Criminals -- Fiction; DiGriz, James Bolivar (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Police -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Good-by James diGriz, weight ninety-eight kilos, age about forty-five,
thick in the middle and heavy in the jowls, a typical business man
whose picture graces the police files of a thousand planets--also his
fingerprints. They went first. When you wear them they feel like a
second skin, a touch of solvent though and they peel off like a pair of
transparent gloves.
All my clothes next--and then the girdle in reverse--that lovely paunch
that straps around my belly and holds twenty kilos of lead mixed with
thermite. A quick wipe from the bottle of bleach and my hair was its
natural shade of brown, the eyebrows, too. The nose plugs and cheek
pads hurt coming out, but that only lasts a second. Then the blue-eyed
contact lenses. This process leaves me mother-naked and I always feel
as if I have been born again. In a sense it is true, I had become a
new man, twenty kilos lighter, ten years younger and with a completely
different description. The large suitcase held a complete change of
clothes and a pair of dark-rimmed glasses that replaced the contact
lenses. All the loose money fitted neatly into a brief case.
When I straightened up I really felt as if ten years had been stripped
from me. I was so used to wearing that weight that I never noticed
it--until it was gone. Put a real spring in my step.
The thermite would take care of all the evidence, I kicked it all into
a heap and triggered the fuse. It caught with a roar and bottles,
clothes, bag, shoes, weights, et al, burned with a cheerful glare. The
police would find a charred spot on the cement and micro-analysis might
get them a few molecules off the walls, but that was all they would
get. The glare of the burning thermite threw jumping shadows around me
as I walked down three flights to the one hundred twelfth floor.
Luck was still with me, there was no one on the floor when I opened the
door. One minute later the express elevator let me and a handful of
other business types out into the lobby.
Only one door was open to the street and a portable TV camera was
trained on it. No attempt was being made to stop people from going in
and out of the building, most of them didn't even notice the camera
and the little group of cops around it. I walked towards it at an even
pace. Strong nerves count for a lot in this business.
For one instant I was square in the field of that cold, glass eye, then
I was past. Nothing happened so I knew I was clear. That camera must
have fed direct to the main computer at police headquarters, if my
description had been close enough to the one they had on file those
robots would have been notified and I would have been pinned before I
had taken a step. You can't outmove a computer-robot combination, not
when they move and think in microseconds--but you can out-think them. I
had done it again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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