Criminals -- Fiction; Police -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
The details of that recollection brought up his spirits again and, he
reminded himself, the lesson had sunk in; had developed into his most
useful ethic. After his narrow scrape with Jason's quantum analyzer in
the Berlin incident, it hadn't taken long for a good, one-man detective
agency to locate Physlab Nine's frenetic genius, Moglaut. It had taken
longer to discover Moglaut's currency but, after much shadowing, the
'tec had come through handsomely. Lonnie, automatically applying his
fully-developed Ethic One, always considered it a nice sentimental touch
that the one-man agency's final case was successful.
Moglaut's price was a prim, brunette soprano who wore her eyes disguised
behind heavy tortoiseshell. The ill-cut garb she could afford added
greatly to her staid appearance, obscuring a certain full-bodied
litheness. She earned a throttled existence soloing at funerals and in
the worship halls of obscure, rigidly fanatic offshoot sects.
Her consuming passion was to be an opera prima donna.
Lonnie never tried to understand why Moglaut sat fascinated through
endless sin-busting sermons and lachrymose requiems. To hurry
afterwards, with the jerky motions, the glazed eyes of a zombie, to
subsequent rendezvous with the soprano at his suburban apartment. It was
entirely sufficient in Lonnie's philosophy that Moglaut did.
The soprano's continuing suburban cooperation was insured by Lonnie's
judicious doling out of exactly the cash to keep a tenth-rate opera
company barely functioning in a lesser quarter of Government City.
Oddly, he found it pleased him and from that grew his wide patronizing
of the Arts.
The immediate result of the situation he created and controlled so
deftly was Moglaut's production of a closed-plenum grid suit.
None of Gov-Pol, Gov-Mil or Gov-Econ labs found out about it; much less
Pol-Anx or Government itself. Moglaut did all the work in the tiny
complete lab Lonnie set up in the suburbs.
Lonnie didn't care what electronic witchery took place in the minute
spatial interstices between the finely-woven mesh of flexible tantalum.
Sufficient for him, the silvery white suit once donned and triple-zipped
through hood and glove-endings, he was immune to ordinary Earthly
phenomena; free to move about, do what he wished, untraceably. In it,
his words were not vulnerable to the sono-beam's eavesdropping.
Photo-electric and magneto-photonic watchdogs ignored him. Even the most
delicately sensitive thermo-couples continued their dreams of freezing
flame undisturbed. Jason's quantum analyzer couldn't pick up the
leavings of a glance--all that the suit permitted out into the physical
world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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