The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

It took him awhile to get the idea, but he learned. There was a shock for cursing or saying anything irrelevant and a double shock when he tried to lie about a word; my polygraph kept me informed about that. He had enough of this quite quickly and found it easier to supply the word I wanted. We quickly ran through my supply of objects and shifted to drawings and acted-out motions. I accepted the phrase "I don't know," as long as it wasn't used too often, and my store of words grew. Under the pressure of the microcurrents of the memorygram the new vocabulary was jammed into my cortex, but not without some painful side effects. When my head began to throb, I took a painpill and went on with the word games. It didn't take long to file away enough words to switch to the second part of the learning process, grammar and structure. "What is your name?" I thought to myself and added the code word "ugly."

"What… name?" I said aloud. A very unattractive language indeed.

"Slasher."

"Me… name… Jim."

"Lemme go, I ain't done nuttin' to you."

"Learn first… leave later. Now tell, what year?"

"What year what?"

"What year now, dum-dum?"

I repeated the question in different ways until realization of what I was asking finally penetrated the solid bone of his skull. I was beginning to sweat.

"Oh, the year. It's 1975. June the nineteenth, 1975."

Right on target! Across all those centuries and millennia the time-helix had snapped me with precise accuracy. I made a mental note of thanks to Professor Coypu and the other vanished scientists, and since they lived on only in my memory, this was probably the only way to send the message. Much cheered by this information, I got on with the language lesson.

The memorygram clutched onto everything he said, organized it, and jammed it deep into my bruised synapses. I stifled a groan and took another painpill. By sunrise I felt I had enough of a command of the language to add to it by myself and switched off the machine. My companion fell over asleep and clunked his head on the rock without waking. I let him sleep and disentangled us both from the electronic equipment. After the nightlong session I was tired myself, but a stimtab took care of that. Hunger growled plaintively in my gut, and I broke out some rations. Slasher awoke soon after and shared my breakfast, eating one of the bars only after he saw me break off the end and consume it myself. I belched with satisfaction, and he echoed eructatingly. He eyed me and my equipment for some time before he made a positive statement.

"I know who you are."

"So tell me."

"You're from Mars, dat's what."

"What's Mars?"

"The planet, you know."

"Yeah, you might be right. It don't matter. You gonna do what I said, help me get some loot?"

"I told you. I'm on parole. If I'm grabbed, they'll throw the key away."

"Don't let it bug you. Stick with me and they won't lay a finger on you. You'll be rolling in bucks. Do you have any of these bucks? I want to see what they look like."

"No!" he said, and his hand went to a bulge in a flap of material affixed to his lower garments. By this time I could detect his simple lies without my equipment.

Sleepgas quieted him, and I worked a sort of hide envelope from his clothing that contained flimsy scraps of green paper, undoubtedly the bucks he had referred to not having. To look at them was to laugh! The cheapest copying machine could turn out duplicates of these by the barrelful—unless there were hidden means of authentification. To check I went over them with the most delicate equipment and found no trace of chemical, physical, or radioactive identification. Amazing. The paper did appear to contain short threads of some kind of substance, but a duplicator would print replicas of these on the surface which would do fine. If only I had a duplicator. Or did I have a duplicator? Toward the end there they were hanging every kind of equipment on me that they could. I rooted through the pile, and sure enough, there was a tiny desk model duplicator. It was loaded with a block of extremely dense material that was expanded in some cellular fashion inside the machine to produce a sheet of smooth white plastic on which the copies were made. After a number of adjustments I managed to reduce the quality of the plastic until it was as rough and crumpled as the bucks. Now when I touched the copy button, the machine produced a buck that appeared a duplicate of the original. The largest denomination Slasher had was a ten-buck note, and I made a number of copies of this. Of course, they all had the same serial number, but my experience has been that people never look very closely at the money they accept.