The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection

by Harry Harrison

  These clothes were something else again. A single-piece overall made of soft and flexible plastic, they provided protection and warmth for the wearer. Yet they were ideal prison dress because they were completely transparent. This continual shielded-nakedness was certainly not morale building and I began to have even more respect for the gray men. And everything done in silence despite my attempts at conversation. The final sartorial touch was a metal collar that locked around my neck. A cable ran from the collar to a box one of the gray men held. All of this had a very ominous look to it. My suspicions were justified when the others left with all of the weapons and he faced me, box in hand.

  ‘I can do this,’ he said in a voice as gray as his garb and pressed a button on the box.

  The thing I experienced next was quite unexpected and singularly painful. In a single instant I was blinded by exploding lights of a color and fury I had never seen before. Sound greater than sound filled my ears and every square inch of my skin burned with a fire as though I had been dropped into an acid bath. These interesting things went on for a longer time than I really appreciated and then suddenly vanished as quickly as they had begun. Sight and hearing returned and I found myself lying on the floor with a sore spot on the back of my head where I had cracked it when I fell. It felt rather good just to lie there. That little box must generate neural currents on selected frequencies. No need to torture the body when you can feed specific pain impulses into the nervous system.

  ‘Stand,’ my captor said, and I did rather quickly.

  ‘If you wish to convey the message that you can do that whenever you want, and right now you want me to behave – the message has been received. But speak and I shall obey. I’ll be a good boy.’

  For the time being. Until I found a way to get out of this stainless steel rat trap. I trotted along docilely to another room where Kraj waited for me behind a large metal desk. The room was dusty and blank areas on the wall showed where pictures and pieces of furniture had been removed. The only new item, other than the desk, was a shining hook recently affixed in the ceiling. I was not at all surprised when the hook fitted into a ring on the box and I was leashed, standing before my captor.

  Kraj looked me up and down, examining me closely, a very easy thing to do considering the transparent condition of my clothing. I have never suffered from a nudity taboo so this did not bother me. It was the cold and unemotional look in his eyes that was more off-putting. At the present moment I was, to use the classical term, completely at his mercy. I had no idea of what nastiness he had in mind for me and I determined to at least attempt to ameliorate it a bit.

  ‘What would you like to know?’ I asked.

  ‘A number of things, but that will come later.’

  ‘What’s wrong with now? Considering the state of modern hypnotic techniques, drug therapy and old-fashioned torture – like your nerve machine here – it is impossible to keep facts from a determined interrogator. Therefore ask and I shall answer.’ What little I knew about the Special Corps he was welcome to. All of the locations of the bases were kept secret from us, undoubtedly with an interrogation like this in mind. I was surprised when he shook his head in a slow no.

  ‘You will give me the information later. First you must be convinced of the seriousness of my aims. I intend to question you, then to enlist your services in our cause. Voluntarily. In order to convince you of this I must begin by saying you will not be killed. Strong men face death bravely. It is an easy escape from their problems. You have no such escape.’

  I was becoming less and less intrigued all the time by what he had to say. I had expected a rough questioning session, but he had bigger things in mind. So I dropped the bantering tone and gave it to him straight.

  ‘Forget it. Face the fact that I do not like you or your organization or what you stand for, and I do not intend to change my mind. Even if I promise to aid you you can never be sure that I meant it – so let us not get involved in this sort of farcical position to begin with.’

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ he said, and touched a button on his desk. The box above hummed and reeled in the thick wire pulling me upward until I had to stand on tiptoe in order to breathe, the collar biting into my neck. ‘Before I am through with you you will be begging me for the opportunity to cooperate and will cry when I do not permit it, until you reach the happiest moment in your life when you are at last granted your single wish. Let me demonstrate one of our simpler but most convincing techniques.’

  My feet vibrated with pain but I had to stay on my toes or I would have been strangled by the collar. Kraj rose and walked behind me where I could not see him – then seized both my wrists and pushed them down against the edge of the metal desk. The desk obliged him by snapping two cuffs about my wrists, clamping them there.

  Not about my wrists, this isn’t exactly true, but about my lower arm, leaving my wrists and hands free. Not that I could do anything more than drum my fingertips on the tabletop. Kraj reappeared and bent to take something from a drawer in the desk.

  It was an ax. A long handled, steel edged ax of a primitive and efficient sort that could be used to chop down trees. He took it in both hands and raised it high over his head.

  ‘What are you doing? Stop!’ I shouted in sudden fear, writhing in the metal embrace, unable to do anything except stare while he held the ax high for a moment. Then brought it down with a vicious, forceful chop.

  I suppose I screamed when it hit, I must have, the pain was large and consuming.

  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 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 lif
e. 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 onto 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.

  ‘You find a planet that is ripe for the picking with some dissident element in the population; there are people who would complain about paradise so you have no problem in finding a group on any world. Here on Burada it was the men, the Konsolosluk party. They were hot for male rule. You backed them with whatever they needed. Your underground operators supplied them with money, weapons, propaganda, all the essentials of a takeover – and it worked. And you asked nothing in return for all this aid, other than only a token resistance when the invasion began. Your agents saw to it that the armed forces surrendered after only the briefest show of force. This invasion was won before it began! No wonder your military people aren’t used to taking losses.’

  ‘Very observant of you. This is exactly what we do, your analysis is a masterly description of the way in which we operate.’

  ‘Then I have you,’ I said happily.

  ‘On the contrary – we have you. You are the only one who knows about our techniques and you will never report them to your superiors.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said with a bravado I did not feel.

  ‘Perhaps you do not know, but we do. We have intercepted the report you made and it will never be sent. They will wait in vain for any work from you and time will pass and soon it will be too late for them to do anything because we will move into phase two of our operation. With the many allies we have gained by occupying planets with governments now friendly to us, we will have a considerable number of troops available to us. Mercenaries I believe they are called. They will be invasion troops and great numbers of them will be killed, but we will always win because our supply will be relatively inexhaustible. It presents an interesting picture, does it not?’

  ‘It will never work,’ I shouted, with the sinking feeling at the same time that it would. ‘The Corps will stop you.’ How, with their only agent run to earth and trapped? I was having a hard job convincing myself and getting nowhere at all in convincing him.

  Kraj rose and started around the desk.

  ‘Now it is time for your indoctrination to begin.’

  I cannot express the fear that overwhelmed and possessed me when I heard those words.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I WAS TAKEN to a cell. A bare, windowless room whose only furnishing was an empty bucket. A ceiling hook had recently been installed here and my attendant gray man obligingly hooked me up to it.

  ‘There is little chance of my starving to death,’ I told him. ‘Because I’ll die of thirst first.’

  He gave no spoken answer but he did return with a soft plastic water bottle and a standard Cliaand field ration. Not the world’s most inspiring food, but it would keep me alive.

  As I chewed and sipped I clamped hard on that last thought. Keep me alive. They would do anything except kill me. They wanted me, actually needed me. They knew that the Special Corps was breathing hot on their trail and they would have to exert an all-out effort to stop them. Kraj had talked big and half convinced me; I looked at my wrists and shuddered. He had convinced me. But why had he tried so hard?

  Because I was obviously more than a pawn in this game. I was the factor that could swing the outcome either way, Right now Cliaand was doing well in the invasion business – but they could be stopped. With what I knew the Special Corps could start work as counter-insurgents and prevent expansion to other planets. Cliaand might even be stopped here. If I were to change sides my specialized knowledge might not defeat the Corps, but it could surely slow it down long enough for the second phase of the invasion operation to go into effect.

  Which means the gray men had made a mistake. They should have killed me as soon as they discovered who I was. If I could be tortured and convinced to change my mind I might be a weapon in their hands. Two maybes. That ignored the fact that as long as I was alive I was the most deadly and potent weapon against them.

  They had made a mistake. I grabbed to that conclusion and worried it just as I worried the jaw-breaking ration. I did not consider that I was their prisoner in every way. Every way? Ha! Physically, yes. Mentally – a resounding no. They had almost had me there for a while with the nerve torture and the positive assurance that I would fall into their hands. At the thought of amputation my stomach gave a heave and I suddenly lost my appetite. I had put the sight of my severed hands out of my mind. For good reasons.

  Now I would have to remember and think about it. But not in the way they wanted. It was a trick, it had to be a trick, and that was the supposition I must hold on to. While I chewed and glugged down the rest of my unappetizing meal I gave myself the hard sell. Listen diGriz, you know enough about reality to be able to tell when it has been tampered with. You are always tampering with it yourself for your own benefit and others discommoding. So now someone has turned the same trick on you. The severed wrists pumping blood! Down, boy. Drain away some of the emotion. We’ll get to the memories after a while. But let us look first at the realities.

  Reality. Marvelous as medicine is it cannot repair amputation in a couple of hours or a couple of days.

  Now where did that figure come from? At some unconscious level I felt that only a brief time had passed between the amputation and the recovery. We all have a clock ticking away down deep in the brain, it controls the circadian rhythms of sleeping and walking and it works all of the time. Right now it was trying to tell me that only a brief time had passed since I had been brought here by the gray men. But did I have any real evidence to back it up? I felt my face and my hair. I needed a shave, but not badly, and my hair felt about the right length. But I could have had a haircut and a shave, no evidence there.

  My fingernails? I kept them trimmed short, and one trimmed fingernail looks like any other one. Wait, think. Memory. Something. Small. Yes – during the landing, plenty of tension, plenty of distractions. I had broken the little fingernail on my left hand. No, don’t look yet, sit on the thing and remember. Broken nail … distraction … bit it off. A rather unappetizing bit of self-consumption that most of us indulge i
n at one time or another. The offending particle of nail torn free, right down to the quick, a minor ouch and a tiny drop of blood. Completely forgotten in the rush of subsequent events.

  With careful motions I released my left hand from its prisoning buttock and held it before me. Little finger, short nail – and a tiny clot of blood.

  Got you, Kraj, you old faker!

  From the look of the thing I had been a prisoner for a day or two at the most, surely no longer than that. The red marks on my wrists were just that – red marks on my wrists. There were a hundred different ways this could have been done. And the amputation? Kraj had tampered with my reality, hypnosis perhaps, it didn’t really matter.

  Kraj and his crew were not as bright as they looked. They had undoubtedly used this mind-cracking torture many times before and had really impressed themselves with the success of the technique. Perhaps this was the way they converted recruits to their nasty ends on the planets they were to invade. Very possible. But Kraj’s cutthroats were used to working on solid citizens, one dimensional peasants who mistook the painted flats and props of their existence as the only reality. Their world was the only real world, their town the really best town. Pull them out of the familiar environment and put pressure on their minds and their brains ran out of their ears like jelly. Jelly men, prey for the gray men.

  Not noble, upright, flexible, dishonest, chameleon-like Slippery Jim diGriz. Man of a thousand faces, familiar of a hundred cultures, linguistically competent in scores of tongues. And they wanted to louse up my reality? It made me laugh. I laughed.

  I not only laughed but I scampered and danced. I ran in circles shouting Yippee! and Victory! and other cries of happiness. Because of my collar and cable I was forced to run in circles but I found that I could vary this by swinging in circles. The cable was too thin to climb, deliberately designed so I am sure, but I could coil a loop of it and hang from this. I made the loop as high above my head as I could reach, grabbed it, kicked off and swung freely. At the bottom of the swing I kicked hard and went higher. Great fun. Until my hand slipped and the loop unlooped.