulfill your destined roles."

"Could you spell it out again? And slower."

"Of course. You managed to destroy He's operation twice in the remote past and eventually reset his machine and sent him forward to the twilight days of Earth. Here he spent an immense amount of time, almost two hundred years, climbing his way to power and uniting all of the planet's resources. He was a genius, albeit a mad one, and could do this. He also remembered you, Jim, fading memories and half-insane ones after two hundred years, but he remembered enough to know you were the enemy. Therefore he launched a time war to destroy you before you could destroy him, trapping you as he thought on a planet about to be destroyed by atomic explosion. From there he returned to 1975 to attack the Corps. You came after him and he fled to 1807 to lay the time loop trap for you. I don't know where he planned to go from there, but his plans appear to have been altered, and he went instead twenty thousand years ahead."

"I did that, altered the setting on his machine just before he left."

"That is all there is to it. We can relax now that it is over, and I do believe I'll join you in that drink."

"Relax!" The words emerged from my throat with a singularly nasty, grating sound. "From what you have said it sounds like I started the whole attack on the Special Corps by altering the setting on the time-helix that sent He to the world where he launched his campaign to destroy the Corps."

"That's one way of looking at it."

"Is there any other? The way I see it He just bounces in a circle in time forever. Running from me, chasing me, running from me… Arrrgh! When was he born? Where does he come from?"

"Those terms are meaningless in this sort of temporal relationship. He exists only within this time loop. If you wish to say it, though it is most imprecise, it would be fair to state that he was never born. The situation exists apart from time as we normally know it. Such as the fact that you returned here with the information to be sent to yourself about the settings on the atomic bombs. Where did this information come from originally? From yourself. So you sent it to yourself in order to send it to yourself to inform yourself about the settings on the bombs in order…"

"Enough!" I groaned, reaching for the bottle with trembling hand. "Just mark the mission as being accomplished and put me in for a fat bonus."

I refilled all the glasses and only when I came to Angelina's did I realize she was no longer present. She had slipped away without a word while I was suffering over having instigated the whole time war, and I was just beginning to miss her and wonder where she had gone when she returned.

"They are fine," she said.

"Who, who?" I said in my best owl imitation. But when I saw the narrowing of Angelina's eyes, I knew I had made a big mistake and I racked my time-trodden brain until understanding burst upon me. "Who indeed! Ho-ho-ho! You must excuse the small joke. Who is fine, you say. Why, our twin, cherubic, gurgling babies are fine. With true maternal instinct you have rushed to their side."

"They are here with me."

"Well, wheel the pram in!"

"The babies," she said as they entered, with what I detected as a strong note of irony.

They were going on six years of age, a little fact that I had neglected to remember. They moved easily, solid chaps with the disconcerting knack of walking in step with each other. Well muscled, their father's firm heritage, I am happy to say, with a tempering of their mother's looks.

"You've been away a long time. Dad," one of them said.

"Not by choice, James. The universe isn't saved in a day."

"I'm James, he's Bolivar. Welcome back."

"Well, thanks." Did I kiss them or what? They settled this by sticking out their hands, and I shook them each quite seriously. Good grips. This family thing was going to take some getting used to. Angelina beamed proudly, and I melted under that look and realized that it was all probably worth it.

"Angelina, I think you have finally convinced me. The joys of married life seem to be worth the price of giving up the happy and carefree occupation of free-lance thief…"

"Thief is the correct word," a nauseously familiar voice cried out. "And crook, con man, blackmailer, briber, and more." Inskipp stood in the doorway waving his florid face and a sheaf of papers in my direction. "Five years I have been waiting for you, diGriz, and this time you are not getting away. No excuses like time wars now. You crook, you steal from your own buddies, urggh!"

He said Urggh! because Angelina had popped a sleep capsule under his nose, and he folded over while the boys—good reflexes there—stepped forward and eased him gently to the floor. Angelina relieved him of the sheaf of papers while he went by.

"After five years I need you more than this nasty old man does. Let's burn this file and steal a ship before he comes to. It will be months before he can find us, and by that time something else will have happened that will need straightening out badly, and he will have to put us back to work again. Meanwhile, we can have a lovely crooked second honeymoon."

"Sounds great—but what about the boys? This is not the sort of trip one takes children on."

"You're not leaving without us," Bolivar said. Where had I seen that unshakable scowl before? In the mirror I guess. "Where you go, we go. If it's a matter of money, we can pay our own way. See."

I saw indeed as he extended a great bundle of credits that could pay his way right across the galaxy. But I also had a quick glimpse of a familiar golden wallet.

"Inskipp's money! You robbed that poor old man while you should have been helping him." I flicked a quick look at James. "And I suppose you will be able to tell time during the trip with his wristwatch that I see suddenly on your arm?"

"In their father's footsteps," Angelina said proudly. "Of course they come with us. And don't concern yourself with expenses, boys. Daddy can steal enough for all of us."

It was too much. "Why not!" I laughed. "Here's to crime!" I raised my glass.

"Here's to time," Coypu said, getting in the spirit of the thing.

"Here's to time crime!" we cried together and drained our glasses and broke them against the wall, and Coypu smiled avuncularly after us as we grabbed the children's hands and leaped lightly over Inskipp's snoring body and were out the door and away.

There's a bright and glorious universe out there, and we are going to enjoy every single bit of it.