The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

Harry Harrison published his first science-fiction story “Into the Rocks” in 1951. Years passed—Harrison became a famous writer, one of the pillars of the genre, the author of dozens of novels and many hundreds of stories.

1. The Alien’s Death Agony
John Garth was a shopkeeper who did not believe in God, and he did not expect that a Christian missionary, Father Mark, would arrive on the planet Wesker. Garth’s friend, a small Wesker amphibian Itin, and other Wesker inhabitants watched the arrival of Father Mark closely. These simple, uneducated creatures of the Stone Age managed up to that point to live without even the beginnings of religion. The atheist Garth gave them books about the structure of the universe, but there was nothing about God. Therefore, in order to come to God, the inhabitants of Wesker decided to carry out a certain experiment.

2. The Outcast
On the planet Delamonda, a single passenger boarded Captain Cortar’s ship. Even at the spaceport, an enraged crowd had thrown stones at him; aboard the vessel, the other passengers recognized in him the executioner Lima—a criminal responsible for more than two hundred victims of lethal medical experiments. Lima infected his victims with an incurable, contagious form of lung cancer, and the court forbade him from practicing medicine again under penalty of death.

3. Jack of All Trades
Who should be sent to repair an old lighthouse that had failed? Of course, the very best repairman of hyperspace lighthouses. His surprise was great when he arrived and saw that the lizard-like natives had not only climbed into the lighthouse—they had set up a temple in it, causing a small religious war. He had to take on a lizard’s form and urgently save the situation.

4. The Law’s Hand
In a backwater town called Nineport, near the spaceport, a robot policeman is sent for field tests. In the established provincial relationships, its appearance does not evoke much enthusiasm in anyone; besides, the instructions for operating it—over a thousand pages—are not easy to master.

And then this $120,000 machine began sweeping floors, cleaning cells, binding paperwork—until suddenly it was needed for someone to go to an incident. With no better option, they sent the robot… Now crime is over in Nineport.

5. Crime
What laws can be invented under the pressure of overpopulation from which you can no longer escape…

Benedict Vernall was guilty of the criminal birth of a child, having exceeded the legal maximum—two children. A crowd of volunteers, ready to fulfill their civic duty, gathered at his house…

6. The Untamable Planet
At a hotel on the planet Cassilia, a professional player Yazon dinalt receives an offer he cannot refuse… The situation develops in such a way that soon he ends up on the planet Pyrrh—a planet where colonists wage the harshest struggle against the animal and plant life of that world. A fight to the death…