The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell

“Here. My own writing, my first calculations, the begi

He looked at the paper, then at the screen, then back to the paper until it looked like he was watching an invisible PingPong match.

“Different…” he said hoarsely. I must admit that my smile was a bit smug and I did enjoy it when Angelina gave me a loving hug and a kiss.

“My husband the genius,” she whispered.

While Coypu hammered away at the computer, Dr. Mastigophora went to look at his patient.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Unconscious. We had to use the psycho blaster on him, paralyze his entire body as well as the brain. Nothing else seems to work.”

“There it is! Hell!” Coypu shouted and we turned to look at his screen which showed a loathsome red landscape under a redder and even more loathsome sun.

“Hell,” he said. “And Heaven. They are all there still. It was the calculations, the primary equations… changed, just slightly, just enough to make the later calculations vary farther and farther from the correct figures. But—how did it happen? Who has done this?”

“I told you—a saboteur. There is a spy in our midst.” I said, very firmly.

“Impossible! There are no spies in the Special Corps. Certainly, none here in Prime Base. Impossible.”

“Very possible. thinking about it in great detail and, unhappy as I am to say this, I can identify the spy.”

I had them now. Even Angelina was leaning forward, waiting for further revelation. I smiled serenely, buffed my fingers on my shirt, turned and pointed. “There’s your spy.”

They all turned to look.

“The spy is none other than my good companion from the rock mine—Berkk.”

Chapter 26

“How can you say that, Jim!” Angelina said. “He saved your life.”

“He did—and I saved his.”

“He was a prisoner like you. He wouldn’t spy for Slakey.”

“He was. And he did.”

Coypu got into the disbelieving act. “Impossible. You told me, he’s a simple mechanic. It would take a mathematician of incredible skill to alter those equations so subtly that I would never notice the changes.”

I raised my hands to silence the growing protest.

“Dear friends—why don’t we put this to the empirical test. Let’s ask him.”

In a matter of seconds the professor had pumped a massive electronic charge into Berkk’s brain and drained it out of his heel. Leaving the brain empty of all intelligence. The captive Slakey was now just random fizzling electrons, which was fine; there were certainly enough other manifestations of him around. Then Coypu seized up the other fully charged TF that was full of Berkk and plugged it back to his body. A switch was thrown and, hopefully, Berkk was back home again. Dr. Mastigophora filled a hypodermic with psycho blaster antidote and shot it into Berkk’s arm. He stirred and moaned and his eyes fluttered open.

“Why am I strapped down?”

I recognized his voice. Slakey was gone and Berkk was home again.

“Free him if you please, Professor.” The clamps jumped open and I went to remove the restraining belt.

“Ouch,” Berkk said, touching his bruised lips. “It was Slakey, wasn’t it? He did this to me.” He sat up and groaned. “Was it worth it? Did you get what you needed?”

“Not quite,” I said. “But before we go into that—I would like to ask you one simple question.”

“What’s that?”

“Why did you sabotage Professor Coypu’s interuniversal transporter?”

“Why… why do you think I would do a thing like that?”

“You tell me, Berkk.”

He looked around at us, not smiling, with a very trappedanimal look. This suddenly changed. He looked up blankly; and a horrified expression transformed his face. “No!” he shouted hoarsely. “Don’t do that—you can’t..

Then he dropped his face into his hands and wept unashamedly. No one spoke, not knowing what was happening. Finally he looked up, dragged his sleeve across his wet eyes.

“Gone,” he said. “Back to the rock quarrying. Back to that hell in Heaven.”

“Would you be kind enough to explain?” I asked.

“Me, I, you know. Me twice. He, I mean me, is back in the quarry. Grabbed by that foul one—eyed robot.”

Sudden realization struck. “Did Slakey duplicate you the way he duplicates himself?”

“Yes.

“Then all is clear,” I said smugly

“Not to a lot of us, diGriz,” Angelina said, all patience gone. “Spell it out so we peasants can understand. And quickly.”

“Sorry, my love. But the explanation is a simple one. When Slakey had me thrown into the rock works he must have been worried about my presence in Heaven, and even more concerned about what Coypu or the Special Corps would do next. So he enlisted Berkk here to watch me. Doubled him and must have done horrible things to one of him to make the other be his spy.”

“Chains,” Berkk moaned. “Torture. Electric shock. I had to do what he told~ me because I felt everything that he was doing to the other me. Chained to the wall in Slakey’s lab.”

’And of course because you knew everything that you and I were doing, the other you also knew everything that we were doing and reported it to Slakey?”

“All the time. Slakey had me build those rebar cages so we could escape. He knew just what we were doing at the very moment we were doing it.”

“But escaping in those cages was very dangerous!”

“What did he care? If we died it wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest. But once we had landed on the rock pile safely, he cleared out the cyclotron building so we could get through it. When we reached the u

“You spying rat,” Angelina said, and I saw her fingers arching into claws. “A viper in our bosom. We save your life and all you can do is sabotage the professor’s machine.”

“I had no choice,” Ron moaned. “The me with Slakey told him everything. Slakey was ready to kill that me at any time if I didn’t do what he ordered. When I woke up after the operation you had all gone away. I came here and this laboratory was empty—the professor was sleeping. That was Slakey’s perfect chance to do the sabotage. I did exactly what he told me to do. Changed the equations and the settings and everything.”

“Did he also order you to volunteer to have his brain pumped into your head?”

“That was my idea, I really meant I was volunteering—he also ordered me to do it, knowing you would get nothing out of it. And it would add to my credibility. I had no choice..

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s all in the past and we can get through to the other universes again since the professor has undone your damage. Your spying days for Slakey are over, so now you can spy for us. You could very well be the key to putting paid to all the Slakeys. Help us and maybe we will be able to save the other you.”

“Could you really?”

“We can but try. Now—the first question. What is going on with all the rock mining and crushing and sorting? We still have no idea of what Slakey’s operation is all about. You used the word ‘u

“I have no idea. But since the other me was with Slakey all of the time I could see and hear everything that he did. He used the word in reference to the sorting tables, just once.”

“It must be the substance we were looking for,” Angelina said. “But what is it used for?”

“I don’t know. But I do know it is the most important thing for Slakey. Nothing else really matters. And I think I know where it goes. Slakey kept me chained to the machine, the one like the professor’s there, so! could tell him everything that was happening. But I could also see everything that he was doing. There were sometimes up to three of him present at one time. They didn’t talk because, after all, they were all the same person. But one time he had that robot on the screen and he said something like ‘Take the u