"You're a crazy old coot, Doc. You know that."
"Don't you think it, boy! And there is no need to fear my—my death, in the interim. Depending upon the time-phase in which you find yourself, anywhere from ten to a hundred years in your continuum will mean perhaps a minute to an hour in mine. But—as to what you'd be—well...."
"Go ahead! Tell me," Cutlass laughed. "As long as I'll be alive!"
"It is actually impossible for me to answer you. I don't think I can change the blood in a man's veins. And the blood of pirates has coursed in yours through generations!"
Cutlass laughed loudly, and it was a defiant, careless laugh that told the Universe and its entire white picket-fence society to go to blazing Hell.
"OK, Doc! You win! You hide me good!"
Cutlass belted the small signalling device around his body and stepped inside the cylinder. The dull black sheen of his tunic lent a peculiar matter-of-factness to the underacted drama, yet Cutlass knew it was as Doc said—hide out, or die.
"Good hunting, Robbin Cutlass!"
A half-light-year beyond Pluto, floating at the edge of Deep Space in a creaking freighter hull that was disguised with the shades of night itself, a withered Martian scientist touched a series of relays with his short, reddish fingers. There was a gentle humming, the faint odor of ozone, and that was all. Robbin Cutlass, last of the Space buccaneers, had vanished completely.