03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “No. That’s some machine.” Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. “Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?”

  Ordaz came back on. He was smiling, barely. “I’m afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In Raymond Sinclair’s apartment on the top floor of the Rodewald Building in Santa Monica.”

  “I’ll come myself,” I said. My tongue suddenly felt thick.

  “Please land on the roof. We are holding the elevator for examination.”

  “Sure.” I hung up.

  Raymond Sinclair!

  I’d never met Raymond Sinclair. He was something of a recluse. But the ARM had dealt with him once in connection with one of his inventions, the FyreStop device. And everyone knew that he had lately been working on an interstellar drive. It was only a rumor, of course … but if someone had killed the brain that held that secret …

  I went.

  The Rodewald Building was forty stories of triangular prism with a row of triangular balconies going up each side. The balconies stopped at the thirty-eighth floor.

  The roof was a garden. There were rosebushes in bloom along one edge, full-grown elms nestled in ivy along another, and a miniature forest of bonsai trees along the third. The landing pad and carport were in the center. A squad car floated down ahead of my taxi, then slid under the carport to give me room to land.

  A cop in a vivid orange uniform came out to watch me come down. He was carrying a deep-sea fishing pole, still in its kit.

  He said, “May I see some ID, please?”

  I had my ARM ident in my hand. He checked it in the console in the squad car, then handed it back. “The inspector’s waiting downstairs,” he said.

  “What’s the pole for?”

  He smiled suddenly, almost secretively. “You’ll see.”

  We left the garden smells via a flight of concrete stairs. They led down into a small room half-full of gardening tools and a heavy door with a spy-eye in it. Ordaz opened the door for us. He shook my hand briskly, glanced at the cop. “You found something? Good.”

  The cop said, “There’s a sporting goods store six blocks from here. The manager let me borrow it. He made sure I knew the name of the store.”

  “Yes, there will certainly be publicity on this matter. Come, Gil.” Ordaz took my arm. “You should examine this before we turn it off.”

  No garden smells here, but there was something—a whiff of something long dead—that the air-conditioning hadn’t quite cleared away. Ordaz walked me into the living room.

  It looked like somebody’s idea of a practical joke.

  The indoor grass covered Sinclair’s living room floor, wall to wall. In a perfect fourteen-foot circle between the sofa and the fireplace, the rug was brown and dead. Elsewhere it was green and thriving.

  A man’s mummy, dressed in stained slacks and turtle-neck, lay on its back in the center of the circle. At a guess it had been about six months dead. It wore a big wristwatch with extra dials on the face and a fine-mesh platinum band, loose now around a wrist of bones and brown skin. The back of the skull had been smashed open, possibly by the classic blunt instrument lying next to it.

  If the fireplace was false—it almost had to be; nobody burns wood—the fireplace instruments were genuine nineteenth- or twentieth-century antiques. The rack was missing a poker. A poker lay inside the circle, in the dead grass next to the disintegrating mummy.

  The glowing device sat just in the center of the magic circle.

  I stepped forward, and a man’s voice spoke sharply. “Don’t go inside that circle of rug. It’s more dangerous than it looks.”

  It was a man I knew: Officer-One Valpredo, a tall man with a small, straight mouth and a long, narrow Italian face.

  “Looks dangerous enough to me,” I said.

  “It is. I reached in there myself,” Valpredo told me, “right after we got here. I thought I could flip the switch off. My whole arm went numb. Instantly. No feeling at all. I yanked it away fast, but for a minute or so after that my whole arm was dead meat. I thought I’d lost it. Then it was all pins and needles, like I’d slept on it.”

  The cop who had brought me in had almost finished assembling the deep-sea fishing pole.

  Ordaz waved into the circle. “Well? Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  I shook my head, studying the violet-glowing machinery. “Whatever it is, it’s brand-new. Sinclair’s really done it this time.”

  An uneven line of solenoids was attached to a plastic frame with homemade joins. Blistered spots on the plastic showed where other objects had been attached and later removed. A breadboard bore masses of heavy wiring. There were six big batteries hooked in parallel and a strange, heavy piece of sculpture in what we later discovered was pure silver, with wiring attached at three curving points. The silver was tarnished almost black, and there were old file marks at the edges.

  Near the center of the arrangement, just in front of the silver sculpture, were two concentric solenoids embedded in a block of clear plastic. They glowed blue shading to violet. So did the batteries. A less perceptible violet glow radiated from everywhere on the machine, more intensely in the interior parts.

  That glow bothered me more than anything else. It was too theatrical. It was like something a special effects man might add to a cheap late-night thriller to suggest a mad scientist’s laboratory.

  I moved around to get a closer look at the dead man’s watch.

  “Keep your head out of the field!” Valpredo said sharply.

  I nodded. I squatted on my heels outside the borderline of dead grass.

  The dead man’s watch was going like crazy. The minute hand was circling the dial every seven seconds or so. I couldn’t find the second hand at all.

  I backed away from the arc of dead grass and stood up. Interstellar drive, hell. This blue-glowing monstrosity looked more like a time machine gone wrong.

  I studied the single-throw switch welded to the plastic frame next to the batteries. A length of nylon line dangled from the horizontal handle. It looked like someone had tugged the switch on from outside the field by using the line, but he’d have had to hang from the ceiling to tug it off that way.

  “I see why you couldn’t send it over to ARM Headquarters. You can’t even touch it. You stick your arm or your head in there for a second, and that’s ten minutes without a blood supply.”

  Ordaz said, “Exactly.”

  “It looks like you could reach in there with a stick and flip that switch off.”

  “Perhaps. We are about to try that.” He waved at the man with the fishing pole. “There was nothing in this room long enough to reach the switch. We had to send—”

  “Wait a minute. There’s a problem.”

  He looked at me. So did the cop with the fishing pole.

  “That switch could be a self-destruct. Sinclair was supposed to be a secretive bastard. Or the field might hold considerable potential energy. Something might go blooey.”

  Ordaz sighed. “We must risk it. Gil, we have measured the rotation of the dead man’s wristwatch. One hour per seven seconds. Fingerprints, footprints, laundry marks, residual body odor, stray eyelashes, all disappearing at an hour per seven seconds.” He gestured, and the cop moved in and began trying to hook the switch.

  “Already we may never know just when he was killed,” Ordaz said.

  The tip of the pole wobbled in large circles, steadied beneath the switch, made contact. I held my breath. The pole bowed. The switch snapped up, and suddenly the violet glow was gone. Valpredo reached into the field, warily, as if the air might be red hot Nothing happened, and he relaxed.

  Then Ordaz began giving orders, and quite a lot happened. Two men in lab coats drew a chalk outline around the mummy and the poker. They moved the mummy onto a stretc
her, put the poker in a plastic bag, and put it next to the mummy.

  I said, “Have you identified that?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ordaz said. “Raymond Sinclair had his own autodoc—”

  “Did he? Those things are expensive.”

  “Yes. Raymond Sinclair was a wealthy man. He owned the top two floors of this building and the roof. According to records in his ‘doc, he had a new set of bud teeth implanted two months ago.” Ordaz pointed to the mummy, to the skinned-back dry lips and the buds of new teeth that were just coming in.

  Right. That was Sinclair.

  That brain had made miracles, and someone had smashed it with a wrought-iron rod. The interstellar drive … that glowing Goldberg device? Or had it been still inside his head?

  I said, “We’ll have to get whoever did it. We’ll have to. Even so …” Even so. No more miracles.

  “We may have her already,” Julio said.

  I looked at him.

  “There is a girl in the autodoc. We think she is Dr. Sinclair’s great-niece, Janice Sinclair.”

  It was a standard drugstore autodoc, a thing like a giant coffin with walls a foot thick and a headboard covered with dials and red and green lights. The girl’s face was calm, her breathing shallow. Sleeping Beauty. Her arms were in the guts of the ‘doc, hidden by bulky rubbery sleeves.

  She was lovely enough to stop my breath. Soft brown hair showing around the electrode cap; small, perfect nose and mouth; smooth pale blue skin shot with silver threads …

  That last was an evening dye job. Without it the impact of her would have been much lessened. The blue shade varied slightly to emphasize the shape of her body and the curve of her cheekbones. The silver lines varied, too, being denser in certain areas, guiding the eye in certain directions: to the tips of her breasts or across the slight swell of abdominal muscle to a lovely oval navel.

  She’d paid high for that dye job. But she would be beautiful without it.

  Some of the headboard lights were red. I punched for a readout and was jolted. The ‘doc had been forced to amputate her right arm. Gangrene.

  She was in for a hell of a shock when she woke up.

  “All right,” I said. “She’s lost her arm. That doesn’t make her a killer.”

  Ordaz asked, “If she were homely, would it help?”

  I laughed. “You question my dispassionate judgment? Men have died for less!” Even so, I thought he could be right. There was good reason to think that the killer was now missing an arm.

  “What do you think happened here, Gil?”

  “Well … any way you look at it, the killer had to want to take Sinclair’s, ah, time machine with him. It’s priceless, for one thing. For another, it looks like he tried to set it up as an alibi. Which means that he knew about it before he came here.” I’d been thinking this through. “Say he made sure some people knew where he was a few hours before he got here. He killed Sinclair within range of the … call it a generator. Turned it on. He figured Sinclair’s own watch would tell him how much time he was gaining. Afterward he could set the watch back and leave with the generator. There’d be no way the police could tell he wasn’t killed six hours earlier, or any number you like.”

  “Yes. But he did not do that.”

  “There was that line hanging from the switch. He must have turned it on from outside the field … probably because he didn’t want to sit with the body for six hours. If he tried to step outside the field after he’d turned it on, he’d bump his nose. It’d be like trying to walk through a wall, going from field time to normal time. So he turned it off, stepped out of range, and used that nylon line to turn it on again. He probably made the same mistake Valpredo did: he thought he could step back in and turn it off.”

  Ordaz nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly. It was very important for him—or her—to do that. Otherwise he would have no alibi and no profit. If he continued to try to reach into the field—”

  “Yah, he could lose the arm to gangrene. That’d be convenient for us, wouldn’t it? He’d be easy to find. But look, Julio: the girl could have done the same thing to herself trying to help Sinclair. He might not have been that obviously dead when she got home.”

  “He might even have been alive,” Ordaz pointed out.

  I shrugged.

  “In point of fact, she came home at one-ten, in her own car, which is still in the carport. There are cameras mounted to cover the landing pad and carport. Doctor Sinclair’s security was thorough. This girl was the only arrival last night. There were no departures.”

  “From the roof, you mean.”

  “Gil, there are only two ways to leave these apartments. One is from the roof, and the other is by elevator, from the lobby. The elevator is on this floor, and it was turned off. It was that way when we arrived. There is no way to override that control from elsewhere in this building.”

  “So someone could have taken it up here and turned it off afterward … or Sinclair could have turned it off before he was killed … I see what you mean. Either way, the killer has to be still here.” I thought about that. I didn’t like its taste. “No, it doesn’t fit. How could she be bright enough to work out that alibi, then dumb enough to lock herself in with the body?”

  Ordaz shrugged. “She locked the elevator before killing her uncle. She did not want to be interrupted. Surely that was sensible? After she hurt her arm, she must have been in a great hurry to reach the ‘doc.”

  One of the red lights turned green. I was glad for that. She didn’t look like a killer. I said half to myself, “Nobody looks like a killer when he’s asleep.”

  “No. But she is where a killer ought to be. Qui lastima.”

  We went back to the living room. I called ARM Headquarters and had them send a truck.

  The machine hadn’t been touched. While we waited, I borrowed a camera from Valpredo and took pictures of the setup in situ. The relative positions of the components might be important.

  The lab men were in the brown grass, using aerosol sprays to turn fingerprints white and give a vivid yellow glow to faint traces of blood. They got plenty of fingerprints on the machine, none at all on the poker. There was a puddle of yellow in the grass where the mummy’s head had been and a long yellow snail track ending at the business end of the poker. It looked like someone had tried to drag the poker out of the field after it had fallen.

  Sinclair’s apartments were roomy and comfortable and occupied the entire top floor. The lower floor was the laboratory where Sinclair had produced his miracles. I went through it with Valpredo. It wasn’t that impressive. It looked like an expensive hobby setup. These tools would assemble components already fabricated, but they would not build anything complex.

  Except for the computer terminal. That was like a little womb, with a recline chair inside a 360-degree wraparound holovision screen and enough banked controls to fly the damn thing to Alpha Centauri.

  The secrets there must be in that computer! But I didn’t try to use it. We’d have to send an ARM programmer to break whatever fail-safe codes Sinclair had put in the memory banks.

  The truck arrived. We dragged Sinclair’s legacy up the stairs to the roof in one piece. The parts were sturdily mounted on their frame, and the stairs were wide and not too steep.

  I rode home in the back of the truck. Studying the generator. That massive piece of silver had something of the look of Bird in Flight: a triangle operated on by a topology student with wires at what were still the corners. I wondered if it was the heart of the machine or just a piece of misdirection. Was I really riding with an interstellar drive? Sinclair could have started that rumor himself to cover whatever this was. Or … there was no law against his working two projects simultaneously.

  I was looking forward to Bera’s reaction.

  Jackson Bera came upon us moving it through the halls of ARM Headquarters. He trailed along behind us. Nonchalant. We pulled the machine into the main laboratory and started checking it against the holos I’d taken in c
ase something had been jarred loose. Bera leaned against the door-jamb, watching us, his eyes gradually losing interest until he seemed about to go to sleep.

  I’d met him three years ago, when I had returned from the asteroids and joined the ARM. He was twenty then, and two years an ARM, but his father and grandfather had both been ARMs. Much of my training had come from Bera. And as I learned to hunt men who hunt other men, I had watched what it was doing to him.

  An ARM needs empathy. He needs the ability to piece together a picture of the mind of his prey. But Bera had too much empathy. I remember his reaction when Kenneth Graham killed himself: a single surge of current through the plug in his skull and down the wire to the pleasure center of his brain. Bera had been twitchy for weeks. And the Anubis case early last year. When we realized what the man had done, Bera had been close to killing him on the spot. I wouldn’t have blamed him.

  Last year Bera had had enough. He’d gone into the technical end of the business. His days of hunting organleggers were finished. He was now running the ARM laboratory.

  He had to want to know what this oddball contraption was. I kept waiting for him to ask … and he watched, faintly smiling. Finally it dawned on me. He thought it was a pratical joke, something I’d cobbled together for his own discomfiture.

  I said, “Bera.”

  And he looked at me brightly and said, “Hey, man, what is it?”

  “You ask the most embarrassing questions.”

  “Right, I can understand your feeling that way, but what is it? I love it, it’s neat, but what is this that you have brought me?”

  I told him all I knew, such as it was. When I finished, he said, “It doesn’t sound much like a new space drive.”

  “Oho, you heard that, too, did you? No, it doesn’t. Unless—” I’d been wondering since I first saw it. “Maybe it’s supposed to accelerate a fusion explosion. You’d get greater efficiency in a fusion drive.”

  “They get better than ninety percent now, and that widget looks heavy.” He reached to touch the bent silver triangle gently with long, tapering fingers. “Huh. Well, we’ll dig out the answers.”