The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

We floated down, waving to our friends and ignoring their questions for the moment. Coypu and the time lab first, to report. There was a quick feeling of unhappiness that He had escaped me and the hope that this time, when he was tracked through time, a few very large bombs could be sent in the place of me or any other volunteer.

Coypu looked up and gaped. "What are you doing here?" he said. "You are supposed to be eliminating this He person. Didn't you get my message?"

"Message?" I asked, blinking rapidly.

"Yes. We made ten thousand metal cubes and sent them back to Earth. Sure you would get one of them. Radio direction and such."

"Oh, that old message. Received and acted upon, but you are a little out of date. What is that doing here?" I'm afraid my voice rose a bit on this last as I pointed with vibrating finger at the compact machine across the room.

"That? Our Mark One compact folding time-helix? What else should it be doing? We have just finished it."

"You've never used it?"

"Never."

"Well, you are now. You have to strap a couple of grav-chutes to it—here, use these—and a recorder and a molecular disrupter and shoot it right back to save Angelina and me."

"I have a pocket recorder, but why…" He took a familiar looking machine from his lab coat.

"Do it first, explanations later. Angelina and I are about to be blown up if you don't do this right."

I grabbed some paint and wrote "Play me" on the recorder, then "Time-helix open with care" on the machine. The exact moment when He had left Earth was determined by the time tracer and the arrival for this cargo set for a few minutes later on the big helix. Coypu dictated the tape under my instruction, and it wasn't until the whole bundle was whisked back into the past that I heaved a grateful sigh of relief.

"We are saved," I said. "Now for that drink you promised me."

"I didn't promise…"

"I'll have it anyway."

Coypu was muttering to himself and scratching on a pad while I prepared some hefty drinks for Angelina and myself. We clunked glasses and were baptizing our throats when he came over, smiling genially.

"I needed that," I said. "It must be ages since I last had a drink."

"It is all coming clear at last," Coypu said, tapping his protruding teeth with contained excitement.

"Is it all right if we sit while we listen? It's been a busy couple of hundred thousand years."

"Yes, by all means. Let me retrace the course of events. A time attack was launched upon the Corps by He, a most successful one. Our numbers were quite reduced…."

"Yes, like down to two. You and me."

"Quite right. Though as soon as I had dispatched you to the year 1975, I found that all things were as they had been. Most sudden. All alone one instant, the next the laboratory full of people who never knew they had been gone. We put a lot of work in on improving the time-tracking techniques, took almost four years to get it the way we wanted."

"Did you say four years?"

"Nearer five before we got it operational. The trails were distant and hard to follow, most tangled as well."

"Angelina!" I cried with sudden realization. "You never told me you had been here alone for five years."

"I didn't think you liked older women."

"I love them as long as they are you. You were lonely?"

"Hideously. Which is why I volunteered to go after you. Inskipp had another volunteer, but he broke his leg."

"My darling—I'll bet I know how that happened!" She is not the blushing type, but she did lower her eyes at the thought.

"We are getting ahead in sequence," Coypu said. "But that is what happened. We traced you from 1975 to 1807—and traced He and his minions as well. There was a loop in time there, an anomaly of some kind that eventually sealed itself off. We could tell that it was about to collapse with you sealed inside of it and succeeded at last in forcing enough power into the helix to penetrate the sealed time loop just before it went down. That is when Angelina went back with the coordinates for your next skip in time, the long twenty-thousand-year jump after He. You had to go after him because the time paths were there to prove that you had followed him. Though of course history was clear by that point, and we knew how it would all end."

"You knew?" I asked, feeling I had missed the point somewhere.

"Of course. The entire nature of the attack was clear, though you all of course had to fulfill your destined roles."

"Could you spell it out again? And slower."