What could I say?
His voice was quieter, more sympathetic. “Would you have arrested her if we hadn’t moved in?” That was the question.
“I don’t know,” was all I could say.
“Well I damn well knew what I was going to do,” he said with the old venom. “So I did it. The plot is well nipped before it could bud and our multiple murderess is offplanet by now.”
“Let her go!” I shouted as I grabbed him by the front of the jacket and swung him free of the ground and shook him. “Let her go I tell you!”
“Would you turn her loose again—the way she is?” was all he answered.
Would I? I suppose I wouldn’t. I dropped him while I was thinking about it and he straightened out the wrinkles in the front of his suit.
“This has been a rough assignment for you,” he said as he started to put the flask away. “At times there can be a very thin line between right and wrong. If you are emotionally involved the line is almost impossible to see.”
“What will happen to her?” I asked.
He hesitated before he answered. “The truth—for a change,” I told him.
“All right, the truth. No promises—but the psych boys might be able to do something with her. If they can find the cause of the basic aberration. But that can be impossible to find at times.”
“Not in this case—I can tell them.”
He looked surprised at that, giving me some small satisfaction.
“In that case there might be a chance. I’ll give positive orders that everything is to be tried before they even consider anything like personality removal. If that is done she is just another body, of which there are plenty in the galaxy. Sentenced to death she’s just another corpse—of which there is an equal multitude.”
I grabbed the flask away from him before it reached his pocket, and opened it. “I know you Inskipp,” I said as I poured. “You’re a born recruiting sergeant. When you lick them—make them join.”
“What else,” he said. “She’d make a great agent.”
“We’d make a great team,” I told him and we raised our cups.
“Here’s to crime.”
Colophon
The Stainless Steel Rat
was published in 1961 by
Harry Harrison.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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Robin Whittleton,
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Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Internet Archive.
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Tableau no. 1,
a painting completed in 1913 by
Piet Mondrian.
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