A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born

I dug out a buck coin as the truck rumbled way. And made a mental note of its registration number. As soon as it was out of sight I headed towards the lights of a phonebox. I felt like a rat as I punched the buttons for the police.

But, really, I had no choice.

Chapter 6

Unlike the hapless Stinger, I had a careftil escape plan worked out. Part of it was a literal misdirection for my late partner. He was not really stupid, so it shouldn't take him very long to figure out who had blown the whistle on him. If he talked and told the police that I had returned to the fine city of Pearly Gates-why that would be all for the better. I had no intention of leaving Biliville, not for quite a while. — The office had been rented through an agency and all transactions had been done by computer. I had visited it before my hopeless bank job, and at that time had left some supplies there. They would come in very handy right now. I would enter through the service door of the fully automated building-after turning off the alarms by using a concealed switch I had been prudent enough to install there. It had a timer built into it, so I had ten lazy minutes to get to the office. I yawned as I picked the lock, sealed the door behind me, then trudged up three flights of stairs. Past the dull eyes of the deactivated cameras and through the invisible-and inoperative-infrared beams. I picked the lock of the office door with two minutes to spare. I blanked the windows, turned on the lights-then headed for the bar.

Cold beer has never tasted better. The first one never even touched the sides of my throat and sizzled when it hit my stomach. I sipped the second as I tore the tab on a dinpac of barbecued ribs of porcuswine. As soon as the steam whistled through the venthole I ripped open the lid of the stretched pack and pulled out a rib the length of my arm. Yum!

Showered, dipilated and wrapped around a third beer, I began to feel much better. "On," I told the terminal, then punched into the comnet. My instructions were simple; all newspaper records on the planet for the last fifty years, all references to a criminal named The Bishop, check for redundancies around the same date and don't give me any duplicates. Print.

Before I had picked up my beer again the first sheets were sliding out of the fax. The top sheet was the most recent-and it was ten years old. A not too interesting item from a city on the other side of the planet, Decalogg. The police had picked up an elderly citizen in a low bar who claimed that he was The Bishop. However it had turned out to be a case of senile dementia and the suspect had been ushered back to the retirement home from which he had taken a walk. I picked up the next item.

I tired towards morning and took a nap in die filing cabinet which turned into a bed when ordered to do so. In the gray light of dawn, helped by a large black coffee, I finished placing the last sheet into the pattern that spread across the floor. Rosy sunlight washed across it. I turned off the lights and tapped the stylo against my teeth while I studied the pattern.

Interesting. A criminal who brags about his crimes. Who leaves a little drawing of a bishop behind after scarpering with his loot. A simple design-easy enough to copy. Which I did. I held it out at arm's length and admired it.

The first bishop had been found in the empty till of an automated liquor store sixty-eight years ago. If The Bishop had started his career of crime as a teenager, as I have done, that would put him in his eighties now. A comfortable age to be, since life expectancy has now been pushed up to a century and a half. But what had happened to him to explain the long silence? Over fifteen years had passed since he had left his last calling card, I numbered off the possibilities on my fingers.

"Number one, and a chance always to be considered, is that he has snuffed it. In which case I can do nothing so let us forget about that.

'Two-he could have gone ofiplanet and be pursuing his life of crime among the stars. If so, forget it like number one. I need a lot more golden bucks, and experience, before I try my hand on other worlds.