03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “Sorry.”

  “Yah. Well, this version works all the time, Yonnie said. It’s still too expensive to market.”

  “Hecate, is it just conceivable,” I wondered, “that Shreve would like me to test their Mark Twenty-nine active shield for them?”

  She shook her head; the pepper and salt crest swirled inside the helmet. Amused. “Not you. A dead flatlander celebrity riding their Mark Twenty-nine Shreveshield? They could watch your death grin in every boob cube in the solar system! Shall I take the first ride?”

  “I want a fresh look. I don’t want to deal with your tire prints.” I boarded the Mark Twenty-nine before she could object.

  She made no move to stop me. I said, “Check the reception.”

  She was into the lemmy’s cabin in a lovely graceful leap. She brought up the feed from my helmet camera. “You’re on, nice and … actually the picture’s jumping a little. Good enough, though.”

  “Keep your eye on me. You can coach.” I kicked the Mark Twenty-nine into gear and rolled toward the rim.

  I’d been wakened from a sound sleep by her call. They keep the same time over the whole moon, so it was the middle of the night for Hecate Bauer-Stanson, too.

  Ah, well. I had time to shower and get some breakfast while she landed and refueled, and that’s never guaranteed. But it didn’t sound like the intruder in Del Rey Crater needed immediate justice.

  During the flight I’d had a chance to read about Del Rey Crater.

  Just before the turn of the millennium, Boeing, then more or less an aircraft company, had done a survey. What kind of customer would pay how much for easy access to orbit?

  The answers it got depended heavily on the cost of launch. A hundred thirty years ago those costs were the stuff of fantasy. NASA’s weird political spacecraft, the Shuttle, launched for three thousand dollars per pound and up. At that price there would be no customers at all: nothing would fly without tax-financed kickbacks, and nothing did.

  At two hundred dollars a pound—then considered marginally possible—the Net could afford to hold gladiatorial contests in orbit.

  Intermediate prices would buy High Frontier antiweapons, orbiting solar power, high-end tourism, hazardous waste disposal, funerals …

  Funerals. For five hundred dollars a pound, an urnful of ashes could be launched frozen in a block of ice for the solar wind to scatter to the stars. They launched from Florida in those days. Florida’s funeral lobby must have owned the state. Florida passed a state law. No funeral procedure could be licensed in Florida unless grieving relatives could visit the grave … via a paved road!

  Boeing also considered disposal of hazardous waste from fission plants.

  You wouldn’t just fire it off. First you’d separate the leftover uranium and/or plutonium, the fuel, to use again. Then you’d take out low-level radioactives and bury them in bricks. The truly noxious remainder, about three percent by mass, you would package to survive an unexpected reentry. Then you’d bomb a crater on the moon with them.

  Power plant technology would improve over the decades to come. Our ancestors saw that far. In time that awful goo would once again be fuel. Future stockholders would want to find it.

  Boeing had chosen Del Rey Crater with some care.

  Del Rey was little but deep, just at the moon’s visible rim. Meteors massing 1.1 tonnes, slamming down at two kilometers per second, would raise dust plumes against the limb of the moon. An amateur’s telescope could find them. Lowell Observatory could get great pictures for the evening news: effective advertising, and free. The high rim would catch more of the dust … not all but most.

  My search program had turned up a Lester del Rey with a half-century career in science fiction. The little crater had indeed been named for him. And he’d written an early story about an imaginary fission power plant: “Nerves.”

  To a man used to moonscapes the view from the crater rim was quite strange. It’s not unusual for craters to overlap craters. But they clustered in the center, so that the central peak had been battered flat, and every crater was the same size. Yet more twenty-meter craters shaped the line that made Del Rey into one huge FORBIDDEN sign.

  Everything around me was covered in pairs of tractor treadmarks a meter apart, often with a middle track as of something being dragged. A kilometer away, the tread marks thinned out and disappeared. There I began to see silvery beads at the center of every crater.

  And one a little shinier, the wrong color, off center. I used the zoom feature in my faceplate to expand the view.

  A pressure suit lay facedown. It was a hardshell, not a skintight. I was looking at the top of its head.

  Corrugated footprints ran away from the body, three and four yards apart. The intruder had been running toward the rim to my right, south-southeast, leaping like a Lunar Olympics runner.

  “Still got me, Hecate?”

  “Yes, Gil. Your camera’s better than the one on the waldo tug, but I can’t make out any markings on the suit.”

  “It’s head-on to me. Okay, I’m setting a relay antenna. Now I’ll get closer.” I started the Mark Twenty-nine rolling into the crater. If the shield around me was glowing, I couldn’t see it from inside.

  “I think you were wrong. That isn’t a flatlander’s suit. It’s just old.”

  “Gil, we went to some effort to get the ARM involved. That was never a lunie design. It’s too square. The helmet’s wrong. This fishbowl design we’re wearing, we were already using it when we built Luna City!”

  “Hecate, how did you find this thing? How long has it been lying here?”

  Hesitation. “We don’t send sputniki over Del Rey Crater very often. It’s hard on the instruments. Nobody saw anything odd until the waldo tugs went in, and then we got a nice view through a tug’s camera.”

  Even if a few sputniki did cross over Del Rey, the suit wouldn’t contrast with the other silver dots around it. How long had it been here? “Hecate, divert a sputnik or a ship with a camera. We need an overhead view. Do you have the authority, or do I have to play dominance games?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “In a minute. These waldo tugs. What are you stockpiling? The moon has helium-three fusion and solar power, too!”

  “Those old impact tanks go off to the Helios plants.”

  “Why?”

  Hecate sighed. “Beats the hell out of me. Maybe you can find out. You’ve got clout.”

  I saw a canister broken open and steered wide around it. Invisible death. I couldn’t see any kind of glow around me: no evil blue Cherenkov radiation and nothing from my own shield, either.

  What if my wheels broke down? I might trust the Shreveshield, but how careful had Shreve Development been with something as simple, as off-the-shelf as a pair of power wheels? I couldn’t leave the Mark Twenty-nine without frying …

  Dumb. I’d just carry it out. Hecate and I had picked it up easily. Why does radiation make people so nervous?

  I stopped a little way from the downed suit. There were no tracks nearby, only the marks under the gloves and boots. The deader had clawed at the dust, leaving finger and toe marks. I ran the Mark Twenty-nine in a half circle, helmet camera running. Then I pulled as close as I could get and lowered the stand.

  At this moment I still couldn’t testify that that wasn’t an empty suit. The only markings were the usual color-coded arrows, instructions for novices. They seemed faded.

  I didn’t much want to step down. Radioactive dust on my boots would be carried inside the Shreveshield. What I could do was lean far over, gripping the belly casing of the Mark Twenty-nine with legs and hands, and reach into the suit with my imaginary arm.

  It’s like reaching into water rich with weeds and scum. My fingers trail through varying texture. Yup, there’s someone in there. It seems dehydrated. Corruption isn’t obtrusive, and for this I’m grateful. Maybe the suit leaked. The chest … a woman?

  I reach around to touch the face lightly. Dry and ancient. I grimace and rea
ch, trailing phantom fingers through chest and torso and abdomen.

  “Gil, are you all right?”

  “Sure, Hecate. I’m using my talent to see what I can feel out.”

  “It’s just that you didn’t say anything for a while. What talent?”

  I never know how someone will react. “Wild talent I’ve got some PK and esper. It amounts to being able to feel around inside a locked box with an imaginary arm and hand. I can pick up things, little things. Okay?”

  “Okay. What have you got?”

  “She was a woman. Hecate, she’s shorter than I am.”

  “Flatlander.”

  “Likely. No markings on the suit. Corruption isn’t advanced, but she’s dried out like a mummy. We should check the suit for a leak.” I continued to search as I talked. “She’s covered with medical telltales outside and in. Big, old-fashioned things. Maybe we can date them. Her face feels two hundred years old, but that’s no sign of anything. Air tanks are dry, of course. Air pressure’s near zero. I haven’t found an injury yet. Hel-lo!”

  “Gil?”

  “Her oxygen flow is twisted right over, all the way up.”

  No comment.

  I said, “Bet on a leak. Even money, a leak got her before the radiation did.”

  “But what the hell was she doing there?”

  “Funny how that thought occurred to both of us. Hecate, shall I collect the body?”

  “I sure don’t want it in my cargo hold. Gil, we don’t want it on the Mark Twenty-nine. If you let me start up the waldo tugs, I can guide one to the body and move it that way.”

  “Start ’em up.”

  I rolled past the dead woman. I stayed wide of the line of footprints leading north-northeast, but that was what I was following.

  … Bounding across a crater that was the most radioactive spot in the solar system, barring the sun itself and maybe Mercury. Frightened out of her mind? Even if there was no leak, it was a sane decision, giving herself maximum oxygen pressure, nothing left for later as she ran for the crater rim like a damned soul escaping hell. But what was she doing in the crater?

  I stopped. “Hecate?”

  “Here. I’ve started the waldo tugs. Shall I send you one?”

  “Yah. Hecate, do you see what I see? The footprints?”

  “They just stop.”

  “In the middle of Del Rey Crater?”

  “Well, what do you see?”

  “They start here in the middle, already running. They get halfway to the rim. The way my rad sensor is losing its lunch, I’d say she made a good run of it.”

  I trundled back to where I’d left the corpse. There was a signal laser in the service pack on my back. I spent a few minutes cutting an outline in the rock around the corpse.

  “Hecate, how fast are those tugs?”

  “Not exactly built for speed. It’s more important that they don’t turn over, but they’ll do twenty-five K on the flat. Gil, you’ll have your tug in ten minutes. How’s your shield holding?”

  I looked at the rad counters. Hell raged around me, but almost nothing was getting inside the shield. “Whatever got through, I probably brought it in on my boots. From outside Del Rey at that. I’d still like to leave.”

  “Gil, give me a camera view of the boots.”

  I wheeled into place and leaned far over the corpse’s boots. Without Hecate’s mention, I might never have noticed them. They were white. No decoration, no custom touches. Big boots with thick soles for lunar heat and cold, heavy treads for lunar dust. Built for the moon. But of course they would be even if they’d come straight from somewhere on Earth.

  “Now the face. The sooner we find out who she was, the better.”

  “She’s lying on her face.”

  “Don’t touch her,” Hecate said. “Wait for the tug.”

  I spent some of my waiting time easing a rope line under the body. Then I just waited.

  A pair of arms on tractor treads was bumping toward me. It crossed crater after crater like it was bobbing on waves. It was making me queasy—if that wasn’t the radiation—but the counters were quiet. I watched, and it came.

  “I’ll turn her over first,” Hecate told me. Metal arms a little bigger than mine reached out. I lifted the rope. The arms went under and over the pressure suit and rotated.

  “Hold that,” I said.

  “Holding.”

  Three centimeters from her faceplate I still couldn’t see through. Maybe the camera could in one frequency or another. I said, “She’s likely still got fingerprints, and we’ll get her DNA, but not retina prints.”

  “Yah.” The cargo tug backed and began moving away. “Get a view of where it was lying,” Hecate said, but I already was. “Can you get closer? Okay, Gil, move out. You don’t have to wait for the tug.”

  I passed another waldo tug as it was latching on to a canister. A third crawled over the crater rim ahead of me. I followed it over the rim and out.

  I said, “I suppose nobody will disturb the scene of the crime? If there’s a crime.”

  “We’ve got cameras on the waldo tugs. I’ll set up a watch.”

  I watched the tug drag its canister toward the hole in the mound.

  In my mind’s eye, that hill was an ancient British barrow and all the ancient dead were pouring through the portal in its side, into the living world. But on this dead world what crawled out of the factory was only another set of arms riding tractor treads. Still, it was more deadly than any murderous old king’s risen army.

  Hecate Bauer-Stanson said, “Soon as we reach civilization, you start a search for missing flatlanders who could have wound up on the moon, and a search for that model pressure suit. We’ve already ruled out anything manufactured here. It’s got to be flatlander.”

  “Not Belter?”

  “The boots, Gil. No magnets. No fittings for magnets.”

  Well, hell. I’d just lost serious sleuthing points to Lawman Hecate Bauer-Stanson.

  “Come on, Gil. We’ll let the waldo tug take the body back.”

  “You can program it?”

  “I can get it down from Helios Power One, which is where we’re going. It’ll be five hours en route. She’s waited a long time, Gil; she’ll wait a little longer. Come on.”

  “We taking the Mark Twenty-nine?”

  “It could go back by itself … no. If anything happened … no, I think we bloody have to.”

  Hecate directed me: we set the Mark Twenty-nine on a rock ridge. I didn’t guess why until she went back to the lemmy for an oxygen tank.

  I asked, “Can we spare that?”

  “Sure, the whole lunar surface is lousy with bound oxygen. I have to get the dust off, don’t I?” She pointed the tank and opened the stopcock. Dust flew from the Mark Twenty-nine, and I stepped back.

  “I mean, we wouldn’t want to run out of breath.” “I packed plenty.” She emptied the tank. Then we lifted the Mark Twenty-nine back into the lemmy’s cargo hold.

  Hecate took us up and away.

  How hard would she hit? Isaac Newton had it all worked out. I was trying to remember the equation, but it wouldn’t come. Postulate a mass driver on the rim wall. Launch her in lunar gravity, three kilometers to the center. Up at forty-five degrees, down the same way, Sir Isaac had that straight, and land running. Keep running. Switch the oxygen to high and run, run for the far side of the rim, away from the—rap rap rap—mad scientist who had set her flying. “Gil?” Rap rap rap.

  Knuckles on my helmet, an inch from my eye sockets. “Yah?” I opened my eyes.

  We were falling toward a hole in the moon, a vast glittering black patch with fine lines of orange and green scrolling across it. As we dropped—as the lemmy’s thrust pulled me into my couch, creating a sudden scary sense of down—I could make out the shape of a rounded hill with a few tiny windows glittering in the black.

  Hecate said, “I thought you might freak if thrust started while you were asleep.”

  The orange and black logo was upside d
own. Helios Power One was sheathed in Black Power. I was amused, but it made sense: If the fusion plant went down, they’d still want lights, cooling, and the air recycler.

  “What were you dreaming? Your legs were kicking.”

  I’d been dozing. What had I been dreaming? “Hecate, she turned the oxygen all the way up. Maybe there was no leak. Maybe it was to run better.”

  We settled into an orange and green mandala, Helios Power One’s landing pad. Hecate eeled out of the cabin, then hustled me out. She said, “We’ll see if her suit really has a leak. Anything else?”

  “I was thinking a ship landed in the middle of Del Rey and left her there. A little ship, because you’d want the drive flame sploshing into a crater, and those are little craters. Your lemmy could do that, couldn’t it? And nothing would show—”

  “Don’t bet on that. It’s always amazing what you can see from orbit. Anyway, I’d hate to ride anything into Del Rey Crater. Gil, I’m feeling a little warm.”

  “Just your imagination.”

  “Let’s get to decontamination.”

  Copernicus Dome was three hundred kilometers northeast of Del Rey. Helios Power One was only a hundred, in a different direction, but both would be just a hop in the lemmy.

  Copernicus Dome certainly had medical facilities for rad poisoning. Any autodoc off Earth could treat us for that. Radiation treatment must date back to the end of World War II! Nearly two centuries of improved techniques leave it difficult to die of radiation … but not impossible.

  But decontamination, washing the radiation off something you want to live with afterward, is something else again. Only fission and fusion power plants would have decontamination facilities.

  So far so good. But Helios Power One used He3 fusion.

  There’s He3 all over the moon, absorbed onto the rocks. The helium-three nucleus includes two protons and a neutron. It fuses nicely with simple deuterium—which has to be imported—giving He4 and hydrogen and energy, but only at ungodly temperatures. The wonderful thing about He3 fusion is that it doesn’t spit out neutrons. It’s not radioactive.