03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “So?”

  “So. Janice came home, called the elevator up, and locked it. She does that without thinking. She had a bad shock last night This morning she didn’t remember.”

  “And this evening it could come back to her.”

  Porter looked up sharply. “I wouldn’t—”

  “You’d better think long and hard before you do. If Ordaz is sixty percent sure of her now, he’ll be a hundred percent sure when she lays that on him.”

  Porter was working his muscles again. In a low voice he said, “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. It makes things a lot simpler, too. But if Janice said it now, she’d sound like a liar.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “I give up. Sure, it’s possible.”

  “Then who’s our killer?”

  There wasn’t any reason I shouldn’t consider the question. It wasn’t my case at all. I did, and presently I laughed. “Did I say it’d make things simpler? Man, it throws the case wide open! Anyone could have done it. Uh, anyone but Steeves. Steeves wouldn’t have had any reason to come back this morning.”

  Porter looked glum. “Steeves wouldn’t have done it anyway.”

  “He was your suggestion.”

  “Oh, in pure mechanical terms, he’s the only one who didn’t need a way out. But you don’t know Steeves. He’s a big, brawny guy with a beer belly and no brains. A nice guy, you understand, I like him, but if he ever killed anyone, it’d be with a beer bottle. And he was proud of Uncle Ray. He liked having Raymond Sinclair in his building.”

  “Okay, forget Steeves. Is there anyone you’d particularly like to pin it on? Bearing in mind that now anyone could get in to do it.”

  “Not anyone. Anyone in the elevator computer, plus anyone Uncle Ray might have let up.”

  “Well?”

  He shook his head.

  “You make a hell of an amateur detective. You’re afraid to accuse anyone.”

  He shrugged, smiling, embarrassed.

  “What about Peterfi? Now that Sinclair’s dead, he can claim they were equal partners in the, uh, time machine. And he tumbled to it awfully fast. The moment Valpredo told him Sinclair was dead, Peterfi was his partner.”

  “Sounds typical.”

  “Could he be telling the truth?”

  “I’d say he’s lying. Doesn’t make him a killer, though.”

  “No. What about Ecks? If he didn’t know Peterfi was involved, he might have tried the same thing. Does he need money?”

  “Not hardly. And he’s been with Uncle Ray for longer than I’ve been alive.”

  “Maybe he was after the exemption. He’s had kids, but not by his present wife. He may not know she can’t have children.”

  “Pauline likes children. I’ve seen her with them.” Porter looked at me curiously. “I don’t see having children as that big a motive.”

  “You’re young. Then there’s Pauline herself. Sinclair knew something about her. Or Sinclair might have told Ecks, and Ecks blew up and killed him for it.”

  Porter shook his head. “In red rage? I can’t think of anything that’d make Larry do that. Pauline, maybe. Larry, no.”

  But, I thought, there are men who would kill if they learned that their wives had gone through a sex change. I said, “Whoever killed Sinclair, if he wasn’t crazy, he had to want to take the machine. One way might have been to lower it by rope …” I trailed off. Fifty pounds or so, lowered two stories by nylon line. Ecks’s steel and plastic arm … or the muscles now rolling like boulders in Porter’s arms. I thought Porter could have managed it.

  Or maybe he’d thought he could. He hadn’t actually had to go through with it.

  My phone rang.

  It was Ordaz. “Have you made any progress on the time machine? I’m told that Dr. Sinclair’s computer—”

  “Was wiped, yah. But that’s all right. We’re learning quite a lot about it. If we run into trouble, Bernath Peterfi can help us. He helped build it. Where are you now?”

  “At Dr. Sinclair’s apartment. We had some further questions for Janice Sinclair.”

  Porter twitched. I said, “All right, we’ll be right over. Andrew Porter’s with me.” I hung up and turned to Porter. “Does Janice know she’s a suspect?”

  “No. Please don’t tell her unless you have to. I’m not sure she could take it.”

  I had the taxi drop us at the lobby level of the Rodewald Building. When I told Porter I wanted a ride in the elevator, he just nodded.

  The elevator to Raymond Sinclair’s penthouse was a box with a seat in it. It would have been comfortable for one, cozy for two good friends. With me and Porter in it, it was crowded. Porter hunched his knees and tried to fold into himself. He seemed used to it.

  He probably was. Most apartment elevators are like that. Why waste room on an elevator shaft when the same space can go into apartments?

  It was a fast ride. The seat was necessary; it was two gees going up and a longer period at half a gee slowing down while lighted numbers flickered past. Numbers but no doors.

  “Hey, Porter. If this elevator jammed, would there be a door to let us out?”

  He gave me a funny look and said he didn’t know. “Why worry about it? If it jammed at this speed, it’d come apart like a handful of shredded lettuce.”

  It was just claustrophobic enough to make me wonder. K hadn’t left by elevator. Why not? Because the ride up had terrified him? Brain to memory: dig into the medical records of that list of suspects. Claustrophobia. Too bad the elevator brain didn’t keep records. We could find out which of them had used the boxlike elevator once or not at all.

  In which case we’d be looking for K2. By now I was thinking in terms of three groups. K1 killed Sinclair, then tried to use the low-inertia field as both loot and alibi. K2 was crazy; he hadn’t wanted the generator at all, except as a way to set up his macabre tableau. K3 was Janice and Drew Porter.

  Janice was there when the doors slid open. She was wan, and her shoulders slumped. But when she saw Porter, she smiled like sunlight and ran to him. Her run was wobbly, thrown off by the missing weight of her arm.

  The wide brown circle was still there in the grass, marked with white chalk and the yellow chemical that picks up bloodstains. White outlines to mark the vanished body, the generator, the poker.

  Something knocked at the back door of my mind. I looked from the chalk outlines, to the open elevator, to the chalk … and a third of the puzzle fell into place.

  So simple. We were looking for K1 … and I had a pretty good idea who he was.

  Ordaz was asking me, “How did you happen to arrive with Mr. Porter?”

  “He came to my office. We were talking about a hypothetical killer—” I lowered my voice slightly. “—a killer who isn’t Janice.”

  “Very good. Did you reason out how he must have left?”

  “Not yet. But play the game with me. Say there was a way.”

  Porter and Janice joined us, their arms about each other’s waists. Ordaz said, “Very well. We assume there was a way out. Did he improvise it? And why did he not use the elevator?”

  “He must have had it in mind when he got here. He didn’t use the elevator because he was planning to take the machine. It wouldn’t have fit,”

  They all stared at the chalk outline of the generator. So simple. Porter said, “Yah! Then he used it anyway and left you a locked room mystery!”

  “That may have been his mistake,” Ordaz said grimly. “When we know his escape route, we may find that only one man could have used it. But of course we do not even know that the route exists.”

  I changed the subject. “Have you got everyone on the elevator tape identified?”

  Valpredo dug out his spiral notebook and flipped to the jotted names of the people permitted to use Sinclair’s elevator. He showed it to Porter. “Have you seen this?”

  Porter studied it. “No, but I can guess what it is. Let’s see … Hans Drucker was Janice’s lover befo
re I came along. We still see him. In fact, he was at that beach party last night at the Randalls’.”

  “He flopped on the Randalls’ rug last night,” Valpredo said. “Him and four others. One of the better alibis.”

  “Oh, Hans wouldn’t have anything to do with this!” Janice exclaimed. The idea horrified her.

  Porter was still looking at the list “You know about most of these people already. Bertha Hall and Muriel Sandusky were lady friends of Uncle Ray’s. Bertha goes backpacking with him.”

  “We interviewed them, too,” Valpredo told me. “You can hear the tapes if you like.”

  “No, just give me the gist I already know who the killer is.”

  Ordaz raised his eyebrows at that, and Janice said, “Oh, good! Who?” which question I answered with a secretive smile. Nobody actually called me a liar.

  Valpredo said, “Muriel Sandusky’s been living in England for almost a year. Married. Hasn’t seen Sinclair in years. Big, beautiful redhead.”

  “She had a crush on Uncle Ray once,” Janice said. “And vice versa. I think his lasted longer.”

  “Bertha Hall is something else again,” Valpredo continued. “Sinclair’s age and in good shape. Wiry. She says that when Sinclair was on the home stretch on a project, he gave up everything: friends, social life, exercise. Afterward he’d call Bertha and go backpacking with her to catch up with himself. He called her two nights ago and set a date for next Monday.”

  I said, “Alibi?”

  “Nope.”

  “Really!” Janice said indignantly. “Why, we’ve known Bertha since I was that high! If you know who killed Uncle Ray, why don’t you just say so?”

  “Out of this list, I sure do, given certain assumptions. But I don’t know how he got out, or how he expected to, or whether we can prove it on him. I can’t accuse anyone now. It’s a damn shame he didn’t lose his arm reaching for that poker.”

  Porter looked frustrated. So did Janice.

  “You would not want to face a lawsuit,” Ordaz suggested delicately. “What of Sinclair’s machine?”

  “It’s an inertialess drive, sort of. Lower the inertia, time speeds up. Bera’s already learned a lot about it, but it’ll be a while before he can really …”

  “You were saying?” Ordaz asked when I trailed off.

  “Sinclair was finished with the damn thing.”

  “Sure he was,” Porter said. “He wouldn’t have been showing it around otherwise.”

  “Or calling Bertha for a backpacking expedition. Or spreading rumors about what he had. Yeah. Sure, he knew everything he could learn about that machine. Julio, you were cheated. It all depends on the machine. And the bastard did wrack up his arm, and we can prove it on him.”

  We piled into Ordaz’s commandeered taxi: me and Ordaz and Valpredo and Porter. Valpredo set the thing for conventional speeds so he wouldn’t have to worry about driving. We’d turned the interior chairs to face each other.

  “This is the part I won’t guarantee,” I said, sketching rapidly in Valpredo’s borrowed notebook. “But remember, he had a length of line with him. He must have expected to use it. Here’s how he planned to get out.”

  I sketched in a box to represent Sinclair’s generator, a stick figure clinging to the frame. A circle around them to represent the field. A bowknot tied to the machine, with one end trailing up through the field.

  “See it? He goes up the stairs with the field on. The camera has about one chance in eight of catching him while he’s moving at that speed. He wheels the machine to the edge of the roof, ties the line to it, throws the line a good distance away, pushes the generator off the roof, and steps off with it. The line falls at thirty-two feet per second squared, normal time, plus a little more because the machine and the killer are tugging down on it. Not hard, because they’re in a low-inertia field. By the time the killer reaches ground, he’s moving at something more than, uh, twelve hundred feet per second over five hundred … uh, say three feet per second internal time, and he’s got to pull the machine out of the way fast, because the rope is going to hit like a bomb.”

  “It looks like it would work,” Porter said.

  “Yah. I thought for a while that he could just stand on the bottom of the field. A little fooling with the machine cured me of that. He’d smash both legs. But he could hang on to the frame; it’s strong enough.”

  “But he didn’t have the machine,” Valpredo pointed out.

  “That’s where you got cheated. What happens when two fields intersect?”

  They looked blank.

  “It’s not a trivial question. Nobody knows the answer yet. But Sinclair did. He had to; he was finished. He must have had two machines. The killer took the second machine.”

  Ordaz said, “Ahh.”

  Porter said, “Who’s K?”

  We were settling on the carport. Valpredo knew where we were, but he didn’t say anything. We left the taxi and headed for the elevators.

  “That’s a lot easier,” I said: “He expected to use the machine as an alibi. That’s silly, considering how many people knew it existed. But if he didn’t know that Sinclair was ready to start showing it to people—specifically to you and Janice—who’s left? Ecks only knew it was some kind of interstellar drive.”

  The elevator was uncommonly large. We piled into it.

  “And,” Valpredo said, “there’s the matter of the arm. I think I’ve got that figured, too.”

  “I gave you enough clues,” I told him.

  Peterfi was a long time answering our buzz. He may have studied us through the door camera, wondering why a parade was marching through his hallway. Then he spoke through the grid. “Yes? What is it?”

  “Police. Open up,” Valpredo said.

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  I stepped forward and showed my ident to the camera. “I’m an ARM. I don’t need a warrant. Open up. We won’t keep you long.” One way or another.

  He opened the door. He looked neater now than he had this afternoon despite informal brown indoor pajamas. “Just you,” he said. He let me in, then started to close the door on the others.

  Valpredo put his hand against the door. “Hey—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. Peterfi was smaller than I was, and I had a needle gun. Valpredo shrugged and let him close the door.

  My mistake. I had two-thirds of the puzzle, and I thought I had it all.

  Peterfi folded his arms and said, “Well? What is it you want to search this time? Would you like to examine my legs?”

  “No, let’s start with the insulin feeder on your upper arm.

  “Certainly,” he said, and startled the hell out of me.

  I waited while he took off his shirt—unnecessary, but he needn’t know that—then ran my imaginary fingers through the insulin feed. The reserve was nearly full. “I should have known,” I said. “Dammit. You got six months worth of insulin from the organlegger.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Organlegger?” He pulled loose. “Is this an accusation, Mr. Hamilton? I’m taping this for my attorney.”

  And I was setting myself up for a lawsuit. The hell with it. “Yah, it’s an accusation. You killed Sinclair. Nobody else could have tried that alibi stunt.”

  He looked puzzled—honestly, I thought. “Why not?”

  “If anyone else had tried to set up an alibi with Sinclair’s generator, Peterfi, you, would have told the police all about what it was and how it worked. But you were the only one who knew that until last night, when he started showing it around.”

  There was only one thing he could say to that kind of logic, and he said it. “Still recording, Mr. Hamilton.”

  “Record and be damned. There are other things we can check. Your grocery delivery service. Your water bill.”

  He didn’t flinch. He was smiling. Was it a bluff? I sniffed the air. Six months worth of body odor emitted in one night? By a man who hadn’t taken more than four or five baths in six months? But his air-conditioning was too good
.

  The curtains were open now to the night and the ocean. They’d been closed this afternoon, and he’d been squinting. But it wasn’t evidence. The lights: he only had one light burning now, and so what?

  The big, powerful campout flashlight sitting on a small table against a wall. I hadn’t even noticed it this afternoon. Now I was sure I knew what he’d used it for, but how to prove it?

  Groceries … “If you didn’t buy six months worth of groceries last night, you must have stolen them. Sinclair’s generator is perfect for thefts. We’ll check the local supermarkets.”

  “And link the thefts to me? How?”

  He was too bright to have kept the generator. But come to think of it, where could he abandon it? He was guilty. He couldn’t have covered all his tracks—

  “Peterfi? I’ve got it.”

  He believed me. I saw it in the way he braced himself. Maybe he’d worked it out before I did. I said, “Your contraceptive shots must have worn off six months early. Your organlegger couldn’t get you that; he’s got no reason to keep contraceptives around. You’re dead, Peterfi.”

  “I might as well be. Damn you, Hamilton! You’ve cost me the exemption!”

  “They won’t try you right away. We can’t afford to lose what’s in your head. You know too much about Sinclair’s generator.”

  “Our generator! We built it together!”

  “Yah.”

  “You won’t try me at all,” he said more calmly. “Are you going to tell a court how the killer left Ray’s apartment?”

  I dug out my sketch and handed it to him. While he was studying it, I said, “How did you like going off the roof? You couldn’t have known it would work.”

  He looked up. His words came slowly, reluctantly. I guess he had to tell someone, and it didn’t matter now. “By then I didn’t care. My arm hung like a dead rabbit, and it stank. It took me three minutes to reach the ground. I thought I’d die on the way.”