The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell

Chapter 23

Darkness vanished and I blinked against the sudden glare of bright lights. I could feel Berkk writhing under me—while directly before my eyes was the most beautiful sight in all of the known, and unknown, galaxy.

Angelina's black—smeared smiling face. I lifted my head and kissed the tip of her nose.

"Errgle," Berkk errgled, trying to wriggle out from under our weight. I moved a bit so he could get free, still clutching harder to Angelina's warm, firm body. We kissed enthusiastically and it was more of heaven than the Heaven we had just left would ever be.

"When you are through with that you might report what you found," Coypu said. I would recognize that voice anywhere. We separated reluctantly and stood up. Still holding hands.

Behind Coypu was a very familiar laboratory.

"We're in Special Corps Prime Base!" I said.

"Obviously, We moved the entire operation back here when you failed to return from Heaven. Slakey is very dangerous people. Soon after we got here there were a number of attempts to penetrate our defenses. They have all failed and the shields are stronger than ever."

"You would like a drink?" Angelina said, whistling over the robar. "Two double Venerian Vodka Coolers."

"After you, my darling. And another for my friend, Berkk, here."

He still sat on the floor, looking around and gaping. His fingers clutched the glass the robar gave him and we all glugged enthusiastically.

"Now, tell me, Professor," I said, hokling out my glass for a—refill. "What was Angelina doing in that terrible place—..and how did she get us back?"

Before he could answer the door burst open and Bolivaror was it James?—burst in followed by his brother. With Sybil a short pace behind.

"Dad!" There were enthusiastic embraces all around, and some more drinks from the robar so we could toast our successful return. As we lowered our glasses Berkk dropped his. When he bent over to pick it up he just kept going, falling heavily to the floor, unconscious. I grabbed his wrist—almost no pulse at all.

"Medic!" I shouted as I rolled him onto his back and opened his mouth to make sure that his air passages were clear. But as I did this I was pushed not—too—gently aside by the medbot that had dropped Out of the ceiling. It put a manipulator into Berkk's mouth to secure his tongue. At the same time it pressed an analyzer against his skin, took a blood sample, extruded a pillow under his head, did a fast body scan, covered him with a blanket and had already radioed for a doctor who burst through the door scant instants later.

"Stand clear," he ordered as the medbot slid an expanding metal web under Berkk's body, popped wheels out of the ends and carefully drove off with him. "The surgeon is standing by," the doctor said. "There appears to be a small blood clot on the patient's brain, undoubtedly caused by a blow to the skull. Prognosis good." He hurried after the medbot while Sybil hurried after him.

"I'll see what happens and report back," she said. She left with Bolivar and James right behind her. The three were inseparable now. Which might lead to problems that I did not wish to consider at this moment.

This put a bit of a damper on the party and we sipped glumly at our drinks. Before we finished them—modern medicine sure works fast—Coypu's phone rang and he grabbed it up. Listened, nodded, then smiled.

"Thank you, Sybil," he said and hung up. "Operation successful, out of danger, no permanent brain damage. He'll stay in narcsleep until the treatment is finished."

We cheered at that. "Thank you, Professor," I said. "With this last emergency out of the way we can now relax and listen. While you tell us how my Angelina managed to drag me out of the hell in Heaven and how she got there in the first place. After which we will try to figure out what all the strange happenings that have been going on really mean. Professor."

"We will take the explanation one step a time, if you don't mind. To go back to the beginning. When you did not return after a good deal of time had passed I activated your undetectable interuniversal activator and the boot returned. Without you. Since you were not wearing the boot I reached the inescapable conclusion that my machine had been detected. Therefore I had to improve its undetectability. I did this rather quickly because I was feeling very, very rushed."

"I held a gun to the back of his head with my finger trembling on the trigger," Angeina said, smiling sweetly. "I was going after you and intended to bring you back—with a better machine than the duff one he had supplied you with."

"It was an early model," Coypu muttered defensively. "I improved the design greatly then constructed three devices of varying degrees of undetectability."

"I carried the first hidden in the lining of my purse," Angelina said. "The second was under the skin on my arm, here." She rubbed at the long white scar, easily visible under the dusty smears, and scowled. "I will have to get this unsightly thing removed."

"That is not the only thing that is going to be removed," I grated through tight—clamped teeth. "I'm going to kill that particular Slakey for that botched bit of surgery."

"Not if I get there first, darling. He of course very quickly found the one in my purse, and then he detected this one, with great difficulty I must say. He was so pleased with himself that he never considered that there might be a third."

"Where is it?" I asked.

"Where Slakey obviously could not find it," Coypu said, happily rattling his fingers on his foreteeth. "I knew that there was no way to detect the pseudo—electrons, so it must have been the pseudo—electron paths in the solid state circuitry that he found. So I impressed my neural network on Angelina's neural network where it would be concealed by her neural activity."

"You mean that you built your machine right into her nervous system?" "Exactly so. Since my pseudo electrons move at pseudo speed, there would be no interference with the electrical function of her synapses. The circuitry ended directly in her brain."

"So when I thought go, we all went," she said, throwing her empty glass towards the robar, which plucked it out of the air with a flip of a tentacle. "Now lam going to wash off this mud and stench and I suggest, Jim diGriz, that you do the same."

"I will after I ask you a single question..

"It can wait." Then she was gone. I whistled up another drink.

"Tell me all that happened," Coypu said.

"You let her go after Slakey alone!" I accused. "With all the massed strength of the Corps to hand."

"And a gun to my head. Do you think that there was any way to stop her?"

"No—but you could at least have tried."

"I did. What happened?"

I slumped in a chair, sipped my drink, and told him the entire repulsive story. My descent into Purgatory from Heaven and the women at the sorting tables there. Then being tossed through Slakey's machine to the living hell of the mining world. He popped his eyes a bit when I told him about our escape in the rebar cages. Narrowed his eyes into pensive slits when he heard about the laboratory and the mysterious circular tunnel.

"And that was that. My dearest Angelina was there and whisked us back here and you know the rest."

"Well, well, well!" Coypu said when I had finished, jumping to his feet with excitement and pacing back and forth.

"Now we know what he is doing and how he is doing itwe just don't know what he is doing it for."

"Perhaps you know, Professor, but some of us are still in the dark." "It's all so obvious." He stopped pacing and raised a didactic finger. "Heaven is the seat of all of his activities, we can be sure of that now. It matters not in the slightest where the mineral is mined. Because it was brought to Heaven after you and the male slaves extracted it from the ground. Dropped through an interuniversal field to end up in Heaven where it is ground finely and bombarded in a cyclotron—" "A what?"

"A cyclotron, that is the machine that you saw in the tunnel. Your description was quite apt, even if in your ignorance you did not know what you were looking at. It is an ancient and rather clumsy bit of research apparatus that is not used much anymore. It is basically a very large, circular tube that has all the air inside evacuated. Then ions are pumped in and whirled around and around through the tube, held in orbit away from the tube walls by electromagnets. After building up tremendous speeds the ions smash into a metallic target."

"Why?"

"My good friend, how did you manage to obtain an education without studying basic science in school? Any first—year student would remember the simple fact that if you bombard platinum with neon ions you obtain element a hundred and four, called unnilquadium. It follows, obviously, that if you hit lead isotopes with a beam of chromium you will obtain unnilsextium." "What is that?"

"A transuranic element. In the Stone Age of physics there were believed to be only ninety—eight elements, the heaviest of which was uranium. As new ones were discovered they were named, we think, after household gods. Curium after the god of medicine who cures disease, that sort of thing. Anyway, after the discovery of mendelevium, nobelium—and such, the elements were numbered in an ancient and lost language. One hundred and four is unnilquadium, one hundred and five unnilquintium and so forth. Slakey has created a new element, much further up the atomic number table I am sure. It is obviously generated in very small quantities and comes out of the cyclotron still mixed with the original ore. Machines cannot detect it or they would have been used for this onerous task. But obviously women, and not men, can find it. Angelina will tell us more about that…"

"About what?" she asked. Making a glorious entrance in a green space juniper that went beautifully with her now red—gold hair.

"What were you and the other women looking for in the grit?" I asked. "I have no idea."

"But exactly what were you doing?"

"An interesting phenomenon. All the bits of sand and gravel looked exactly alike. But some of the grains, when you touched them they felt—slow? No, that's not right, perhaps the other grains felt faster. It's almost impossible to describe. But once felt never forgotten."

"Entropy," Coypu said firmly. "That's Slakey's special field of research. I am certain now that he is producing particles with different entropy"

"Why?"

"That is what we will have to find out."

"How?" I asked. Puzzled, bothered and bewildered.

"You will find a way, you always do," Angelina said, patting me on the arm.. Her smile turned to a frown when she looked at her filthy fingertips. "Go burn those clothes," she ordered. "Then wash until your skin glows, then wash some more."

I went willingly, well aware now of the stench, itch and scratch of my battered body. In the guest suite a burst of flame in the bathroom burner incinerated my clothing. I punched for antiseptics as well as soap in the bath, sank with a sigh under the warm water with a weary whew..

Woke up drowning as my nose slipped beneath the surface. Hawked and spat out water; I must have fallen asleep. My body was giving me a message that I was happy to receive. Dried and dusted I went on all fours into the bedroom, crawled dizzily into bed and knew nothing more.

Angelina and I were having a relaxed drink before dinner. The twins and Sybil were off somewhere, while the professor was busy in his laboratory. We had a few moments alone.

"Any particular way you would like me to kill Slakey in Heaven?" I asked. "Messy and painful. Though he wasn't really that awful to me. But he was an irritating, fat old git. Cackling with joy when the surgicalbot cut out the implant. Painless really, just messy. He couldn't have cared less after that. I was just another woman for his slave labor at the tables. That terrible one—eyed robot grabbed me—now that is one piece of rusty iron I intend to dispatch personally—and took me off to the sorting place. One of the other women let me touch a grain she had found and that was that. Unlike those other poor creatures I knew that I could leave at any time, so it wasn't too awful. I also knew that you would be making a breakout from somewhere somehow as soon as you could, so I didn't mind waiting. I worked along with the others until I saw you and your friend running away from the robot. That was when I decided that it would be better if we all came back here."

Better! Not a word of complaint about what she had gone through to rescue me. My angel, my Angelina! Words could not express my gratitude, but some fervid kisses did get the message across. We separated when Coypu arrived. I ordered him his favorite cocktail while Angelina went out to do whatever women do when their hair is mussed.

"A question, if you please, Professor."

"What?" He sipped and smacked his lips happily.

"How are you doing with that little difficulty you hadabout not being able to send machines through between the universes? You will recall that when we went to Hell the only weapons that worked were salamis."

"I do recall it—and that is why I instantly tackled the problem. It is solved. An energy cage protects any object you wish from the effects of transition. You have an idea?"

"I certainly do. You will remember that my son James hypnotized that old devil Slakey in Hell."

"Unhappily, unsuccessfully. He was too insane to be questioned easily. And there wasn't enough time to do more."

"What if you had him or any other of the Slakeys here?"

"No problem at all then. We have highly skilled psychologists who work with computerized probes that can track thought processes down through all the levels of the brain. Mental blocks can be removed, traumas healed, memories accessed. But we don't have him here or any of the others. And the one in Hell. We know that he has been there too long. He will die if he is moved out."

"I know—and I'm not suggesting that. Now run your mind back to the adventurous past. You must recall the time war when the Special Corps was almost destroyed?"

"Was destroyed!" He shivered and sipped. "You restored us to reality when you won the war. Shan't forget that."

"Anything to help a friend. But what I am interested in now is the time fixator. The machine you built when reality was getting weaker and people were popping out of existence. You told me that as long as a person remembered who he was he was safe from the effects of the time attack. So you put together the machine that records the memories of an individual and feeds them back every three milliseconds."

"Of course I remember the time fixator—since I invented it. We have plenty in stock now. Why?"

"Patience. Then you will also remember that I took your memories with me~ Then, when I had to move back through time again, I let your memories take over my body to build a time helix, the time—traveling machine that is also your invention."

His eyes opened wide as his speedy thoughts leaped to the conclusion that I was slowly building towards. He smiled broadly, finished his drink, jumped to his feet, rushed over and seized my hand and pumped it enthusiastically.

"Brilliantly done! An idea that is as good, almost, as one I might have thought up. We take the time fixator to Hell—"

"Plug Slakey into it and take a recording. Then leave him there in the flesh—but bring back all of his memories!" Angelina had returned and heard this last. "If you are off on one more interuniversal trip you are not going alone this time."

Said without anger but with an unshakeable firmness. I opened my mouth to protest. Closed it and nodded.

"Of course. We're going back to Hell. Wear your lightest clothes."

"But no salamis this time."

"Quite right. That was an emergency measure—that succeeded I must remind you—that won't be needed now. We'll take the marines again, but well—armored and armed this time. To defend us while we make a memory recording of the Slakey in red."

"No troops," she said. "They would only get in the way. It will be just you and I in a fast armored scout tank. A lightning attack, find the old devil. Then I fight off anyone who gets in the way while you plug his brain into the memory fixator. After that it will be home in time for lunch. Tomorrow?"

"Why not? They want me in the hospital today. Some therapy for my bruises and cuts, and a broken rib or two that they are going to put right. Tomorrow morning will be fine."

It was. The body scan showed that two of my ribs were cracked. But microwindow surgery soon took care of them. The incision was so small that all that was needed was a local anesthetic. Since I am always very interested when someone fiddles around with my insides, I insisted upon having a hologram monitor, just like the surgeon's, so I could watch what was happening in glorious color 3D. The flexible needle snaked in through my skin and on into the bone of the rib itself. Once in place nanotechnology devices poured out of the tip of the needle, a submicroscopic crowd of molecular machines that grabbed the broken bone ends with their manipulators, then held tight onto each other. Micromotors whirred and the broken ends were neatly pulled together. Wonderful. The little machines would remain in place as new bone grew over them. I went right from the operating table to the laboratory where the interuniversal transporter and Angelina were waiting.

"I'm ready whenever you are," she said. She certainly was. Tastefully garbed in a black uniform, all metal studs and grenade clips, black boots—and a heavy weapon holstered on each hip.

"Very fetching," I said, slipping on the backpack that held the time fixator. "How was the test drive in your steel steed?"

"Very nice indeed," she said, patting the armor plate on the scout tank. "Fast, tough, with impressive fire power. More than enough weaponry to cover you in Hell. How was the bone operation?"

"Fast and efficient and I'm all mended and raring to go. Shall we?"

"In a moment. Before we leave I want to impress on Professor. Coypu a few important facts. Like the fact that we are not setting up housekeeping in Hell and want to be returned here soonest."

"Exactly."

Coypu strolled over from his control console looking decidedly miffed. "There will be no problems with the operation of the interuniversal activator this time, I can assure you of that."

"That's what you told me when you sent me to Heaven and I almost died with my boots off."

"Improvements have been made since then. Your vehicle has one activator built into the hull while you once again have one in your bootheel. And if worse comes to worse just clutch Angelina tightly—"

"Always a pleasant thought!"

"—and she will bring you both back."

"I feel relieved," I said, feeling relieved as I climbed into the scout tank and slammed the hatch. Angelina revved the engines and I gave Coypu the thumbs—up. His image scowled back at me from the communicator screen.

"You can turn the engine off," he said. "We have a small problem."

"How small?"

"Well …perhaps I should say big. I can't seem to find Hell."

"What do you mean you can't find it?"

"Just that. It appears to be gone."