The doctor sighed. "Some chaps with everything wrong can't be bothered with elementary medical care, while the healthiest individual I've seen in years— But I suppose I shouldn't discourage you."
Hasselborg went out to Woolwich for an hour's pistol practice at the range; then back to arrange with a colleague to take over his two pending fraud cases. Then home to his apartment to hang on the telephone until he got through to Yussuf Batruni, who waxed emotional all the way from Aleppo: "My boy, my boy, it is noble of you—"
Then he took Alexandra Garshin Fallon out to dinner again, saying: "Last date, chum."
"So soon?"
"Yep; I'd rather wait till a later ship, but I'm only the third engineer of my soul; Joe Batruni's the captain. I drop you right after we sheathe our fangs and go home to pack."
"Let me come around to help you."
"No. Sorry." He smiled to counteract her hurt look. "I can't, you know; might give away trade secrets."
"Oh," she said.
He knew that wasn't the real reason. The reason was that he was falling in love with her, and he was not sure he could keep his mind on packing if—
Just as well he was going, he thought. The idea wormed into his mind that it would be so easy to fail to find Fallon and his light-o'-love, and then come back and have Alexandra to himself— No! While he didn't consider himself a Galahad of purity, he still had his code. And although he had witnessed most of the delinquencies of mankind in the course of his career, and had partaken of some of them, he was still a bit of a fanatic on the subject of wife-stealing. With reason.
He laid out on his bed one Webley & Scott six-millimeter twenty-shot automatic pistol, one blackjack, one set of brass knuckles, one pair of handcuffs, one pocket camera, one WF standard police fingerprint recording apparatus, one pencil flashlight, one two-way pocket radio set, one portable wire-recorder set, one armor vest, one infrared scanning and receiving apparatus—pocket size—one set of capsules containing various gases and explosives, which would accomplish anything from putting an audience to sleep to blowing a safe, one box of knockout drops, a pick-lock, a supply of cigars, a notebook, and pills: vitamin, mineral, longevity, headache, constipation, cold—and ammunition for all this equipment: HV cartridges, camera film, notebook fillers, and so on. The most valuable of the equipment he stowed in his pockets until his suit began to look lumpy. The rest he packed.
Alexandra came out to Waddon to see him off, saying: "I wish I were going with you."
He supposed she did not know she was turning the knife in the wound, so he smiled amiably. "Almost wish you were, too. Wouldn't do, of course. But I'll think of you. If you get tired of waiting around for Tony and me, you can always go in trance or—" He meant—ditch Fallon and go her way, but thought better of saying so.
"Speck in my eye." She dabbed at the optic with a handkerchief a little larger than a postage stamp. "Gone now."
"Look here, could I have that handkerchief?"
"What for?"
"Why—uh—just to take along." He grinned to hide his embarrassment. "In spring, when woods are getting green, I'll try and tell you what I mean. In summer, when the days are long, perhaps you'll understand the song."
"Why Victor, you're sentimental!"
"Uh-huh, but speak it not in Gath. It would ruin my professional reputation." They shook hands formally, Hasselborg finding it hard to keep up his pose of guileless geniality. "Good-by, Alexandra."
The Barcelona plane whizzed down the catapult strip and off the field in a cloud of smoke.
II.
While Hasselborg pondered the case on his way to Barcelona, it occurred to him that the fugitive pair might have resorted to some human version of the old shell game, like arranging with another pair of passengers to switch identities after they got to Pluto and then returning to Earth or one of the other inner planets under their assumed names. They might get away with such a dodge, because their prints would not be checked once they had left Barcelona. Having no wish to spend years chasing them through the Galaxy as if they were a pair of rather unholy grails, he looked up the investigating firm of Montejo and Durruti in Barcelona and arranged for them to cover all incoming spaceships until further notice.
Then he sent a last-minute post card to Alexandra—not exactly a professional thing to do, he told himself, but he might be dead before he returned—and boarded the Coronado for Pluto.
There were nine passengers besides Victor Hasselborg, who found himself bunking with one Chuen Liao-dz. They were all squeezed into the little honeycomb of passenger compartments in the nose, below the control compartments and above the cargo and the vast mass of fuel and machinery that occupied nine-tenths of the craft.
After an ineffective effort to unpack his belongings at the same time that Chuen unpacked his—without disclosing the professional equipment—Hasselborg said: "Look here, chum, suppose I lie on the bunk while you unpack; then we trade off?"
"Thank you," said Chuen, a short, thick, dish-faced man with coarse black hair turning gray. "You turn crank on the end of your bunk, and the end comes up like a hospital bed. What's your line, Mr. Hassel-borg?"
"Insurance investigator. What's yours?"
"Ah—I'm economic official to the Chinese government. A very dull person, I assure you. First trip?"
"Uh-huh."
"Then—ah—I suppose you know your instructions for takeoff?"
"Sure. Lie down when I hear the warning bell, et cetera."
"That's right. You'll find exercise compartment down the passageway to the right. Better sign up for one hour out of every twenty-four, subjective time. It'll keep you from going mad from boredom."
That proved no overstatement. With every cubic centimeter accounted for, there were no ports to look out of and no deck space for strolling. Even the minute passenger list ate in two shifts in the tiny compartment that served as lounge the rest of the time for whichever half of the passengers had been lucky enough to preempt the available seats.
When the ship had risen above the plane of the ecliptic and had cut its acceleration back to 1.25 G, Hasselborg played cards, pulled on weights in the exercise room—-just big enough to let him do so without barking his knuckles—and pried into the lives of his fellow passengers. Some proved garrulous and transparent; others opaque and taciturn. He found his roommate, oddly enough, to be loquacious and opaque at the same time. When Chuen was asked what official business he was on, he would reply, vaguely:
"Ah—just looking into possibilities of high-grade imports and exports. No, nothing definite; I shall have to decide on the ground. Only goods of highest quality for a given mass can be handled, you know—"
Hasselborg decided, more in fun than in earnest, that Chuen was really a plain-clothes agent either of China or of the W.F. If such were the case, however, it would do no good to say: "See here, old man, aren't you a cop?" One of the more dismal facts about the profession was that you had to spend so much time playing dumb.
This monotonous half-life, bounded by bare bulkheads and punctuated by bells that reminded the sluggish appetite that the time had come for another meal, continued for days until the warning bell told him they were nearing Pluto. Hours later the pressure of deceleration let up and the loud-speaker in the wall said: "Passageiros sai, por favor!"
Suitcase in hand, Hasselborg followed Chuen down the inclosed ramp that had been attached to the ship's side. As usual there was nothing to see; space travel was no game for a claustrophobe. The ramp moved slightly with the weight of the people walking down it.