The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

Mercurial of mood is the word for my Angelina. She kissed me with what can only be described as true passion, and I, clanking my lengths of chain, got my arms around her in happy response when she squawked and straight-armed me, so I reeled back, choking.

"The time!" She looked at her watch and gasped. "You made me forget. There is less than a minute left. Where is the time-helix?"

"Here!" Hugging my still-painful midriff, I showed her the machine.

"And the controls?"

"These."

"How ugly. Where is the readout?"

"These dials."

"This the setting we must use, down to the thirteenth decimal position Coypu said, most insistent about that."

I played the keys like a mad pianist and sweated. The dials spun and hesitated, then gyrated wildly.

"Thirty seconds," Angelina said sweetly, to encourage me. I sweated harder.

"There!" I gasped as she announced ten seconds. I kicked in the tinier and threw the master switch. The time-helix glowed greenly at us as we rushed to its protruding end.

"Stay close and hug me as hard as you can," I said. "The time field has a surface effect, so we must be close." She responded with pleasure.

"I only wish I weren't wearing this silly space suit," she whispered, nibbling my ear. "It would be so much more fun."

"It might be, but it might also be a little embarrassing when we arrived back at the Special Corps in that condition."

"Don't worry about that, we're not going back yet."

There was a sudden stab of anxiety just below my sternum.

"What do you mean? Where are we going?"

"I'm sure I wouldn't know. All Coypu said was that the hop would be about 20,000 years into the future, just before this planet is to be destroyed."

"He and his mad mob again," I wailed. "You've just sent us off to tackle an entire planetary insane asylum—where they're all against us!"

Everything froze as the time-helix actuated and I was whipped into time with that pained expression on my face. That expression lasted 20,000 years, which was exactly how I felt.

Chapter 17

BLAM! It was like falling into a steam bath—and falling was the right word for it. Hot clouds of vapor rushed past us, and the invisible surface could be ten meters or ten miles below us.

"Switch on your grav-chute," I shouted. "Mine's back in the nonexistent nineteenth century."

Perhaps I shouldn't have shouted because Angelina turned the thing on at full lift and slithered up out of my fond embrace like an oiled eel. I clutched madly and managed to grab one of her feet with both hands—whereupon the boot part of the one-piece space suit promptly came off her foot.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," she called down to me.

"I agree with you completely," I answered incoherently through tight-damped and grating teeth.

The suit stretched and stretched until the leg was twice its normal length and I bobbed up and on down as though I were on the end of a rubber band. I took a quick look, but there was still only fog visible below. Space suit fabric is tough, but it was never designed to take a strain like this. Something had to be done.

"Cut your lift!" I called out, and Angelina responded instantly.

We were in free fall, and as soon as the tension was relieved, the leg fabric contracted and snapped me back up to Angelina's waiting arms.

"Yum," I said.

She looked down and shrieked and hit the grav-chute power again. This time I wasn't ready and I slipped right down and out of her embrace and was falling toward the solid-looking landscape that had suddenly appeared below.

In the small fraction of a second left to me I did what little I could. Twisting in the air, spreading my arms and legs wide, trying to land square on my back. I had almost succeeded when I hit.

Everything went black, and I was sure I was dead, and darkness overwhelmed my brain as well, and my last thought flashed before me. Not only did I regret anything I had ever done, but there were a few things I wished I had done more often.

I could not have been unconscious more than a few instants. There was foul tasting mud in my mouth, and I spluttered it out and rubbed even more of it from my eyes and looked around me. I was floating in a half-liquid sea of mud and water from which large bubbles rose and broke with slow plops. They stank. Sickly-looking reeds and water plants grew on all sides.

"Alive!" I shouted. "I am alive." I had struck flat out on the syrupy surface, dividing the blow over the entire back surface of my body. There were some aches and bruises, but nothing seemed to be broken.

"It looks very nasty down there," Angelina said, hovering a few feet above my head.

"It's just as nasty as it looks so, if you don't mind, I would like to get out of it. Can you sort of drop down so I can grab your ankles, which will permit you to drag me out with a wet sucking sound?"