The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted

Chapter 1

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.

Three newly arrived female prisoners were passing by on the other side of the fence. Two of them, cut from the same cloth as my companions, responded with equally hoarse cries and interesting gestures of the fingers and hand. The third prisoner walked quietly, if grimly, ignoring her surroundings. Her walk was familiar. But how could it be? I had never even heard of this planet before I had been forcefully brought here. This was a mystery in need of a solution. I hurried along the fence to its end, cleared a space for myself by applying my knuckles to a hair-covered neck in such a manner that the neck's owner slipped into unconsciousness, took his space and looked out.

At a very familiar face passing by not a meter distant. Without a doubt a face and a name that I knew very well.

Bibs, the crewgirl from Captain Garth's spacer.

She was a link to Garth and I had to talk to her, to find out where he was. By kidnapping us and dumping us on the loathsome planet of Spiovente, Captain Garth had been responsible for The Bishop's death. Which meant that I would like to be responsible for his in return.

So, without further thought, and possessed only of a suicidal and impractical enthusiasm, I had foolishly escaped. Only the luck that watches over the completely witless had saved my life and permitted my return, undetected, to my prison cell. I blushed now with shame as I thought about the stupidity of my plan. Lack of thought, lack of foresight - and the incredibly dumb assumption that all security in the giant building would be identical. During our daily exodus and return to the cell block I had noted the exceedingly simple locks on all of the doors, the absence of any alarms. I had assumed that the rest of the building had been the same.

I had assumed wrong. The car of the maglevlift had notified the guards when it had been used. I had spotted the detectors in the corridor at once when the door had opened on the top floor. That was why I had tried the escape hatch in the roof, hoping to find a way out through the mechanism at the top of the shaft.

Except that there had been no mechanism there - just another door. Opening into another floor that did not appear on the bank of buttons inside the car. Some secret location known only to the authorities. Hoping to penetrate this secret I had climbed onto the doorsill and searched for a way to open the door. Only to have the elevator vanish from behind me leaving me stranded on top of the empty shaft.

I had come out of this little harebrained adventure far better than I had deserved. Luck would not ride with me a second time. Cool planning was needed. I put this nearly-disastrous escapade behind me and thought furiously of schemes and ways to make contact with the crewgirl.

"Do it honestly," I said, and shocked myself with the words.

Honest? Me? The stainless steel rat who prowls the darkness of the night in solitary silence, fearing no one, needing no one.

Yes. Painful as the realization was, just this once honesty was indeed the best policy.

"Attention, foul jailers, attention!" I shouted and hammered on the bars of my cage. "Arouse yourself from your sweat-sodden slumbers and vulgar, erotic dreams and take me to Captain Varod. Soonest - or even sooner!" My fellow prisoners awoke, calling out in righteous anger and threatened all sorts of unimaginative bodily harm. I returned the insults with enthusiasm and eventually the night guard appeared, scowling with menace.

"Hi, there," I called out cheerily. "Nice to see a friendly face."

"You want your skull broke, kid?" he asked. His repartee just about as sharp as that of the inmates.

"No. But I want you to stay out of trouble by instantly taking me to Captain Varod since I have information of such military importance that you would be shot instantly if suspected of keeping it from the captain for more than a second or two."

He added some more threats, but there was a glint of worry, in his eyes as he thought about what I had said. It seemed obvious, even to someone of his guttering intelligence, that passing the buck was the wisest fallback position. He growled some more insults when I pointed back down the corridor, but left in any case and went to his telephone. Nor was my wait a long one. A brace of overmuscled and overweight guards appeared on the scene within minutes. They unlocked my cell, clamped on the cuffs and hurried me into the maglevlift and up a few hundred stories to a bare office. Where they fastened the cuffs to a heavy chair and left. The lieutenant who entered a few minutes later was still blinking the sleep from his eyes and was not happy at being disturbed in the middle of the night.

"I want Varod," I said. "I don't talk to the hired help."

"Shut up, diGriz, before you get yourself into worse trouble. The captain is in deep space and unreachable. I am from his department and urge you to speak quickly before I bounce you out of here."

It sounded reasonable enough. And I had very little choice.

"Have you ever heard of a space-going Venian swine who goes by the name of Captain Garth?"

"Get on with it," he said in a bored voice, yawning to drive home the point. "I worked on your case so you can speak freely. What do you know that you haven't told us already?"

"I have information about our gun-running friend. You do have him in custody, don't you."

"DiGriz - you give us information, that is the way that it works, not the other way around." That was what he said, but his expression spoke otherwise. A fleeting instant of worry. If that meant what I thought it meant then Garth had managed to escape them.

"I saw a girl today, a new prisoner being brought in. Her name is Bibs."

"Did you get me out of bed to describe some sordid sexual secret?"

"No. I just thought you should know that Bibs was a crewgirl on Garth's ship."

This caught his attention instantly, and not being as experienced as his commanding officer he could not conceal the look of sudden interest. "You are sure of this?"

"Check for yourself. The information on today's arrivals should be readily available."

It was: he sat behind the steel desk and hammered away at the keys on the terminal there. Looked at the screen and scowled in my direction.

"Three women admitted today. None named Bibs,"

"How very unusual." Scorn dripped from my voice. "Can it be that the criminal classes now use aliases?" He did not answer but tapped away at the terminal again. The fax buzzed and produced three sheets of paper. Three color portraits. I dropped two of them onto the floor and handed the third back.

Bibs.

He bashed some more keys, then slumped back and rubbed his chin as he studied the screen.

"It fits, it fits," he muttered. "Marianney Giuffrida, age twenty-five, occupation given as electrotechnician with deepspace experience. Arrested on a drugs possession charge, anonymous tip, swears she was framed. No other details."

"Ask her about Garth. Use persuasion. Make her talk."

"You have our thanks for your assistance, diGriz. It will go on your record." He tapped a number into the phone. "But you have been watching too many films. There is no way we can force people to give evidence. But we can question and observe and draw conclusions. They will take you back to your cell now."

"Gee, thanks for the thanks. Thanks for nothing. Can you at least do me the favor of telling me how long you intend to keep me here?"

"That should be easy enough to find out." A quick access of the terminal and a sage nod of the head as the door opened behind me. "You will be leaving us the day after tomorrow. A spacer will be stopping at a planet with the interesting name of Bit O'Heaven where, it appears, you have to answer some criminal charges."

"Guilty until found guilty, I suppose." I sneered and whined to hide the surge of enthusiasm that raced through me. Once out of here I really would be out of here. I ignored the rough clutch and muttered complaints of my warders and permitted myself to be docilely led back to my cell. I was going to be good, very, very good, until the day after tomorrow.

But I lay awake a long time after that, staring into the darkness, working out how I was going to pry the information.