The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection by Harry Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

office door with two minutes to spare. I blankedthe windows, turned on the lights – then headed for the bar.
    Cold beer has never tasted better. The first one never even touched the sides of my throat and sizzled when it hit my stomach. I sipped the second as I tore the tab on a dinpac of barbecued ribs of porcuswine. As soon as the steam whistled through the venthole I ripped open the lid of the stretched pack and pulled out a rib the lengthof my arm. Yum!
    Showered, depilated and wrapped around a third beer I began to feel much better. ‘On,’ I told the terminal, then punched into the comnet. My instructions were simple; all newspaper records on the planet for the last fifty years, all references to a criminal named The Bishop, check for redundancies around the same date and don’t give me any duplicates. Print.
    Before I had pickedup my beer again the first sheets were sliding out of the fax. The top sheet was the most recent – and it was ten years old. A not too interesting item from a city on the other side of the planet, Decalogg. The police had picked up an elderly citizen in a low bar who claimed that he was TheBishop. However it had turned out to be a case of senile dementia and the suspect had been ushered backto the retirement home from which he had taken a walk. I picked up the next item.
    I tired towards morning and took a nap in the filing cabinet which turned into a bed when ordered to do so. In the grey light of dawn, helped by a large black coffee, I finished placing the last sheet into the pattern that spread across the floor. Rosy sunlight washed across it. I turned off the lights and tappedthe stylo against my teeth while I studied the pattern.
    Interesting. A criminal who brags about his crimes. Who leaves a little drawing of a bishop after scarpering with his loot. A simple design – easy enough to copy. Which I did. I held it out at arm’s length and admired it.

    The first bishop had been found in the empty till of an automated liquor store sixty-eight years ago. If The Bishop had started his career of crime as a teenager, as I have done, that would put him in his eighties now. A comfortable age to be, since life expectancy has now been pushed up to a century and a half. But what had happened to him to explain the long silence? Over fifteen years hadpassed since he had left his last calling card. I numbered off the possibilities on my fingers.
    ‘Number one, and a chance always to be considered, is that he has snuffed it. In which case I can do nothing so let us forget about that.
    ‘Two, he could have gone offplanet and be pursuing his life of crime among the stars. If so, forget it like number one. I need a lot more golden bucks, and experience,before I try my hand on other worlds.
    ‘Three, he has gone into retirement to spend his ill-gotten gains – in which case more power to him. Or four, he has changed rackets and stopped leaving his spoor at every job.’
    I sat back smugly and sipped the coffee. If it were three or four I had a chance of finding him. He had certainly had a busy career before the years of silence; I looked at the listwith appreciation. Plane theft, car theft, bank emptying. And more and more. All of the crimes involving moving bucks from someone else’s pockets to his pockets. Or real property that could be sold quickly, with forged identification, for more bucks. And he had never been caught, that was the best part of it. Here was the man who could be my mentor, my tutor, my university of crime – who wouldone day issue a diploma of deviltry that would eventually admit me to the golden acres I so coveted.
    But how could I find him if the united police forces of an entire world, over a period of decades, had never been able to lay a finger on him? An interesting question.
    So interesting that I could see no easy answer. I decided to let my subconscious work on this problem for a bit, so I pushedsome synapses aside and let the whole thing slip down into my