03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  I reassured him on that point.

  “That’s good. I was about to say that if it had been destroyed, I could recreate it. I did most of the work of building it. Ray preferred to work with his mind, not with his hands.”

  Had Peterfi visited Sinclair last night?

  “No. I had dinner at a restaurant down the coast, then came home and watched the holo wall. What times do I need alibis for?” he asked jokingly.

  Valpredo told him. The joking look turned into a nervous grimace. No, he’d left the Mail Shirt just after nine; he couldn’t prove his whereabouts after that time.

  Had he any idea who might have wanted to murder Raymond Sinclair?

  Peterfi was reluctant to make outright accusations. Surely we understood. It might be someone he had worked with in the past or someone he’d insulted. Ray thought most of humanity were fools. Or we might look into the matter of Ray’s brother’s exemption.

  Valpredo said, “Edward Sinclair’s exemption? What about it?”

  “I’d really prefer that you get the story from someone else. You may know that Edward Sinclair was refused the right to have children because of an inherited heart condition. His grandson has it, too. There is some question as to whether he really did the work that earned him the exemption.”

  “But that must have been forty to fifty years ago. How could it figure in a murder now?”

  Peterfi explained patiently. “Edward had a child by virtue of an exemption to the Fertility Laws. Now there are two grandchildren. Suppose the matter came up for review? His grandchildren would lose the right to have children. They’d be illegitimate. They might even lose the right to inherit.”

  Valpredo was nodding. “Yah. We’ll look into that, all right.”

  I said, “You applied for an exemption yourself not long ago. I suppose your, uh—”

  “Yes, my diabetes. It doesn’t interfere with my life at all. Do you know how long we’ve been using insulin to handle diabetes? Almost two hundred years! What does it matter if I’m a diabetic? If my children are?”

  He glared at us, demanding an answer. He got none.

  “But the Fertility Laws refuse me children. Do you know that I lost my wife because the board refused me an exemption? I deserved it. My work on plasma flow in the solar photosphere— Well, I’d hardly lecture you on the subject, would I? But my work can be used to predict the patterns of proton storms near any G-type star. Every colony world owes something to my work!”

  That was an exaggeration, I thought. Proton storms affected mainly asteroidal mining operations. “Why don’t you move to the Belt?” I asked. “They’d honor you for your work, and they don’t have Fertility Laws.”

  “I get sick off Earth. It’s biorhythms; it has nothing to do with diabetes. Half of humanity suffers from biorhythm upset.”

  I felt sorry for the guy. “You could still get the exemption. For your work on the inertialess drive. Wouldn’t that get you your wife back?”

  “I … don’t know. I doubt it. It’s been two years. In any case, there’s no telling which way the board will jump. I thought I’d have the exemption last time.”

  “Do you mind if I examine your arms?”

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “I’d like to examine your arms.”

  “That seems a most curious request. Why?”

  “There seems a good chance that Sinclair’s killer damaged his arm last night. Now, I’ll remind you that I’m acting in the name of the UN Police. If you’ve been hurt by the side effects of a possible space drive, one that might be used by human colonists, then you’re concealing evidence in a—” I stopped, because Peterfi had stood up and was taking off his tunic.

  He wasn’t happy, but he stood still for it. His arms looked all right. I ran my hands along each arm, bent the joints, massaged the knuckles. Inside the flesh I ran my imaginary fingertips along the bones.

  Three inches below the shoulder joint the bone was knotted. I probed the muscles and tendons …

  “Your right arm is a transplant,” I said. “It must have happened about six months ago.”

  He bridled. “You may not be aware of it, but surgery to reattach my own arm would show the same scars.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  Anger made his speech more precise. “Yes. I was performing an experiment, and there was an explosion. The arm was nearly severed. I tied a tourniquet and got to a ‘doc before I collapsed.”

  “Any proof of this?”

  “I doubt it. I never told anyone of this accident, and the ‘doc wouldn’t keep records. In any case, I think the burden of proof would be on you.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Peterfi was putting his tunic back on. “Are you quite finished here? I’m deeply sorry for Ray Sinclair’s death, but I don’t see what it could possibly have to do with my stupidity of six months ago.”

  I didn’t, either. We left.

  Back in the car. It was seventeen-twenty; we could pick up a snack on the way to Pauline Urthiers place. I told Valpredo, “I think it was a transplant. And he didn’t want to admit it. He must have gone to an organlegger.”

  “Why would he do that? It’s not that tough to get an arm from the public organ banks.”

  I chewed that. “You’re right. But if it was a normal transplant, there’ll be a record. Well, it could have happened the way he said it did.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How about this? He was doing an experiment, and it was illegal. Something that might cause pollution in a city or even something to do with radiation. He picked up radiation burns in his arm. If he’d gone to the public organ banks, he’d have been arrested.”

  “That would fit, too. Can we prove it on him?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to. He might tell us how to find whoever he dealt with. Let’s do some digging: maybe we can find out what he was working on six months ago.”

  Pauline Urthiel opened the door the instant we rang. “Hi! I just got in myself. Can I make you drinks?”

  We refused. She ushered us into a smallish apartment with a lot of fold-into-the-ceiling furniture. A sofa and coffee table were showing now; the rest existed as outlines on the ceiling. The view through the picture window was breathtaking. She lived near the top of Lindstetter’s Needle, some three hundred stories up from her husband.

  She was tall and slender, with a facial structure that would have been effeminate on a man. On a woman it was a touch masculine. The well-formed breasts might be flesh or plastic but were surgically implanted in either case.

  She finished making a large drink and joined us on the couch. And the questions started.

  Had she any idea who might have wanted Raymond Sinclair dead?

  “Not really. How did he die?”

  “Someone smashed in his skull with a poker,” Valpredo said. If he wasn’t going to mention the generator, neither was I.

  “How quaint.” Her contralto turned acid. “His own poker, too, I presume. Out of his own fireplace rack. What you’re looking for is a traditionalist.” She peered at us over the rim of her glass. Her eyes were large, the lids decorated in semipermanent tattoos as a pair of flapping UN flags. “That doesn’t help much, does it? You might try whoever was working with him on whatever his latest project was.”

  That sounded like Peterfi, I thought. But Valpredo said, “Would he necessarily have a collaborator?”

  “He generally works alone at the beginning. But somewhere along the line he brings in people to make the hardware. He never made anything real by himself. It was all just something in a computer bank. It took someone else to make it real. And he never gave credit to anyone.”

  Then his hypothetical collaborator might have found out how little credit he was getting for his work, and— But Urthiel was shaking her head. “I’m talking about a psychotic, not someone who’s really been cheated. Sinclair never offered anyone a share in anything he did. He always made it damn plain what was happening. I knew what I was doing when I se
t up the FyreStop prototype for him, and I knew what I was doing when I quit It was all him. He was using my training, not my brain. I wanted to do something original, something me.”

  Did she have any idea what Sinclair’s present project was?

  “My husband would know. Larry Ecks, lives in this same building. He’s been dropping cryptic hints, and when I want more details, he has this grin—” She grinned herself suddenly. “You’ll gather I’m interested. But he won’t say.”

  Time for me to take over or we’d never get certain questions asked. “I’m an ARM. What I’m about to tell you is secret,” I said. And I told her what we knew of Sinclair’s generator. Maybe Valpredo was looking at me disapprovingly, maybe not.

  “We know that the field can damage a human arm in a few seconds. What we want to know,” I said, “is whether the killer is now wandering around with a half-decayed hand or arm—or foot, for that—”

  She stood and pulled the upper half of her body stocking down around her waist.

  She looked very much a real woman. If I hadn’t known—and why would it matter? These days the sex change operation is elaborate and perfect. Hell with it; I was on duty. Valpredo was looking nonchalant, waiting for me.

  I examined both of her arms with my eyes and my three hands. There was nothing. Not even a bruise.

  “My legs, too?”

  I said, “Not if you can stand on them.”

  Next question. Could an artificial arm operate within the field?

  “Larry? You mean Larry? You’re out of your teeny mind.”

  “Take it as a hypothetical question.”

  She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. There aren’t any experts on inertialess fields.”

  “There was one. He’s dead,” I reminded her.

  “All I know is what I learned watching the Gray Lens-man show in the holo wall when I was a kid.” She smiled suddenly. “That old space opera.”

  Valpredo laughed. “You, too? I used to watch that show in study hall on a little pocket phone. One day the principal caught me at it.”

  “Sure. And then we outgrew it. Too bad. Those inertialess ships … I’m sure an inertialess ship wouldn’t behave like those did. You couldn’t possibly get rid of the time compression effect.” She took a long pull on her drink, set it down, and said, “Yes and no. He could reach in, but—you see the problem? The nerve impulses that move the motors in Larry’s arm, they’re coming into the field too slowly.”

  “Sure.”

  “But if Larry closed his fist on something, say, and reached into the field with it, it would probably stay closed. He could have brained Ray with—no, he couldn’t. The poker wouldn’t be moving any faster than a glacier. Ray would just dodge.”

  And he couldn’t pull a poker out of the field, either. His fist wouldn’t close on it after it was inside. But he could have tried and still left with his arm intact, I thought.

  Did Urthiel know anything of the circumstances surrounding Edward Sinclair’s exemption?

  “Oh, that’s an old story,” she said. “Sure, I heard about it. How could it possibly have anything to do with, with Ray’s murder?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed.: “I’m just thrashing around.”

  “Well, you’ll probably get it more accurately from the UN files. Edward Sinclair did some mathematics on the fields that scoop up interstellar hydrogen for the cargo ramrobots. He was a shoo-in for the exemption. That’s the surest way of getting it: make a breakthrough in anything that has anything to do with the interstellar colonies. Every time you move one man away from Earth, the population drops by one.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “Nothing anyone could prove. Remember, the Fertility Restriction Laws were new then. They couldn’t stand a real test. But Edward Sinclair’s a pure math man. He works with number theory, not practical applications. I’ve seen Edward’s equations, and they’re closer to something Ray would come up with. And Ray didn’t need the exemption. He never wanted children.”

  “So you think—”

  “I don’t care which of them redesigned the ramscoops. Diddling the Fertility Board like that, that takes brains.” She swallowed the rest of her drink, set the glass down. “Breeding for brains is never a mistake. It’s no challenge to the Fertility Board, either. The people who do the damage are the ones who go into hiding when their shots come due, have their babies, then scream to high heaven when the board has to sterilize them. Too many of those and we won’t have Fertility Laws anymore. And that—” She didn’t have to finish.

  Had Sinclair known that Pauline Urthiel was once Paul?

  She stared. “Now just what the bleep has that got to do with anything?”

  I’d been toying with the idea that Sinclair might have been blackmailing Urthiel with that information. Not for money but for credit in some discovery they’d made together. “Just thrashing around,” I said.

  “Well … all right. I don’t know if Ray knew or not. He never raised the subject, but he never made a pass, either, and he must have researched me before he hired me. And, say, listen: Larry doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t blurt it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “See, he had his children by his first wife. I’m not denying him children … Maybe he married me because I had a touch of, urn, masculine insight. Maybe. But he doesn’t know it, and he doesn’t want to. I don’t know whether he’d laugh it off or kill me.”

  I had Valpredo drop me off at ARM Headquarters.

  This peculiar machine really does bother me, Gil … Well it should, Julio. The Los Angeles Police were not trained to deal with a mad scientist’s nightmare running quietly in the middle of a murder scene.

  Granted that Janice wasn’t the type. Not for this murder. But Drew Porter was precisely the type to evolve a perfect murder around Sinclair’s generator, purely as an intellectual exercise. He might have guided her through it; he might even have been there and used the elevator before she shut it off. It was the one thing he forgot to tell her: not to shut off the elevator.

  Or: he outlined a perfect murder to her, purely as a puzzle, never dreaming she’d go through with it—badly.

  Or: one of them killed Janice’s uncle on impulse. No telling what he’d said that one of them couldn’t tolerate. But the machine had been right there in the living room, and Drew had wrapped his big arm around Janice and said, Wait, don’t do anything yet; let’s think this out …

  Take any of these as the true state of affairs, and a prosecutor could have a hell of a time proving it. He could show that no killer could possibly have left the scene of the crime without Janice Sinclair’s help, and therefore … But what about that glowing thing, that time machine built by the dead man? Could it have freed a killer from an effectively locked room? How could a judge know its power?

  Well, could it?

  Bera might know.

  The machine was running. I caught the faint violet glow as I stepped into the laboratory and a flickering next to it … and then it was off, and Jackson Bera stood suddenly beside it, grinning, silent, waiting.

  I wasn’t about to spoil his fun. I said, “Well? Is it an interstellar drive?”

  “Yes!”

  A warm glow spread through me. I said, “Okay.”

  “It’s a low-inertia field,” said Bera. “Things inside lose most of their inertia … not their mass, just the resistance to movement. Ratio of about five hundred to one. The interface is sharp as a razor. We think there are quantum levels involved.”

  “Uh huh. The field doesn’t affect time directly?”

  “No, it … I shouldn’t say that. Who the hell knows what time really is? It affects chemical and nuclear reactions, energy release of all kinds … but it doesn’t affect the speed of light. You know, it’s kind of kicky to be measuring the speed of light at 370 miles per second with honest instruments.”

  Dammit. I’d been half hoping it was an FTL drive. I said, “Did you ever find out wha
t was causing that blue glow?”

  Bera laughed at me. “Watch.” He’d rigged a remote switch to turn the machine on. He used it, then struck a match and flipped it toward the blue glow. As it crossed an invisible barrier, the match flared violet-white for something less than an eye blink. I blinked. It had been like a flashbulb going off.

  I said, “Oh, sure. The machinery’s warm.”

  “Right. The blue glow is just infrared radiation being boosted to violet when it enters normal time.”

  Bera shouldn’t have had to tell me that. Embarrassed, I changed the subject. “But you said it was an interstellar drive.”

  “Yah. It’s got drawbacks,” Bera said. “We can’t just put a field around a whole starship. The crew would think they’d lowered the speed of light, but so what? A slowboat doesn’t get that close to lightspeed anyway. They’d save a little trip time, but they’d have to live through it five hundred times as fast.”

  “How about if you just put the field around your fuel tanks?”

  Bera nodded. “That’s what they’ll probably do. Leave the motor and the life support system outside. You could carry a god-awful amount of fuel that way … Well, it’s not our department. Someone else’ll be designing the star-ships,” he said a bit wistfully.

  “Have you thought of this thing in relation to robbing banks? Or espionage?”

  “If a gang could afford to build one of these jobs, they wouldn’t need to rob banks.” He ruminated. “I hate making anything this big a UN secret. But I guess you’re right. The average government could afford a whole stable of the things.”

  “Thus combining James Bond and the Flash.”

  He rapped on the plastic frame. “Want to try it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Heart to brain: THUD! What’re you doing? You’ll get us all killed! I knew we should never have put you in charge of things … I stepped up to the generator, waited for Bera to scamper beyond range, then pulled the switch.

  Everything turned deep red. Bera became a statue.

  Well, here I was. The second hand on the wall clock had stopped moving. I took two steps forward and rapped with my knuckles. Rapped, hell: it was like rapping on contact cement. The invisible wall was tacky.