The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

As was the sight of my right hand severed from the wrist, lying unmoving on the desk top, the spout of blood from my wrist pumping out and drenching it. The ax went up again and this time I am sure I shouted aloud, screamed, all the time it went up and flashed down and my left hand was severed like the right and my life's blood spouted out all over the desk and ran down to the floor.

And through the pain and the terror that possessed me I was aware of Kraj's face. Smiling. Smiling for the first time.

Then I was unconscious. Blacking out, dying, I couldn't tell. The world rushed away from me down a dark tunnel and I was left with the sensation of pain alone and then even that was gone.

When I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and a period of unmeasured time had gone by. My thoughts were thick with sleep or something else and I had to work to dredge up the memory of what had happened. Only when the startling vision of my severed hands came to me clearly did I open my eyes and sit up, rubbing one hand with the other. They felt perfectly normal. What had happened?

"Stand up," Kraj 's voice said, and I realized that I was sitting on the floor before his desk and that the collar was still in place about my neck with its wiring running up to the device on the ceiling. I stood, slowly, and looked at his clean desk. There was no blood.

"I would have sworn…" I said and my voice died away as I saw the two great grooves in the metal top of the desk as though it had been hit twice with some heavy blade. Then I lifted my hands before my face and looked at my wrists.

Each wrist was circled by a red weal of healing flesh with the sharp red points of removed stitches along the edges. Yet my hands felt as they always did. What had happened?

"Are you beginning to understand what I mean?" Kraj asked, once more seated behind the desk, his voice as gray as his clothing.

"What did you do? You couldn't have amputated my hands and sewed them back. I could tell, it would take time, you couldn't…" I realized that I was starting to babble and I shut up.

"You don't believe it happened? Should I do it again?"

"No!" I said, almost shouting the word, drawing back from him. He nodded approvingly at this.

"So the training begins. You have lost a little bit of reality. You do not know what happened—but you do know that you do not wish it to happen again. This is the way it will go. Eventually you will lose all touch with the reality you have known all your life, and then will lose contact with the person you have been all your life. When you reach that state we will accept you as one of us. Then you will go into great detail about your Special Corps, not only racking your memory for crumbs of fact you may have missed, but in actively originating plans for their destruction."

"It won't work," I said with a great deal more sincerity than I really felt. "I am not alone. The Corps is on to you now and actively working against you, so that it is now just a matter of time before they pull the plug and all your little invasion schemes go down the drain."

"Quite the opposite," Kraj said clasping his hands together on the desk before him like a teacher about to lecture a class. "We have been aware of their attention for a long time and have forestalled them at every turn. We have captured, tortured and killed a number of the Corps people to get information. We know that everything is geared to follow the lead of a field agent, such as yourself, and we have been waiting for one to come along. You have come, and we have you. It is that simple. You are the weapon with which we will destroy the Special Corps."

He had me half believing him. The plan he proposed sounded like a reasonable one and I put that thought away as fast as it arrived. I was going to have to stop agreeing with him, attack rather than defend.

"That is very ambitious of you and I hope you don't bite off more than you can chew. Aren't you forgetting the hundreds of planets that support the league and what they can do to you when they find out the kind of trouble you are causing?"

"There are hundreds of planets only in theory, in reality they are just one after the other. We pluck them in that manner, they fall before us, we cannot be stopped, and the process is an accelerating one. As our empire expands we move faster and faster."

"And there is a limit to that speed," I broke in, trying to work a sneer into my words. "I know how your invasion technique works You don't invade a planet until they have already lost. Isn't that right?"

"Perfectly correct." He nodded agreement and I rushed on.