by Larry Niven
I remembered how the water had sheathed me when I had stood up in the tub. But— “Would it spread that much? Mayor, could the glass in the window cut some of the light?”
The mayor shook his head. “He said red light. The window wouldn’t stop red light. It filters raw sunlight, but mainly in the blue and ultraviolet and X-ray range.”
“We ought to let him sleep,” McCavity said. We followed him out.
The corridor was high because lunies are high, and wide for a touch of luxury. Windows looked down into the Garden.
The newstapers were waiting. Desiree Porter confronted Marion Shaeffer. “I’d like my camera back, please.”
Shaeffer handed over the bulky two-handed instrument.
“And my holos?”
She jerked a thumb at the freckled, seven-foot-high lunie cop. “Captain Jefferson’s got ’em. They’re evidence.”
Tom Reinecke confronted Harry McCavity. “Doctor, what is Chris Penzler’s condition? Is it murder or attempted murder?”
McCavity smiled. “Attempted. He’ll be all right. He should rest tomorrow, but I think he’ll be well enough to attend the conference afterward. Mayor, are you through with me? I’m tired.”
Captain Jefferson said, “We’ll need your evidence on the nature of the wound, but not just now.”
McCavity waved and departed, leaping down the corridor like a frog, both feet pushing at the floor at the same time.
Mayor Hove Watson watched him go. His face was puzzled, thoughtful. He came to himself with a start. “What about it, Gil? What would the ARM be doing if this were Los Angeles?”
“Nothing. Murder isn’t ARM business unless it involves organlegging or esoteric technology. I’ve investigated some murders, though. Mainly we’d try to track the weapon.”
“We’ll do that. Chris said red light. That probably means it was a message laser, and they’re guarded. The police use them for weapons as well as senders.”
“Guarded how?” I noticed that both newstapers were listening quietly.
“The locks are controlled by the same computer that operates your own apartment, including the door lock. It’s a different program, of course.”
“Okay. What about opportunity? There was a killer out on the moon. He can’t stay out forever.”
Mayor Hove turned to the lunie cop. “We have no secrets, Jefferson.”
“Yessir. We were lucky,” Jefferson told us. “First, it’s city night and lunar night. Well, predawn. Most of the population is in their apartments, and we can account for some of the rest. One flatlander tourist is out on the moon, and nobody else as far as we can tell. We’re checking the night shift at the mirror works. If it were daylight, we’d have hundreds of suspects. Second, the Watchbird Two satellite rose ten minutes ago. I’ve had the projection room made ready for us.”
“Very good.” Mayor Hove rubbed his eyes. “Proceed with your investigations, Captain. Detectives Hamilton and Shaeffer may accompany you if they wish. The reporters … well, use your own judgment.” He dropped his voice to tell me, “I thought it politic to let Mr. Penzler see me concerned in his behalf, but I’d be of no more use here …” And he jumped off down the corridor.
The rest of us followed Jefferson to an elevator.
3. THE PROJECTION ROOM
The projection room was a big box set into Levels Six and Seven, underground, in the south side. The police had a projection going when we arrived. They were wading knee deep in miniature lunar landscape.
I think the newstapers were jolted. I know I was.
Jefferson beamed at us. “The Watchbird Two satellite is just over us now. It sends us a picture, and we project it in real time.”
He waded out into the moon, and we followed, thigh deep and a hundred feet tall. I could see my feet through the flat stone surface of Grimalde Crater if I concentrated.
Dawn had fully arrived. The sun flared on the eastern horizon, not far below the crescent Earth. The crater-pocked landscape west of us was all glaring ridges and black shadows. Hovestraydt City was a dollhouse. Tiny figures in bright orange skintights with police insignia were leaving an air lock in the south face, on the road that led across the badlands to the Belt Trading Post.
Someone was walking toward them down the middle of the road. I bent close above the doll figure, looking for details. An inflated suit, sky blue, shorter than the approaching lunie cops. Blond hair in the bubble helmet.
I heard a satisfied “Ah.” When I turned, Marion Shaeffer added, “I was pretty sure it would be a flatlander.”
Penzler’s room would be second from the end in the west face. I picked it out, then traced a line to a tilted rock like an elongated egg. Past that point it was mostly shadows. I saw nobody anywhere in that whole stretch of moonscape, save for a sky blue suit and four orange ones, converging.
“We seem to have only one suspect,” Captain Jefferson said. “Even a puffer wouldn’t take a killer out of range that fast.”
Shaeffer asked, “Puffer?”
“Basically two wheels and a motor and a saddle. We use them a lot.”
“Ah. What about a spacecraft?”
“We checked, of course. The only spacecraft in the vicinity came nowhere near here.”
I was thinking along different lines. “What’s a message laser look like? Our little blue suspect doesn’t seem to be carrying anything.”
“We’d see it. A message laser is about yay long—” Jefferson’s hands were a yard, or meter, apart. “—and masses nine kilos.”
“Well, those shadows could hide anything. Mind if I feel around in there? I might turn up the weapon.”
Tom and Desiree grinned at each other. Shaeffer stared. Jefferson said. “What? What did you say?”
The newstapers laughed outright. Desiree said, “He’s Gil the Arm. Haven’t you ever heard of Gil the Arm?”
“He’s got an imaginary arm,” Tom added.
With impressive restraint Jefferson said, “Oh?”
“Combination of psychic powers,” I told him. “But it’s all limited by my imagination. As if I had a ghost arm and hand.”
I didn’t bother to add that psychic powers are notoriously undependable. What gave me confidence this time was that I was already trying it: running my imaginary hand lightly over the smooth surface of the Grimalde plain, feeling its texture—cooled magma, cracked everywhere, the cracks filled by moondust—then plunging my hand in and running the ghostly rock between my fingers like water. Hard rock here; pools of moondust in the rough land beyond Grimalde’s rim wall; here beneath the dust, an oxygen tank split down the middle by internal pressure. “It’d help if I knew what a message laser looks like,” I added.
Captain Jefferson used his belt phone to summon someone with a message laser. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “maybe you’d like to feel around in here?’” He patted at the southeast corner of the hologram city.
I reached into the wall. I found a small room, cramped, lined with racks. The only door felt thick, massive. It opened into the mirror works, in vacuum. I found varied equipment on the racks: armored inflated suits, personal jet packs, a heavy two-handed cutting torch. I described what I was finding. My audience could be expected to include skeptics.
And I tried not to think about what was actually happening: my own disembodied sense of touch reaching through rock walls to roam through a locked room seven floors above me. If I stopped believing, it couldn’t happen.
The racks held a score of things like bulky rifles.
I pinched one between my thumb and two fingers. Riflestock frame, compact excitation barrel, tingle of battery power, and a scope just big enough to feel as a bump. The message laser felt both light and heavy: no mass at all yet impossible to move.
A cop came in carrying the real thing. I held it in my hands and ran my imaginary hand over it, then through it. There was a dimmer switch and a cord that would plug into a pressure suit’s microphone.
You could talk with it. I wouldn’t ha
ve been surprised either way. Calling a deadly police weapon a message laser could have been no more than good public relations.
I waded west into the choppy cratered land our would-be killer must have fired from. The newstapers and lunie cops were watching me intently. God knows what they expected to see. I swept my imaginary hand back and forth through the landscape, like sifting intangible sand. The killer might well have dumped his weapon into a dust pool. He might equally well be hiding in one of those shadows, I thought, with a stock of air tanks and spare batteries. I sifted them.
Pools and lakes of shadow felt very cold and showed nothing, though I could feel the shapes of the rocks. Once I felt something like a twelve-foot artillery shell smashed against a crater rim. I asked Jefferson about it. He said it was probably from the rescue attempt after the Blowout eighteen years ago. It would have held water or air.
There was a high ridge, a crater wall. I felt around in the shadows behind it. The killer couldn’t have been placed farther back than this. The ridge would have blocked him, and it was already farther than Chris Penzler’s “three hundred, four hundred meters.”
I turned and went back over the same territory again. By now I was feeling foolish. No laser, no hidden killer, and the beginning of a headache.
The neon orange dolls had collected the blue doll and were going through the air lock. I waded back to where the others waited. I said, “I quit.”
The others didn’t hide their disappointment. Then Desiree brightened and said, “You’ll have to testify, won’t you? No weapon and no other suspect.”
“I guess I will. Let’s go see who they’ve got.”
The desk sergeant was a lunie woman with rounded oriental features and big boobs.
Forgive me! Later I got to know Laura Drury fairly well, but I was seeing her for the first time, and I admit I stared. On her spare, attenuated frame her attractive, ample breasts became her dominant feature. You don’t picture a Tolkien elf that way.
We stopped in the doorway, not wanting to interfere. Sergeant Drury asked, “Is this your first visit to the moon, Ms. Mitchison?”
And I went numb.
Naomi’s eyes flicked to us and away. It was the desk sergeant who concerned her. She knew she was in trouble, and it made her voice brittle. “No, I was at the museum in Mare Tranquilitatis four years ago.”
“Did you see much of the moon then?”
The shock was getting through to me. One suspect had been in position to fire through Chris Penzler’s window. I would have to testify that nobody was hiding out there in the shadows. I’d eliminated everyone but Naomi.
It was insane. What could Naomi have to do with Chris Penzler? But I remembered a vindictive glare directed toward our dinner table last night. For Penzler?
Her golden hair was still rumpled from the pressure suit helmet. The rest of the suit was still on her. The big gaudy blue butterfly still covered her eyelids. She sat on the forward edge of a web chair. “I only stayed a week that time,” she said. “I … was in the mood for a dead world, but I was wrapped up in myself, too. My husband and my little girl had just died. I guess I spent most of my time staring out the window of my room.”
“You left Hovestraydt City alone this evening,” the desk sergeant said. “You’ve been out four and a half hours. For a tourist that is reckless. Did you keep to known paths?”
“No, I played tourist. I wandered. I spent some time on the big road, but I ducked into the shadows and the craters every so often. Why not? I couldn’t get lost. I could see Earth.”
“Did you take a signal laser?”
“No. Nobody told me to. Have I broken some fool regulation, Sergeant?”
The lunie woman’s lips twitched. “In a manner of speaking. You are accused of having stationed yourself several hundred meters west of the city, of having located Fourth Speaker Chris Penzler’s window and kept watch until he stood up in his bathtub, at which time you fired a signal laser into his chest. Did you do that?”
Naomi was amazed, then horrified … or she was a fine actress. “No. Why would I?” She turned. “Gil? Are you in on this?”
“Only as an observer,” I half lied. Marion was looking at me with distrust. Clearly the suspect knew me.
The desk sergeant asked, “Ms. Mitchison? Do you know Chris Penzler?”
“I used to. He’s a Belter. My husband and I met him on Earth almost five years ago. He was negotiating with the UN about some kind of jurisdictional problem. Is he dead?”
“No. He is badly injured.”
“And you’re really accusing me of attempted murder? With a message laser?”
“We are, yes.”
“But … I don’t have any reason. I don’t have a message laser, either. Why me?” Her eyes flicked about the room: a butterfly fluttering against a window. “Gil?”
I flinched. “I’m not in this. It’s not my jurisdiction.”
“Gil, is attempted murder an organ bank crime? On the moon?”
Sergeant Drury answered for me. “Why would we give a clumsy killer a second chance?”
“You can refuse to answer questions,” I said.
Naomi shook her head. “That’s all right. But … is that a news camera?”
Jefferson crooked his finger at Tom and Desiree. The newstapers looked at each other and somehow agreed that resistance would be futile. They followed Jefferson out.
The desk sergeant’s eyes flicked to Marion. “Who might you be?”
“Marion Shaeffer, Captain, Belt Police. The man who was shot is a Belt citizen.”
Drury’s eyes questioned me, and I answered. “Gil Hamilton, operative, ARM, here for the conference. I know Ms. Mitchison. I’d like to stay.”
“Have you any suggestions?”
“Yes. Naomi, one problem is that we can’t find anyone else who could have been in the right place. You were. You’ve said you didn’t shoot Chris—”
“With what?”
“Who cares? If you’re not our clumsy killer, then you’re our only witness. Did you see anything unusual out there?”
She thought about it. “I’m handicapped, Gil. I don’t know the moon, and it was night. I didn’t see anyone else.”
“Did you drop anything, or brush against anything, or break anything? Is there some way we could tell just where you were?”
“You could examine my suit.” Hostility was creeping into her voice.
“Oh, we’ll do that. We’d also like to examine your route. You’d have to lead us. We can’t make you do that.”
“Gil, can I get some sleep first?”
I looked at Sergeant Drury, who said, “Of course. You may find it easier when the sun’s higher.” She sent Naomi off with another cop.
“We’ve got men out there,” she said briskly. “There won’t be anyone tampering with evidence. What do you know about her?”
“I haven’t seen Naomi in ten years. I wouldn’t have said she was the killer type. When you take her outside, may I go along?”
“We’ll alert you. And you, Ms. Shaeffer.”
“Thanks. Make that Marion.”
“Okay. I’m Laura Drury. Make it Laura.”
We waited for the elevators. Marion said, “Gil, what do you consider the killer type?”
“Yeah, that’s a hard one, isn’t it? But Naomi strikes me as more the murder victim type.”
“What do you mean?”
She sounded like she was questioning a suspect. I put it down to habit, I said, “Once upon a time I might have killed her myself. Naomi has a way of … inviting a pass, then slapping the passer down hard. I really think she gets a charge out of leaving a man horny and frustrated. This isn’t just subjective, Marion. I’ve heard other guys talk about it. Still … it was ten years ago, and she got married and had a little girl. So your guess is as good as mine.”
The elevator came. We got in. Marion said, “I don’t have to guess. She was the only one out there, and she’s a flatlander.”
“So?”<
br />
She smiled. “The wound was too high. Eight, nine centimeters above the heart. Why?”
“The rim of the tub was too high.”
“Right. Now, there aren’t any tubs in the Belt, except in the bubble worlds. A flatlander wouldn’t expect a lunie bathtub to stand so tall. When it came time to make her move, Naomi couldn’t see Penzler’s heart. She just took her best shot.”
I shook my head. “A lunie would know how tall the tub was, but he wouldn’t expect Penzler to be so short.”
“He must have seen Penzler.”
“Sure, and Naomi’s seen lunie bathtubs, too.” While she was mulling that, I added, “Maybe it was a Belter. You said it yourself; the only tubs in the Belt are in the bubble worlds. You spin those for an Earth gravity. Belt bathtubs are just like Earth’s.”
Marion grinned. “Got me.”
“And we’re still missing the main point. Why didn’t the killer just wait till Penzler got out of the tub? If it was Naomi, she’d already been waiting most of four hours.”
“Now, that is a damn good question,” Marion said. And we parted on that note, her to her room, me to mine. I could catch two or three hours on my back before 0610.
At exactly 0610 I rang Taffy’s doorbell.
“Gil! Are you alone?”
The long stretch of hall was quite empty. “At this hour, what sane man would be up?”
“Chiron, open door.”
I walked in. And she was already in flight! I leaned far forward to catch her weight and managed not to bounce back into the hall. We took a long time over our first kiss. Tasting each other. By and by I noticed that she was wearing a surgeon’s paper coverall. Those things are intended to be used only once.
“Can I rip this off you?”
“Be my guest.”
I tore it off in handfuls, with sound effects: the roar of an unendurably frustrated male. The paper was tough. A lunie couldn’t have done it. I swept her in my arms and leapt for the bed and bounced off again. Pulled my own clothes off more sedately, moved back to the bed, and had some trouble.
