"A solid month. I expect. His Dignity's enemy seems to have anticipated an attempt to scrag him. He's a clever devil," Hautley said, permitting a note of professional admiration to seep into the clinical detachment of his cool tones, as he extemporized with suave eloquence. "A surgeon has extracted the ulna bone from the right forearm. An aluminum tube has been inserted in its place, a tube packed with those new molecule-sized ultratransistors and micro-printed circuits. The miniscule gadgetry projects a field of force impervious to any material object larger than a proton—transparent, in fact, only to those more harmless octaves of the electro-magnetic spectrum such as normal gravity, average extremes of heat and light. This force shell completely armors his body—"
"Space! How does the poor bastard breathe?" Barsine asked, fascinated. Hautley's agile wits raced keenly.
"Air, within his self-imposed prison, is manufactured and re-processed by a tiny recycling plant concealed in the left tibia, which has also been replaced with an aluminum tube," he said glibly. She marvelled.
"Clever devil! With all that hardware clanking around in his innards, I should he'd be afraid of getting the hiccups and joggling something loose!"
He smiled at her jape.
"Or of taking a shower! Suppose he short-circuited the old tibia there, eh? Ha ha!"
"Ha," he joined her, "ha."
"So how do you plan to clobber ol' invulnerable—if you don't mind a mere amateur prying into, snort, snort, 'Professional' secrets?"
Did he detect a note of unseemly levity in her query?
Was it possible Barsine Torsche was not taken in?
He permitted a worrisome frown to crinkle the bland expanse of his mahogany-hued brow.
"Don't know. Studying the problem now. Rather busy, as I said before, Barsine ... ”
She sighed. "Ah? So. Well, this gal can take a hint when she's not wanted.”
She rose lithely and went to the door. Pausing there, she turned a keen glance on him.
"I hope you're not trying to put one over on me, Hautley Quicksilver!"
His mobile features assumed a hurt expression.
''Cause if you are, let me warn you, me bucko! 'Old T.J.' 's really boiling on this one. And Carina-Cygnus won't be big enough to hold 'Old T.J.' and you if he finds out ... well ... that's it, Quicksilver!"
A look of hurt innocence filled his mercury-colored eyes.
"Barsine! Really!"
She ground her teeth. "Oh, all right ... bye now, Haut. Got to buzz along and find your replacement—see you in the newsfax! No, don't call old Creepy—! know the way out."
And she was gone. To find a replacement for Hautley Quicksilver!
Leaning back in the auto-adjusting pneumo, he permitted himself a small quiet smile of complacency. She would hunt far to find an agent of comparable talent—as his swift simulation of a legal contract and smoothly-concocted story gave full proof!
But now—to work. As an esteemed (and, no doubt purely legendary) pioneer of Hautley Quicksilver's profession was wont to put it—the game's afoot!
14
WOBBLING AND CREAKING on insecure joints, his butler and valet, Smeedley assisted him in donning working clothes, in this case what Hautley oft referred to as his "business suit." The rainment consisted of virtually a portable armory. The cuff buttons were incendiary grenades.
Each shoelace was a triplex nylon garroting-cord.
His belt buckle was a miniaturized radio transceiver whose aerial was a metallic thread indistinguishably woven through-out the warp and woof of his tunic. His shirt, of a thin but airtight fabric, was double strength, lined with a duplicate panel, inflatable, and made, in watery moments of need, an admirable life raft.
Ingenious compartments in boot heels and shoulder pads contained a variety of interesting substances and devices.
A flat flexible tube sewn into the lining of his jacket contained a virulent acid wherewith door locks could be eaten away.
One jewelled cuff link was a minute laser gun.
The other concealed a nuclear grenade capable of demolishing a medium-sized metropolis.
A back tooth, in actuality a hollow plastine receptacle, contained deadly poison.
Other teeth contained: a sleeping powder of suffcient concentration as to thrust the entire population of a small town into the of Morpheus (if admixed with the local drinking water by tossing it into the reservoir); an incredibly minute reference library of scientific and technical works which could be viewed through the microscopic lens concealed beneath the nail on his left forefinger; a variety of poisons, truth drugs, and other potent fluids and concoctions—including, I should add, a potent aphrodisiac.
Be prepared, was the Quicksilver motto. For anything!
Once strapped and belted into this amazing assortment of gadgetry, Hautley Quicksilver was virtually a one-man army.
And now to depart, after final instructions to Smeedley.
"Return the library books due next Gormsday ... water the delphiniums ... feed the Venus' fly traps ... monitor all in-coming calls ..."
"Yes, Ser Hautley."
"And above all, Smeedley, for Onolk's sake don't forget to tend my prize Prince Rupert von Hentzau odontoglossums! I plan to enter the Sirian Sector Flower Show next month, and they're bound to carry off a silver ribbon."
"Oh yes, Ser Hautley!"
Instructions given, Quicksilver bounded into his sleek little cruiser—the fastest thing in space—and launched the vessel through a camouflaged exit disguised as a crater. Up from the surface of the planetoid Carvel he rocketed, threading his way through the whirling of tiny asteroids with the skilled dexterity and deft touch of a master pilot. With a precise twirl of the wheel he avoided two sizzling meteor storms, and thus gained space at last. The ship's computer brain was thoroughly familiar with the orbits of the eleven thousand four hundred and sixty-two bodies that made up the deadly "moat" of Quicksilver Castle, and could easily have assumed the responsibility of piloting the vessel, but Hautley liked to do it on manual controls "just to keep his hand in," as he put it.
Behind and to one side of the hurtling sliver needle that was Hautley's trim little craft, a sullen spark of somber crimson glowed like a dying cod. That was the aged red Supergiant, the star Astarte, wherefrom the system had originated in primordial times.
Thieves' Haven, the outlaw planet, lay some seventeen thousand light-years towards the galactic Hub. It was a lone and sunless world, deep sunk in the black and starless rift between the innermost galactic arm, that of Sagittarius, and the midmost, second arm of the galaxy, called Carina-Cygnus. This rift between the two arms was called ''The Gap," and thence Hautley must wend his way.
It would of course, consume some milenia of time, were he to proceed for so vast a distance at the sub-photonic velocities attainable on mere planetary drive.
Hence, as he pointed the needle sharp prow of his lean and rakish craft Hubwards, he flicked the switch that would activate special mechanisms, thus transposing his craft into that mathematically-impossible, illusory and paradoxical quasicontinuum called pseudospace.
With a bone-shaking subsonic whine, the Bettleheim-Ortleigh-Robton Drive engines engaged. Their superbly counterpoised semigears clashing smoothly in custom designed cusps of synthetic rose diamond, the drive engines built about the hurtling little craft a magnetic field of enormous force, way up in the thousand-billion-gauss range—a cocoon of magnetic lines of force of such stupendous magnitude that they warped the very fabric of space itself, bending space until it "snapped," forming a bubble of closed three-dimensional space around the sleek cruiser—in effect, creating a private little universe to contain the ship.