The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell
Harry Harrison
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0752817191
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Brand new adventure of slippery Jim DiGriz, the SF superhero the TLS compared to James Bond and Flash Gordon and the Daily Telegraph, called the Monty Python of the spaceways. While our anti-hero is taking it easy on the resort planet Lussouso, his wife Angelina and her cavorting pals are at the temple ofEternal Truth, being bamboozled into believing that at last they can buy their way into heaven. When Angelina asks 1 pertinent question too many, Slippery Jim suddenly finds himself without a wife. Within the Temple of Eternal Truth lie the doors to Heaven and Hell - to find Angelina, Jim and his twin sons will have to break down those doors and explore the worlds behind them. In outer space, the devil makes work for idle hands.
followed us, but a fast—moving target is hard to hit. I slid, gasping, into the lee of a giant boulder, saw that Sybil had reached shelter as well. “Where’s the sniper?” she called out. “Top of the slope we were climbing. I had a quick glimpse, just something moving.” “Any particular color?” “The local favorite.” “Next?” “Get our breath back. Then spread out and hunt the hunter. Sorry but I dropped our supplies. We’ll worry about that later. After we find this redskin. All right with you?”
sorry I asked. He explained at great and boring length. Gravity, air pressure, oxygen tension, speed of light, all that was okay. But there was too much more of electron spin, chaos dispersion, water quality, sewage disposal, fractal fracture and such. When he got on to analysis of atmospheric components I stopped him. “What was that you said about some kind of gas?” He pointed to the analysis bar on the screen. “This. A compound I have never seen before, so it has no name. I call it
Paradise, which is still being built. I better keep on looking. So I just popped back for a beer and to let you know what was going on. A little trouble there, nothing to mention. If Angelina should ask about me say that everything is going fine. Now—can you send me back, but not quite to the same spot if you don’t mind?” “Not a problem since I have calibrated the spherical locator during your absence. Would a kilometer laterally do?” “Fine.” I opened the garage door a crack, saw only blue sky
he will tell us—” “I’ll tell you now!” I shouted, jumping about to face them and neatly clicking my heels in the air as I did. “Your computer is absolutely right, Professor, and you should have more respect for its conclusions. Those universes will always be in the same place. As soon as we realize that, why the answer becomes obvious. We must look for the real reason why you cannot access those universes. Do you know what that is?” I had them now, professorial jaws gaping, heads shaking,
he said. “Tell me about it, Professor Slakey. Convince me and perhaps I will consider it.” “Entropy,” he said sinking automatically into professorial didactic lecture mode. “That is my field of expertise, as you know. But you do not know how far I have advanced my knowledge, or to what lengths my research has gone. In the beginning was the theory. I did a mathematical analysis of the transuranic elements. I found that as the atomic numbers became higher the rate of entropy slowed. By very