Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  I flopped back in the reading chair.

  If my hypothetical killer had watched Owen, he’d done it with a bug. Unless he’d actually lived on this floor for the four or five weeks it took Owen to die, there was no other way.

  Okay, think about a bug. Make it small enough and nobody could find it except the cleaning robot, which would send it straight to the incinerator. You’d have to make it big so the robot wouldn’t get it. No worry about Owen finding it! And then, when you knew Owen was dead, you’d use the self-destruct.

  But if you burned it to slag, you’d leave a burn hole somewhere. Ordaz would have found it. So. An asbestos pad? You’d want the self-destruct to leave something that the cleaning robot would sweep up.

  And if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. It was too chancy. Nobody knows what a cleaning robot will decide is garbage. They’re made stupid because it’s cheaper. So they’re programmed to leave large objects alone.

  There had to be someone on this floor either to watch Owen himself or to pick up the bug that did the watching. I was betting everything I had on a human watcher.

  I’d come here mainly to give my intuition a chance. It wasn’t working. Owen had spent six weeks in this chair, and for at least the last week he’d been dead. Yet I couldn’t feel it with him. It was just a chair with two end tables. He had left nothing in the room, not even a restless ghost.

  The call caught me halfway back to headquarters.

  “You were right,” Ordaz told me over the wristphone. “We have found a locker at Death Valley Port registered to Cubes Forsythe. I am on my way there now. Will you join me?”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Good. I am as eager as you to see what Owen Jennison left us.”

  I doubted that.

  The port was something more than 230 miles away, an hour at taxi speeds. It would be a big fare. I typed out a new address on the destination board, then called in at headquarters. An ARM agent is fairly free; he doesn’t have to justify every little move. There was no question of getting permission to go. At worst they might disallow the fare on my expense account.

  “Oh, and there’ll be a set of holos coming in from Monica Apartments,” I told the man. “Have the computer check them against known organleggers and associates of Loren.”

  The taxi rose smoothly into the sky and headed east. I watched tridee and drank coffee until I ran out of coins for the dispenser.

  If you go between November and May, when the climate is ideal, Death Valley can be a tourist’s paradise. There is the Devil’s Golf Course, with its fantastic ridges and pinnacles of salt; Zabriskie Point and its weird badlands topography; the old borax mining sites; and all kinds of strange, rare plants adapted to the heat and the death-dry climate. Yes, Death Valley has many points of interest, and someday I’m going to see them. So far all I’d seen was the spaceport. But the port was impressive in its own way.

  The landing field used to be part of a sizable inland sea. It is now a sea of salt. Alternating red and blue concentric circles mark the field for ships dropping from space, and a century’s developments in chemical, fission, and fusion reaction motors have left blast pits striped like rainbows by esoteric, often radioactive salts. But mostly the field retains its ancient glare-white.

  And out across the salt are ships of many sizes and many shapes. Vehicles and machinery dance attendance, and if you’re willing to wait, you may see a ship land. It’s worth the wait.

  The port building, at the edge of the major salt flat, is a pastel green tower set in a wide patch of fluorescent orange concrete. No ship has ever landed on it—yet. The taxi dropped me at the entrance and moved away to join others of its kind. And I stood inhaling me dry, balmy air.

  Four months of the year Death Valley’s climate is ideal. One August the Furnace Creek Ranch recorded 134° Fahrenheit shade temperature.

  A man behind a desk told me that Ordaz had arrived before me. I found him and another officer in a labyrinth of pay lockers, each big enough to hold two or three suitcases. The locker Ordaz had opened held only a lightweight plastic briefcase.

  “He may have taken other lockers,” he said.

  “Probably not. Belters travel light. Have you tried to open it?”

  “Not yet. It is a combination lock. I thought perhaps …”

  “Maybe.” I squatted to look at it.

  Funny: I felt no surprise at all. It was as if I’d known all along that Owen’s suitcase would be there. And why not? He was bound to try to protect himself somehow. Through me, because I was already involved in the UN side of organlegging. By leaving something in a spaceport locker, because Loren couldn’t find the right locker or get into it if he did, and because I would naturally connect Owen with spaceports. Under Cubes’s name, because I’d be looking for that and Loren wouldn’t.

  Hindsight is wonderful.

  The lock had five digits. “He must have meant me to open it. Let’s see …” I moved the tumblers to 42217. April 22, 2117, the day Cubes died, stapled suddenly to a plastic partition.

  The lock clicked open.

  Ordaz went instantly for the manila folder. More slowly, I picked up two glass phials. One was tightly sealed against Earth’s air and half-full of an incredibly fine dust. So fine was it that it slid about like oil inside the glass. The other phial held a blackened grain of nickel-iron, barely big enough to see.

  * * *

  Other things were in that case, but the prize was that folder. The story was in there … at least up to a point. Owen must have planned to add to it.

  A message had been waiting for him in the Ceres mail dump when he returned from his last trip out. Owen must have laughed over parts of that message. Loren had taken the trouble to assemble a complete dossier of Owen’s smuggling activities over the past eight years. Did he think he could ensure Owen’s silence by threatening to turn the dossier over to the goldskins?

  Maybe the dossier had given Owen the wrong idea. In any case, he’d decided to contact Loren and see what developed. Ordinarily he’d have sent me the entire message and let me try to track it down. I was the expert, after all. But Owen’s last trip out had been a disaster.

  His fusion drive had blown somewhere beyond Jupiter’s orbit. No explanation. The safeties had blown his lifesystem capsule free of the explosion, barely. A rescue ship had returned him to Ceres. The fee had nearly broken him. He needed money. Loren might have known that and counted on it.

  The reward for information leading to Loren’s capture would have bought him a new ship.

  He’d landed at Outback Field, following Loren’s instructions. From there, Loren’s men had moved him about a good deal: to London, to Bombay, to Amberg, Germany. Owen’s personal, written story ended in Amberg. How had he reached California? He had not had a chance to say.

  But in between he had learned a good deal. There were snatches of detail on Loren’s organization. There was Loren’s full plan for shipping illicit transplant materials to the Belt and for finding and contacting customers. Owen had made suggestions there. Most of them sounded reasonable and would be unworkable in practice. Typically Owen. I could find no sign that he’d overplayed his hand.

  But of course he hadn’t known it when he had.

  And there were holos, twenty-three of them, each a member of Loren’s gang. Some of the pictures had markings on the back; others were blank. Owen had been unable to find out where each of them stood in the organization. I leafed through them twice, wondering if one of them could be Loren himself. Owen had never known.

  “It would seem you were right,” Ordaz said. “He could not have collected such detail by accident. He must have planned from the beginning to betray the Loren gang.”

  “Just as I told you. And he was murdered for it.”

  “It seems he must have been. What motive could he have had for suicide?” Ordaz’s round, calm face was doing its best to show anger. “I find I cannot believe in our inconsistent murderer, either. You have ruin
ed my digestion, Mr. Hamilton.”

  I told him my idea about other tenants on Owen’s floor. He nodded. “Possibly, possibly. This is your department now. Organlegging is the business of the ARMs.”

  “Right.” I closed the briefcase and hefted it. “Let’s see what the computer can do with these. I’ll send you photocopies of everything in here.”

  “You’ll let me know about the other tenants?”

  “Of course.”

  I walked into ARM Headquarters swinging that precious briefcase, feeling on top of the world. Owen had been murdered. He had died with honor, if not—oh, definitely not— with dignity. Even Ordaz knew it now.

  Then Jackson Bera, snarling and panting, went by at a dead run.

  “What’s up?” I called after him. Maybe I wanted a chance to brag. I had twenty-three faces, twenty-three organleggers, in my briefcase.

  Bera slid to a stop beside me. “Where have you been?”

  “Working. Honest. What’s the hurry?”

  “Remember that pleasure peddler we were watching?”

  “Graham? Kenneth Graham?”

  “That’s the one. He’s dead. We blew it.” And Bera took off.

  He’d reached the lab by the time I caught up with him.

  Kenneth Graham’s corpse was faceup on the operating table. His long, lantern-jawed face was pale and slack, without expression, empty. Machinery was in place above and below his head.

  “How you doing?” Bera demanded.

  “Not good,” the doctor answered. “Not your fault. You got him into the deep freeze fast enough. It’s just that the current—” He shrugged.

  I shook Bera’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  Bera was panting a little from his run. “Something must have leaked. Graham tried to make a run for it. We got him at the airport.”

  “You could have waited. Put someone on the plane with him. Flooded the plane with TY-4.”

  “Remember the stink the last time we used TY-4 on civilians? Damn newscasters.” Bera was shivering. I didn’t blame him.

  ARMs and organleggers play a funny kind of game. The organleggers have to turn their donors in alive, so they’re always armed with hypo guns, firing slivers of crystalline anesthetic that melt instantly in the blood. We use the same weapon for somewhat the same reason: a criminal has to be saved for trial and then for the government hospitals. So no ARM ever expects to kill a man.

  There was a day I learned the truth. A small-time organlegger named Raphael Haine was trying to reach a call button in his own home. If he’d reached it, all kinds of hell would have broken loose, Haine’s men would have hypoed me, and I would have regained consciousness a piece at a time in Haine’s organ-storage tanks. So I strangled him.

  The report was in the computer, but only three human beings knew about it. One was my immediate superior, Lucas Garner. The other was Julie. So far he was the only man I’d ever killed.

  And Graham was Bera’s first killing.

  “We got him at the airport,” Bera said. “He was wearing a hat. I wish I’d noticed that; we might have moved faster. We started to close in on him with hypo guns. He turned and saw us. He reached under his hat, and then he fell.”

  “Killed himself?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How?”

  “Look at his head.”

  I edged closer to the table, trying to stay out of the doctor’s way. The doctor was going through the routine of trying to pull information from a dead brain by induction. It wasn’t going well.

  There was a flat oblong box on top of Graham’s head. Black plastic, about half the size of a pack of cards. I touched it and knew at once that it was attached to Graham’s skull.

  “A droud. Not a standard type. Too big.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Liquid helium ran up my nerves. “There’s a battery in it.”

  “Right.”

  “I often wonder what the vintners buy, et cetera. A cordless droud. Man, that’s what I want for Christmas.”

  Bera twitched all over. “Don’t say that.”

  “Did you know he was a current addict?”

  “No. We were afraid to bug his home. He might have found it and been tipped. Take another look at that thing.”

  The shape was wrong, I thought. The black plastic case had been half melted.

  “Heat,” I mused. “Oh!”

  “Uh huh. He blew the whole battery at once. Sent the whole killing charge right through his brain, right through the pleasure center of his brain. And Jesus, Gil, the thing I keep wondering is, What did it feel like? Gil, what could it possibly have felt like?”

  I thumped him across the shoulders in lieu of giving him an intelligent answer. He’d be a long time wondering.

  Here was the man who had put the wire in Owen’s head. Had his death been momentary hell or all the delights of paradise in one singing jolt? Hell, I hoped, but I didn’t believe it.

  At least Kenneth Graham wasn’t somewhere else in the world, getting a new face and new retinas and new fingertips from Loren’s illicit organ banks.

  “Nothing,” the doctor said. “His brain’s too badly burned. There’s just nothing there that isn’t too scrambled to make sense.”

  “Keep trying,” Bera said.

  I left quietly. Maybe later I’d buy Bera a drink. He seemed to need it. Bera was one of those with empathy. I knew that he could almost feel that awful surge of ecstasy and defeat as Kenneth Graham left the world behind.

  The holos from Monica Apartments had arrived hours ago. Miller had picked not only the tenants who had occupied the eighteenth floor during the past six weeks but tenants from the nineteenth and seventeenth floors, too. It seemed an embarrassment of riches. I toyed with the idea of someone from the nineteenth floor dropping over his balcony to the eighteenth every day for five weeks. But 1809 hadn’t had an outside wall, let alone a window, not to mention a balcony.

  Had Miller played with the same idea? Nonsense. He didn’t even know the problem. He’d just overkilled with the holos to show how cooperative he was.

  None of the tenants during the period in question matched known or suspected Loren men.

  I said a few appropriate words and went for coffee. Then I remembered the twenty-three possible Loren men in Owen’s briefcase. I’d left them with a programmer, since I wasn’t quite sure how to get them into the computer myself. He ought to be finished by now.

  I called down. He was.

  I persuaded the computer to compare them with the holos from Monica Apartments.

  Nothing. Nobody matched anybody.

  I spent the next two hours writing up the Owen Jennison case. A programmer would have to translate it for the machine. I wasn’t that good yet.

  We were back with Ordaz’s inconsistent killer.

  That and a tangle of dead ends. Owen’s death had bought us a handful of new pictures, pictures which might even be obsolete by now. Organleggers changed their faces at the drop of a hat. I finished the case outline, sent it down to a programmer, and called Julie. I wouldn’t need her protection now.

  Julie had left for home.

  I started to call Taffy, stopped with her number half-dialed. There are times not to make a phone call. I needed to sulk; I needed a cave to be alone in. My expression would probably have broken a phone screen. Why inflict it on an innocent girl?

  I left for home.

  It was dark when I reached the street. I rode the pedestrian bridge across the slidewalks, waited for a taxi at the intersection disk. Presently one dropped, the white FREE sign blinking on its belly. I stepped in and deposited my credit card.

  Owen had collected his holos from all over the Eurasian continent. Most of them, if not all, had been Loren’s foreign agents. Why had I expected to find them in Los Angeles?

  The taxi rose into the white night sky. City lights turned the cloud cover into a flat white dome. We penetrated the clouds and stayed there. The taxi autopilot didn’t care if I had a view or not.

>   … So what did I have now? Someone among dozens of tenants was a Loren man. That, or Ordaz’s inconsistent killer, the careful one, had left Owen to die for five weeks, alone and unsupervised.

  … Was the inconsistent killer so unbelievable?

  He was, after all, my own hypothetical Loren. And Loren had committed murder, the ultimate crime. He’d murdered routinely, over and over, with fabulous profits. The ARMs hadn’t been able to touch him. Wasn’t it about time he started getting careless?

  Like Graham. How long had Graham been selecting donors among his customers, choosing a few nonentities a year? And then, twice within a few months, he took clients who were missed. Careless.

  Most criminals are not too bright. Loren had brains enough, but the men on his payroll would be about average. Loren would deal with the stupid ones, the ones who turned to crime because they didn’t have enough sense to make it in real life.

  If a man like Loren got careless, this was how it would happen. Unconsciously he would judge ARM intelligence by his own men. Seduced by an ingenious plan for murder, he might ignore the single loophole and go through with it. With Graham to advise him, he knew more about current addiction than we did, perhaps enough to trust the effects of current addiction on Owen.

  Then Owen’s killers had delivered him to his apartment and never seen him again. It was a small gamble Loren had taken, and it had paid off this time.

  Next time he’d grow more careless. One day we’d get him.

  The taxi settled out of the traffic pattern, touched down on the roof of my apartment building in the Hollywood Hills. I got out and moved toward the elevators.

  An elevator opened. Someone stepped out.

  Something warned me, something about the way he moved. I turned, quick drawing from the shoulder. The taxi might have made good cover—if it hadn’t been already rising. Other figures had stepped from the shadows.

  I think I got a couple before something stung my cheek. Mercy bullets, slivers of crystalline anesthetics melting in my bloodstream. My head spun, and the roof spun, and the centrifugal force dropped me limply to the roof. Shadows loomed above me, then receded to infinity.