Stainless Steel Rat (9)

For novel upon novel, Slippery Jim DiGriz—the Stainless Steel Rat—has outfoxed the forces of conventionality, cutting a stylish swathe through dozens of star systems.

Now, Slippery Jim and his beautiful wife, Angelina, find themselves becalmed on a painfully boring backwater planet, with nothing to do but practice their skills at computer crime.

Then they meet a billionaire who claims to be 40,000 years old… who offers them millions of credits to investigate a string of unsolved interstellar bank robberies. Robberies which, it turns out, always happen when the circus is nearby…

In a sense, the Stainless Steel Rat has always been a high-wire performer. Now, as he infiltrates the world of the galactic big top, he’s taking the role to extremes… and drawing the attention of more dangerous ringmasters and strongmen than he ever expected.

Will this be his final show? Has Slippery Jim finally leapt for his last trapeze? Naah.

In book after book, one outrageous adventure after another, Harry Harrison has chronicled the wild and fast-paced exploits of the universe’s greatest thief and con artist: Slippery Jim diGriz, alias the Stainless Steel Rat. Now the Rat returns in his most devilish caper yet. DiGriz is strenuously fighting boredom on a ritzy pleasure planet when his beloved wife, Angelina, disappears while visiting the Temple of Eternal Truth, an enigmatic institution that promises its wealthy patrons a sneak peek at Heaven—for a price. The Temple’s scam offends that Rat’s professional sensibilities. It’s one thing to fleece the idle rich of their cash; stealing their souls is something else entirely. Besides, he wants his wife back. DiGriz immediately calls in the troops, including his twin sons, Bolivar and James, and a sexy superspy named Sybil. With his friends and family at his side, and armed with his own survival ability and experience, he thinks he’s ready for anything, but he never expects to find himself banished to Hell, complete with man-eating devils with horns and pointed tails. After years of gleeful criminality, has divine judgment caught up with the Rat at last? Of course not.

Harry Harrison’s bestselling Stainless Steel Rat series has earned rave reviews and a legion of fans, and has catapulted the Rat himself, an antisocial rule breaker in an overcivilized world, to fame, if not fortune. Now the fabled futuristic criminal is back, in the long-awaited new adventure of intergalactic danger, intrigue, and—after a fashion—rock stardom. DiGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact—the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration. For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself—a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed… or die. Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale—a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear. But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet… which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing. Zany, irreverent, and hilarious, the Stainless Steel Rat series continues as the most entertaining futuristic performance ever staged. And in The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues Harry Harrison takes the adventure to new levels of inventiveness and delight.

In a galaxy where civilization covers every world with steel and ferroconcrete, only a very special man can break all the rules and still stay free. A man who moves through the rafters of society like a rat. A Stainless Steel Rat… And when the galaxy goes to war, it needs special men. That’s when The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. The 25th century’s most dangerous outlaw is back—and this time it means war! Slippery Jim diGriz, better known as the Stainless Steel Rat, is seeking revenge for the murder of his mentor-in-crime, the fabled archcriminal known as The Bishop. His trail leads to Nevenkebla and the iron-fisted dictator General Zennor—the kind of man who’d sell his own mother into slavery just to see the expression on her face. Now in the uniform of a Nevenkeblan soldier, Jim discovers Zennor’s vile plan to enslave a defenseless planet. Only a man with a Special code of honor—only a Stainless Steel Rat—can save the world from the invading horde.

The Stainless Steel rat is back! Slippery Jim diGriz, the future’s most lovable, laughable, larcenous conman turned counterspy, returns for yet another high-tension mission.

This time the Special Corps has given the Rat a daring assignment—liberate a backward tourist planet from the clutches of an aging dictator. With his lovely but lethal wife, Angelina, and his two stalwart sons, James and Bolivar, diGriz pits ballots against bullets in the fight for freedom. He's vowed to restore truth, justice, and democracy to the world of Parisio-Aqui, if he has to lie, cheat, and steal to do it.

James Bolivar diGriz, criminal-virtuoso-turned-undercover-agent, had never been one to quail in the face of danger. Therefore, when his lovely, larcenous wife, Angelina, was kidnapped by the cruelest organization in the galaxy—Interstellar Internal and External Revenue (IIER)—he wasted no time in formulating a scheme to free her.

Unfortunately, even though he had the aid of his talented sons, James and Bolivar (whom he'd arranged to have graduate a little ahead of time from the Dorsky Military Boarding School and Penitentiary), things didn't go according to plan. The trio broke into IIER's headquarters easily enough, but they set off an alarm in the process—which not only meant 'that Angelina's rescue had to be postponed, but also that the boys had to wipe clean the family's tax records on their own while their father created an appropriate diversion.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable escapade for the senior stainless steel rat, and “Slippery Jim's” exhilaration was not diminished when, some time later, he was taken into custody. But the fun stopped there. For instead of hauling him off to prison, diGriz's captors took him to an unfamiliar building across town…where his boss, Harold Inskipp—the hard-nosed, humorless head of the Interplanetary Special Corps—was waiting to hand him a tricky, very possibly suicidal assignment.

After grudgingly assuring Jim that Angelina was out of jail, Inskipp outlined the much more serious problem currently facing the Corps. Asatellite base which had been hosting a major meeting of the League Navy chiefs of staff had vanished without a trace, leaving League defenses in a dangerously disorganized state. It was up to diGriz to find out what had happened in the satellite, and who was responsible.

The first part of the puzzle wasn't at all difficult for him to solve. A quick jump backward in time revealed that the satellite and its occupants had been swallowed by a huge, toothy something. But when it came to following the something back to its home base, the situation became a bit more hairy…or rather, scaly. Because the attack on the satellite was merely the first move in what was destined to become an all-out intergalactic war—between Mankind and an unholy union of slimy, stalk-eyed, multi-limbed and oozy-tentacled alien races…who had decided that human beings were just too dry and ugly to exist!

The second adventure of slippery Jim diGriz the Robin Hood of the far future, robbing the rich to give to the even richer… himself.

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.