The Stainless Steel Rat Returns Page 5

  Our acceleration couches were waiting. Strapping in took but a moment. Angelina seized my hand and squeezed it happily. I smiled hypocritically and the spacer trembled as the engines rumbled to life.

  Mechanistria here we come . . .

  As soon as the acceleration ceased I unbuckled and headed—purely by reflex—towards the newly installed bar.

  “Hitting the sauce early are we . . . ?” the chill voice of my beloved sounded in my ear. I turned towards her, discarded my glass and nodded grimly.

  “You’re right, of course. I have been feeling sorry for myself and I apologize. To work! You’ll let me know when it’s time for the cocktail hour.”

  “I will. And now I’m going to find Pinky! I’m sure that takeoff terrified her.”

  “I’m off to the bridge.”

  We parted. I climbed the stairs. Pining for that lost drink. Admit it, Jim. You’re glugging the booze down because, truthfully, you’re as useful as a fifth wheel on this trip. With a fine captain, a stout engineer—and a fully automated spacer—you’re out of a job.

  I went onto the bridge and Kirpal waved a cheerful greeting.

  “The money for the overhaul was well spent. We are aligning now for our course and all systems are go—”

  His enthusiastic report was interrupted by a crackling eructation from the wall speaker.

  “Stramm here. We’re having a little problem . . .”

  “Boss diGriz is on the way!” I said into the mike, as I waved Kirpal back into his seat.

  “You’re needed here. I’ll find out what’s happening and report back.”

  “You’re the boss, Boss.” He sat back down.

  I whistled as I headed for the engine room, drink and depression forgotten as I got my teeth into the bit.

  I found Stramm staring gloomily at a large illuminated gauge set among the other readouts. He tapped it and sighed heavily.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Trouble.” In a voice heavy with gloom.

  “Tell.”

  He did. In far too great technical detail. Like all engineers with a captive audience.

  “As you know this ship is a bit of an antique. It has no levitation field for takeoff and landing.”

  “But we took off!”

  “With great effort. When is the last time you used an acceleration couch?”

  “In the military . . .”

  “Right. All modern civilian ships use acceleration neutralizers.”

  “But we did take off . . .”

  “We did. But we are going to have a bit of trouble landing.”

  “Explain!”

  He tapped the gauge again.

  “Reads full. It’s not. I began to think about how I found that swine Rifuti down here. I began to wonder if he had been up to any more sabotage as well. Then I checked this reaction mass tank for the atomic thrust jets. We had to use some of the mass for takeoff, but this gauge read full. That couldn’t be right. So I used the override and reset—like this.”

  The needle quivered and jumped to one extreme and back to the other. Then slowly moved a short distance up the dial and stopped.

  “Meaning?”

  “Rifuti dumped most of the tank. We had enough mass left for takeoff and a bit left over. But there is not enough for deceleration when we have to land.”

  “Trapped in space! Doomed to roam the stars forever . . . !”

  “Not quite. But we’ll have to scout about and find a solar orbiting satellite station where we can take on more reaction mass.”

  “What is that?”

  “Water.”

  Put the old thinking cap on Jim.

  “Don’t we have more water aboard?”

  “We do. But not a lot. We can keep drinking—or use it to land.”

  “Not much of a choice,”

  I chewed my lip—always a helpful cudgel for thought. But all I did was hurt my lip. Think, Jim!

  “Is water the only reaction mass that we can use?”

  “No, but it’s the easiest to handle in bulk. Throw any mass away fast enough and you get a reactive force.”

  Newton’s first law: you learned it in school. But what else besides water could we use . . . ?

  With the question came the answer!

  “Tell me, Stramm, what is it they always got an awful lot of down on the farm?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know—I’m a city lad. But . . . !” His eyes bulged—and then he smiled broadly. “You can throw anything away!”

  “Right! So this will be the first spacer to land using . . .”

  “Pig Poo Power!”

  I was quite pleased with myself for this keen bit of lateral thinking. Stramm was rubbing his lantern jaw, deep in thought.

  “Logistics,” he muttered, “logistics . . .”

  “Not a problem. Call a specialist.”

  I grabbed the ship’s phone, switched to all compartments, spoke in my most authoritarian voice.

  “Now hear this. Will Elmo report to the engine room at once. Elmo needed below.”

  I was examining the seals on the tank’s inspection hatch when he arrived, brimming with curiosity. This instantly became bucolic bliss when the nature of my request became clear.

  “Why that is shore a great idea, Cousin Jim. I admit that this was getting to be a problem what with . . .”

  “Work first, explain later. You will need buckets and wheelbarrows, shovels and pitchforks . . .”

  “We got all them things.” He rushed off, his voice dying in the distance. “When the boys hear about this they will be happier than swine with their trotters in a trough!”

  It was quite easy to visualize what came next with the boys, and I wanted none of it.

  “I leave you in control of the situation, stout engineer Stramm. Until things have been . . . finalized . . . I should avoid the corridors between here and the sty deck. Should there be any more problems please contact me on the bridge.”

  I fled. Buckets and barrows and hearty earthy oaths were already sounding in the distance. I joined Kirpal and accepted his kind offer of a cup of tea. His placid smile turned to a scowl when I told him about Rifuti’s latest perfidy.

  “I shall radio details to the planetary police. They may grab him before he goes off-planet.”

  “A possible chance,” I muttered. Sure that he would long be gone.

  A bell on Kirpal’s computer pinged and he put his cup down. He muttered to himself, punched in some more figures and nodded happily when a throaty buzzer sounded.

  “Good. Course alignment entered and correct.” He pressed a large red button. “Done. We’re beginning our first Bloat.”

  I scratched my finger in my ear, not having heard right.

  “Earwax maybe. I, ha-ha, did not hear right. For a moment there I thought you said bloat!”

  “I did. This spacer isn’t exactly new . . .”

  As he said this his face had the same gloomy expression as that of engineer Stramm when he talked about the ship. His voice echoed from the depths of depression.

  “You’ve seen what antiques we have for landing jets. Well, the ship’s main drive is not much better.”

  “No Faster Than Light Drive?”

  “Hardly. We have what is an ancient, long-superseded, outdated and archaic form of transportation called the Bloater Drive.”

  My finger quivered toward my ear—but I resisted. “Would you mind, sort of, you know, explaining that in a bit more detail?”

  “Of course.” He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from a drawer in the console and put them on, then steepled his fingers before him. Why did I think that he had been a professor in one of his many incarnations? “How acquainted are you with nuclear physics?”

  “Use words of one syllable—or less!—and I’ll be able to follow you.”

  He nodded gloomily and sighed. I could hear his thoughts: another microcephalic.

  “Have you heard of molecular binding energies?”

  “Positively! I
have used a molebinding device most successfully in the past.” In the profitable pursuit of crime, I neglected to add.

  “Then you are aware of molecular theory. In this reaction molecular binding energy is weakened so that another molecule can actually penetrate the molecules in an existing structure. The Bloater Drive works like this as well, only on a far greater scale—to the square of two million in fact—with results equal to the forces released. It permits the ship’s molecules to expand exponentially until they are literally approaching light years apart.”

  I wish I had some of what he was smoking!

  “You can’t be serious?”

  “Regretfully, I am. The Bloat operates along the central axis AB. With no observable motion of point A and continual acceleration of point B . . .”

  My head was beginning to hurt. “Simplification I beg!”

  The captain took the steel glasses off. “The ship gets bigger and longer in one direction.”

  “Understood!”

  “So, when one end of the ship is at its destination it begins to shrink again—from that direction. Like stretching a rubber band between your hands. You pull wide with your right hand. Then bring your left hand over after it. The stretched band contracts back to normal size. But it is now in a new place. The same way that the expanded ship contracts. This is done until the ship is small again, only now it is at the new location in space.”

  The professor put his glasses back on, scowling at the stupidity of the untutored.

  “That’s why it is named the Bloater Drive. It also uses a great deal of power and is very inaccurate. After it arrives at the target, star observations are made, a new course is calculated and the next Bloat is made. Usually a number of these are needed.”

  “Well, thanks . . .” But I was too late. He was in full Bloater Drive now!

  “Gravitons are responsible. The graviton is an elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity and molecular adhesion in the framework of the quantum field theory. The graviton is massless, because the gravitational force must have unlimited range, and must have spin of two because gravity is a second-rank tensor field.”

  I was feeling third rank myself by this time and badly in need of rescue.

  “And how is all this powered?” I asked desperately, maybe forcing a change in subject.

  “I explained that in detail that I thought was quite clear. Gravitons are orientated in the tensor field as you can see here.”

  He pointed to a glowing screen, looked away, then pulled his attention back to it sharply. His jaw fell and he reached out and almost tapped it. Grimly he whipped off his steel glasses and thumbed a switch, spoke sharply and abruptly.

  “Engineer Stramm to bridge—code red.”

  THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME I had seen our highly efficient captain loose his cool. He punched the buttons angrily, ran a quick program in the computer—growling under his breath—then wiped it from the screen with a muttered curse. He became even more active when Stramm hurried in. They bashed at the control console, ran equations. Even tapped dials.

  “Something wrong guys?” I asked.

  I must say that Captain Singh exercised great self-control and did not strike me down on the spot.

  “Gravitons . . .” Stramm muttered darkly and they sighed in mutual disgust.

  “Might I ask you to expand on that just a bit?”

  “That treacherous swine Rifuti . . .” The captain growled. Then grabbed his self-control and was in command again.

  “More sabotage. He was the wily one, making acts of double sabotage in the hope that when we were dealing with one we wouldn’t notice his second dark deed.” He tapped a meter. “He bled off over eighty percent of our gravitons.”

  “Weren’t they seen?”

  “Hardly. Since they are invisible, infinitesimal and exist only in quantum terms. The ground might be heavier for a few microseconds before they vanished into the planet’s core.”

  “So . . . what do we do?”

  “Hope there is a graviton refueling depot waiting at the other end—when we finish our Bloat.”

  “They are not very common.” Stramm said, adding to the general gloom. “The collection stations are located on massive high-G planets where there are plenty of gravitons lying around.” He raised his finger and smiled. “But we do have a graviton concentrator on the engine room!”

  “I’ve seen it,” the captain said, gloomily shaking his head. “It’s an antique like everything else on this ship. Working flat out, on a one-G planet, it would take about two years to collect enough for our needs. Three months on a three-G planet would be fine. Except we would all be dead.”

  I dropped the obvious question into the growing silence.

  “Then . . . what shall we do?”

  Captain Singh took himself in hand—sat up straight and shook himself like a dog.

  “We’ll get out of this.” He looked at his watch. “Our first Bloat will end in about five hours when we are scheduled to make a navigation check. We’ll have to forget about getting to Mechanistria until we have had the opportunity to refuel.”

  “Where we will end up after the first Bloat?”

  “Hopefully we will be close to a solar system that contains a single inhabited planet named Floradora.”

  “Sounds nice!” I said chipperly.

  “The cheerful names usually stand for very repellent planets,” Stramm said, bringing the gloom level back up again. The captain read from the screen.

  “Inhabited planet. Early technical world type Alpha-X. No orbiting satellites or space stations at time of survey.”

  “When did this survey take place?” Stramm asked.

  “Four hundred and two years ago come next Groundhog Day.”

  “Gosh, a lot could happen in that time!” I said brightly. This sally was greeted with cold silence. The captain hammered at a program he was running. When he finished he actually sat back and smiled.

  “I estimate that when this first Bloat ends we will have enough gravitons for two more Bloats of the same distance.” The smile vanished. “I hope we will be able to load gravitons at one of the two destinations.” His voice grew cold. “If not, be prepared for quite a long visit.”

  I could think of no snappy answer to that. But I did have an important question.

  “Instead of carrying on this course, why don’t we simply return to Moolaplenty?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that simple. When the Bloater Drive is in operation it leaves a virtual tunnel through interstellar space. These tunnels gradually die away, but sometimes take years to disperse. But they are easily detected and avoided.”

  “Then there is no way of going back?”

  “Not the way we came. And we don’t have enough gravitons for a more circuitous course.”

  I went back to our cabin under a cloud of gloom. I was mixing a lethal weapons-grade cocktail when I heard soft footsteps and the clatter of little trotters. I doubled the quantity of drink and filled a bowl with curry puffs. I cooled the drink mixture and poured it into two glasses over ice.

  Pinky sniffed the air and burbled happily. I threw her a puff.

  Angelina raised an eyebrow at the sight of the drinks.

  “Are we celebrating?”

  “Yes and no,” I said handing her a glass. “Yes we are celebrating a successful takeoff and first Bloat—”

  “How many of these have you had?”

  “Like you, this is my first. Here’s to a successful journey.” I raised my glass and drank deep.

  “But . . . ?”

  “There are difficult times ahead. Sit, drink, nibble a puff. And I’ll explain.”

  She listened in attentive silence to my tale of woe. In the end she nodded and held out her glass for a refill. She sipped and, in a steely voice, said, “I should have killed Rifuti when I had a chance. At least I sent a message to the Moolaplenty police about his first sabotage. Someday I will kill him. But that’s for the future—after we have refilled th
e graviton tank.”

  “Have another curry puff,” I said extending the bowl. Still glaring she took one, crunching down hard on it as though it were Rifuti’s neck. An inquiring snuffle drew her attention and she fed one to Pinky.

  “What’s this Floradora planet like?”

  “Don’t know. All contact was apparently lost during the breakdown and the records were wiped.”

  “We’ll just have to play it by ear.”

  She smiled. “I hate to say it, Jim, but I suddenly realized that I have had it with our pleasure planet sojourn. It will be a relief to see a new world. To deal with whatever problems come up.”

  The nature of the problems we might face was obvious when a small and wicked-looking knife appeared in her hand. She tested the blade delicately with a fingertip, frowned slightly and went into the kitchen. She returned with an atomic sharpener, which put a molecule-wide edge on the blade. Then smiled cheerily as, with a quick swipe, the blade cut a good chunk out of the metal table. “I think Floradora will be fun!”

  We clinked glasses happily—smiling at each other at the same time.

  THE DAYS PASSED SWIFTLY AS the end of the first Bloat approached. But the air seemed to smell sweeter—despite a certain lingering memory of the farmyard, although the constant topping up of the reaction mass tank did tend to improve this. The thought of more interesting and attractive times to come made the food taste better, the drink stronger, the future more appealing.

  We were just finishing our evening meal when Captain Singh’s voice crackled from the speakers.

  “Boss Jim to the bridge. Unbloating has begun.”

  Angelina smiled and we even held hands as we climbed the stairs. We didn’t know what to expect from this new world, but we did know that life was sure to be more interesting in the very near future.

  “That’s the primary,” Kirpal said, pointing to a star in the center of the screen. “I’m holding position here while I get off a signal to Interstellar Emergency.”

  Angelina declined a visit to the communications room and went to see after Pinky. I followed Kirpal and watched while he switched on comm power.

  “It will take a short time to align . . .”

  I don’t know if it aligned or not, but there was a brief thudding sound. Followed by a great gout of flame that blew the front panel off. Smoke billowed out as alarm bells sounded throughout the ship.