by Larry Niven
“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. Qué lástima.”
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 case something had been jarred loose. Bera leaned against the doorjamb, 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 practical 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.”
“Good luck. I'm going back to Sinclair's place.”
“Why? The action is here.” Often enough he'd heard me talking wistfully of joining an interstellar colony. He must know how I'd feel about a better drive for the interstellar slowboats.
“It's like this,” I said. “We've got the generator, but we don't know anything about it. We might wreck it. I'm going to have a whack at finding someone who knows something about Sinclair's genera
tor.”
“Meaning?”
“Whoever tried to steal it. Sinclair's killer.”
“If you say so.” But he looked dubious. He knew me too well. He said, “I understand there's a mother hunt in the offing.”
“Oh?”
He smiled. “Just a rumor. You guys are lucky. When my dad first joined, the business of the ARM was mostly mother hunts. The organleggers hadn't really got organized yet, and the Fertility Laws were new. If we hadn't enforced them, nobody would have obeyed them at all.”
“Sure, and people threw rocks at your father. Bera, those days are gone.”
“They could come back. Having children is basic.”
“Bera, I did not join the ARM to hunt unlicensed parents.” I waved and left before he could answer. I could do without the call to duty from Bera, who had done with hunting men and mothers.
* * * *
I'd had a good view of the Rodewald Building while dropping toward the roof this morning. I had a good view now from my commandeered taxi. This time I was looking for escape paths.
There were no balconies on Sinclair's floors, and the windows were flush to the side of the building. A cat burglar would have trouble with them. They didn't look like they'd open.
I tried to spot the cameras Ordaz had mentioned as the taxi dropped toward the roof. I couldn't find them. Maybe they were mounted in the elms.
Why was I bothering? I hadn't joined the ARM to chase mothers or machinery or common murderers.
I'd joined the ARM to hunt organleggers.
The ARM doesn't deal in murder per se. The machine was out of my hands now. A murder investigation wouldn't keep me out of a mother hunt. And I'd never met the girl. I knew nothing of her beyond the fact that she was where a killer ought to be.
Was it just that she was pretty?
Poor Janice. When she woke up ... For a solid month I'd wakened to that same stunning shock, the knowledge that my right arm was gone.
The taxi settled. Valpredo was waiting below.
I speculated ... Cars weren't the only things that flew. But anyone flying one of those tricky ducted-fan flycycles over a city, where he could fall on a pedestrian, wouldn't have to worry about a murder charge. They'd feed him to the organ banks regardless. And anything that flew would leave traces anywhere but on the landing pad itself. It would crush a rosebush or a bonsai tree or be flipped over an elm.
The taxi took off in a whisper of air.
Valpredo was grinning at me. “The thinker. What's on your mind?”
“I was wondering if the killer could have come down on the carport roof.”
He turned to study the situation. “There are two cameras mounted on the edge of the roof. If his vehicle was light enough, sure, he could land there, and the cameras wouldn't spot him. Roof wouldn't hold a car, though. Anyway, nobody did it.”
“How do you know?”
“I'll show you. By the way, we inspected the camera system. We're pretty sure the cameras weren't tampered with. Nobody even landed here until seven this morning. Look here.” We had reached the concrete stairs that led down into Sinclair's apartments. Valpredo pointed at a glint of light in the sloping ceiling, at heart level. “This is the only way down. The camera would get anyone coming in or out. It might not catch his face, but it'd show if someone passed. It takes sixty frames a minute.”
I went on down. A cop let me in.
Ordaz was on the phone. The screen showed a young man with a deep tan and shock showing through the tan. Ordaz waved at me, a shushing motion, and went on talking. “Fifteen minutes? That will be a great help to us. Please land on the roof. We are still working on the elevator.”
He hung up and turned to me. “Andrew Porter, Janice Sinclair's lover. He tells us that he and Janice spent the evening at a party. She dropped him off at his home around one o'clock.”
“Then she came straight home, if that's her in the ’doc.”
“I think it must be. Mr. Porter says she was wearing a blue skin-dye job.” Ordaz was frowning. “He put on a most convincing act, if it was that. I think he really was not expecting any kind of trouble. He was surprised that a stranger answered, shocked when he learned of Doctor Sinclair's death, and horrified when he learned that Janice had been hurt.”
With the mummy and the generator removed, the murder scene had become an empty circle of brown grass marked with random streaks of yellow chemical and outlines of white chalk.
“We had some luck,” Ordaz said. “Today's date is June 4, 2124. Dr. Sinclair was wearing a calendar watch. It registered January 17, 2125. If we switched the machine off at ten minutes to ten—which we did—and if it was registering an hour for every seven seconds that passed outside the field, then the field must have gone on at around one o'clock last night, give or take a margin of error.”
“Then if the girl didn't do it, she must have just missed the killer.”
“Exactly.”
“What about the elevator? Could it have been jiggered?”
“No. We took the workings apart. It was on this floor and locked by hand. Nobody could have left by elevator...”
“Why did you trail off like that?”
Ordaz shrugged, embarrassed. “This peculiar machine really does bother me, Gil. I found myself thinking, Suppose it can reverse time? Then the killer could have gone down in an elevator that was going up.”
He laughed with me. I said, “In the first place, I don't believe a word of it. In the second place, he didn't have the machine to do it with. Unless ... he made his escape before the murder. Dammit, now you've got me doing it.”
“I would like to know more about the machine.”
“Bera's investigating it now. I'll let you know as soon as we learn anything. And I'd like to know more about how the killer couldn't possibly have left.”
He looked at me. “Details?”
“Could someone have opened a window?”
“No. These apartments are forty years old. The smog was still bad when they were built. Dr. Sinclair apparently preferred to depend on his air-conditioning.”
“How about the apartment below? I presume it has a different set of elevators.”
“Yes, of course. It belongs to Howard Rodewald, the owner of this building—of this chain of buildings, in fact. At the moment he is in Europe. His apartment has been loaned to friends.”
“There's no stairs down to there?”
“No. We searched these apartments thoroughly.”
“All right. We know the killer had a nylon line, because he left a strand of it on the generator. Could he have climbed down to Rodewald's balcony from the roof?”
“Thirty feet? Yes, I suppose so.” Ordaz's eyes sparked. “We must look into that. There is still the matter of how he got past the camera and whether he could have gotten inside once he was on the balcony.”
“Yah.”
“Try this, Gil. Another question. How did he expect to get away?” He watched for my reaction, which must have been satisfying, because it was a damn good question. “You see, if Janice Sinclair murdered her great-uncle, then neither question applies. If we are looking for someone else, we have to assume that his plans misfired. He had to improvise.”
“Uh huh. He could still have been planning to use Rodewald's balcony. And that would mean he had a way past the camera...”
“Of course he did. The generator.”
Right. If he came to steal the generator ... and he'd have to steal it regardless, because if we found it here, it would shoot his alibi sky high. So he'd leave it on while he trundled it up the stairs. Say it took him a minute; that's only an eighth of a second of normal time. One chance in eight that the camera would fire, and it would catch nothing but a streak ... “Uh oh.”
“What is it?”
“He had to be planning to steal the machine. Is he really going to lower it to Rodewald's balcony by rope?”
“I think it unlikely,” Ordaz said. “It weighed more than fifty pounds. He could have moved
it upstairs. The frame would make it portable. But to lower it by rope...”
“We'd be looking for one hell of an athlete.”
“At least you will not have to search far to find him. We assume that your hypothetical killer came by elevator, do we not?”
“Yah.” Nobody but Janice Sinclair had arrived by the roof last night.
“The elevator was programmed to allow a number of people to enter it and to turn away all others. The list is short. Doctor Sinclair was not a gregarious man.”
“You're checking them out? Whereabouts, alibis, and so forth?”
“Of course.”
“There's something else you might check on,” I said. But Andrew Porter came in, and I had to postpone it.
Porter came casual, in a well-worn translucent one-piece jumpsuit he must have pulled on while running for a taxi. The muscles rolled like boulders beneath the loose fabric, and his belly muscles showed like the plates on an armadillo. Surfing muscles. The sun had bleached his hair nearly white and burned him as brown as Jackson Bera. You'd think a tan that dark would cover for blood draining out of a face, but it doesn't.
“Where is she?” he demanded. He didn't wait for an answer. He knew where the ’doc was, and he went there. We trailed in his wake.
Ordaz didn't push. He waited while Porter looked down at Janice, then punched for a readout and went through it in detail. Porter seemed calmer then, and his color was back. He turned to Ordaz and said, “What happened?”
“Mr. Porter, did you know anything of Dr. Sinclair's latest project?”
“The time compressor thing? Yah. He had it set up in the living room when I got here yesterday evening—right in the middle of that circle of dead grass. Any connection?”
“When did you arrive?”
“Oh, about six. We had some drinks, and Uncle Ray showed off his machine. He didn't tell us much about it. Just showed what it could do.” Porter showed us flashing white teeth. “It worked. That thing can compress time! You could live your whole life in there in two months! Watching him move around inside the field was like trying to keep track of a hummingbird. Worse. He struck a match—”
