Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “We’re talking about the bathtub attack, remember. Chris saw the killer too close. That makes him tall. It took a resident to borrow the facilities in the mirror works and know how to use them. He also had to futz with the city computer. A lot of residents seem to be good at that.” And the mayor, I thought suddenly, would have to be even better.

  “So you know about the mirror. Can you tell me how Chris was able to see me? I wasn’t fool enough to leave the room lights on while I waited for him to stand up.”

  “Huh. You weren’t?” I thought about it. “Oh. His lights were on. You were lighted by the mirror.”

  He nodded. “That’s bothered me ever since. Was it me you suspected?”

  “I’m flabbergasted. Hove, why?” And then I saw why, out of the corner of my eye, on Naomi’s phone screen.

  Hove seemed almost disinterested. “Twice he came to the moon to meddle in our internal affairs. First to impose the holding tanks on us, then to criticize the way we use them. Never mind. Can you think of any way in which the police can trace me? Without your help, of course.”

  “The guard at the door?”

  “He didn’t see me. He won’t see me leave.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing.

  Naomi said, “Mayor, do you see where my finger is now?”

  It was on the Return key for the phone keyboard. I saw that much, and then I stepped between Naomi and the gun. Hove didn’t react fast enough to stop me. “You’ll have to shoot through me,” I said. “You’ll never make it”

  Naomi said, “One tap of this key and these four faces appear on every phone screen in the city.”

  “We can negotiate,” I said quickly, soothingly, I hoped. Hove’s eyes were going desperate. “You tried to kill Chris Penzler for political reasons? Fine, so say we all. You sliced his hand off six days later? Fine. Do you want to tell us how you managed that?”

  He’d been about to fire. Perhaps he still was. “When did it happen?” he asked.

  “Chris could have died anytime in a five-hour period. You can’t possibly have an alibi. You must have posed as a policeman. The computer would have issued you a police skintight suit and lost the records.”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “And Chris left a dying message that points toward you.”

  I saw the intensity setting on the laser start to unwind and saw Hove thumb it back to maximum. Hove said, “Did he? Did he really? That’s very interesting.”

  “It points toward you,” I said, “but not directly. Chris was only three feet away when the laser sliced his hand off. He must have seen his killer’s face and his chest symbol, too. Why didn’t he just write TREE or MAYOR? Somebody’s bound to wonder. Of course, if you just turn yourself in, the case is solved.”

  Hove seemed lost in thought. Then, “Gil, do you understand what this affair could do to my city?”

  “It’s bad now. It could get much worse if things run their course.”

  “Yes. God, yes.” He drew himself up and, looking down on us from a great height, said, “Here are my terms. I want an hour to escape. After that you can tell the police all that we’ve discussed. Agreed? Your word of honor?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes,” Boone said.

  Naomi hesitated for several nerve-shattering seconds. Her hand was starting to tremble where she held it poised above the Return key. She said, “Yes.”

  “That on the screen goes back into storage.”

  “Yes,” Naomi said.

  “Open the door,” the mayor said.

  The laser was under his coat as he stepped into the hall. Naomi called the door closed. Then she said, “Well?”

  I mopped away sweat with a napkin. “My word of honor is good.”

  Boone, faintly smiling, was looking at his watch.

  “And so say we all,” Naomi said. “The bastard! Where will he go?”

  “Someplace where he can’t be questioned,” I said. “He’ll get a puffer and go till he’s out of air, then find a dust pool.”

  “You think so?” She looked at the hologram portraits. Four of them. Chris Penzler, and Mayor Hovestraydt Watson, and Alan Watson, and a very tall, elfishly beautiful young woman with long light brown hair. I could guess who she was from the context. Naomi said, “I wonder how she died.”

  “You think he killed her? Maybe. It hardly matters now.”

  “Right.” Naomi typed rapidly. The screen cleared.

  We waited.

  13. PENALTIES

  We found the guard snoring outside Naomi’s door. Hove had fired a cloud of soluble anesthetic crystals into him from an ARM-issue handgun. It was mine. I’d turned it in on arrival; Hove must have persuaded the computer to release it.

  Hove … well, we waited it out, more or less grimly. He had checked out a puffer and gone. We searched the projected moonscape while we could; he probably hid until Watchbird Two set. Jefferson’s police searched old mines and known cave systems. Nothing. He certainly hadn’t reached the Belt Trading Post; the Belters were looking for him, too. Jefferson sent men to search the launch head for the Grimalde mass driver.

  Their mistake, I think, was in assuming Hove was desperate to live. Hove’s problem was to hide a puffer and a corpse; his own. My own theory is that he blew them both to bits by exploding the puffer’s fuel and oxygen.

  Alan Watson came in late that night, looking used-up. He came back to life when he saw Naomi. They talked seriously for a while, and then she went off under his long arm. I didn’t see them again until the next morning.

  By then I had talked to Harry McCavity again.

  Alan and Naomi were eating a huge breakfast together on the dining level. I managed to be at the buffet when Alan went for more coffee.

  “I have to see you in private,” I said.

  Coffee sloshed. I startled him, I think. He asked, “Isn’t it over yet?”

  “Mostly it’s about you and your father.”

  A momentary wariness showed in his face. Then, “All right.”

  I ate breakfast while I waited. Presently Naomi left, and Alan came to join me. “She told me about yesterday,” he said. “He could have killed you all. I wish none of it had happened.”

  “So do I. Alan, you’re leaving the moon.”

  His mouth opened. He stared. “What?”

  “Come on, you’re not that surprised. I made some promises to Mayor Hove, but I made them at gunpoint. Be off the moon within a week. Don’t ever come back. Or I’ll break those promises.”

  He studied my eyes. No, he wasn’t that surprised. “You’ll have to spell it out for me.”

  “I’m not enjoying this,” I said. “I’ll try to keep it short. Chris Penzler was close enough to get a good look at the man who killed him. We know it was a lunie. Even if Penzler didn’t know his name, he could have tried to describe the chest emblem. Instead, he left a reference to the attempt to kill him in his bathtub a week earlier. Why would he protect the man who murdered him?”

  “Well?”

  “You’re his son. Naomi finally saw it, and I should have. You’ve Hove Watson’s height, and I took that for genes, but it isn’t. You were raised in lunar gravity. Otherwise you look a lot like Chris Penzler and somewhat like your mother and not at all like Hove Watson.”

  Alan was looking down into his coffee. He was quite pale. “This is all pure speculation, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the kind of speculation that could finish Hovestraydt City, I think. You’re supposed to be the mayor’s son, the heir apparent. It’s bad enough if Hove killed Penzler for political reasons—”

  “I know. You could be right.”

  “Anyway, I did a little more speculating. Then last night I got Harry McCavity out of bed and made him check a certain pressure suit helmet for traces of dried blood.”

  Alan looked up. I might have stepped out of a nightmare, the way he looked at me. I said, “What did he do, offer to legitimize you?”

  “Offer?” Alan laughed out loud,
an ugly sound, then looked quickly around him. Faces had turned. Alan lowered his voice. “He insisted! He was going to name me as his heir and bastard!”

  “Did you kill him to get Naomi off the hook?”

  “No, no. I wouldn’t have hurt him at all if I’d had time to think. I could have explained it to him, couldn’t I? He just didn’t know what he’d be doing to me.

  “He said he was my father. He said he was going to announce it. He wouldn’t listen. And I was holding the laser. I lost my head. It was all over in a thousandth of a second. I sliced his hand off, and he pointed at me and sprayed blood in my face. Blinded me. When I wiped it off the glass, he was gone. I looked for him to get his suit sealed and get him to a hospital. When I found him, he was dead.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Alan was very pale. He wasn’t seeing me at all. He said, “His wrist was still bubbling.”

  I said, “You could blame Chris for letting his gonads lead him around. You could blame Hove for trying to kill him. It didn’t work, but that’s what started Chris thinking about his children. Sure you’re bound to blame yourself, but Alan, it wasn’t all your fault.”

  “All right. Now what?”

  “If the truth came out, hell wouldn’t hold the political repercussions, and you’d be broken up for parts. I don’t want that. But I won’t have you in a position of political power, and there’s no way you can stay on the moon without becoming mayor. Get off the moon within a week or I’ll start talking.”

  “I suppose you left a letter somewhere in case something happens to you?”

  “Get stuffed.”

  He stared. “But you’re giving me a week to kill you!”

  I got up. “You’re not the type. And I meant it. I meant it all,” I said, and left.

  The rules the committee laid down during the following week included provisions for periodic review of lunar legal practice. None of the delegates were especially happy with the new laws. The lunies liked it least, but how could they object after Naomi’s testimony? They compromised.

  We were wrapping up the conference the day Alan Watson left for Ceres. I’d have preferred to see him go, but it didn’t matter. Given who he was, he got a police escort. He was definitely gone.

  Laura told me about it that evening. “Naomi Mitchison went with him,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Sure. I like to keep things tidy.”

  Naomi had asked for her Belt citizenship a few days ago, and Hildegarde Quifting was glad to ram it through for her. Naomi would be an embarrassment on Earth or on the moon. Moving her to the Belt let everyone breathe easier.

  Including Naomi. Old friends on Earth could remember her as she used to be. She needn’t stand trial for illegal cloning. Her little girl would be waiting for her.

  She might even be in love with Alan Watson. Futz, I even like the idea. Let it stand.

  THE WOMAN IN

  DEL REY CRATER

  We were falling back toward the moon. It’s always an uneasy sensation, and in a lemmy I felt frail. A lemmy is a spacecraft but a very small one; it won’t even reach lunar orbit.

  Lawman Bauer-Stanson set the attitude jets popping. The lemmy rolled belly up to give us a view. “There, Hamilton,” she said, waving at the bone-white land above our heads. “With the old VERBOTEN sign across it.”

  It was four T-days past sunrise, and the shadows were long. Del Rey was well off to the side, six kilometers across, almost edge-on and flattening as we fell. There were dots of dulled silver everywhere inside the crater, clustering near the center. A crudely drawn gouge ran straight across the crater’s center, deep and blackly shadowed. That line and the circle of rim formed the VERBOTEN sign.

  I asked, “Aren’t you going to take us across?”

  “No.” Lawman Bauer-Stanson floated at her ease while choppy moonscape drifted nearer. “I don’t like radiation.”

  “We’re shielded.”

  “Suuure.”

  The computer rolled us over and started the main motor. The lunie lawman tapped in a few instructions. The computer was doing all the work, but I let her land us before I spoke. She’d put us a good kilometer south of the crater rim.

  I said, “Being cautious, are we?”

  Bauer-Stanson looked at me over her shoulder. Narrow shoulders, long neck, pointed chin: she had the lunies’ look of a Tolkien elf matriarch. Her bubble helmet cramped her long hair. It was black going white, and she wore it in a feathery crest, modified Belt style.

  She said, “This is a scary place, Ubersleuth Hamilton. Damn few people come here on purpose.”

  “I was invited.”

  “We’re lucky you were available. Ubersleuth Hamilton, the shield on a lemmy will stop a solar storm, the wildest solar storm. Thank God for the Shreveshield.” The radiation signal pulled at Bauer-Stanson’s eyes and mine. No rads were getting through at all. “But Del Rey Crater is way different.”

  The Earth was a blue-white sickle ten degrees above the horizon. Through either window I could see classic moonscape, craters big and little, and the long rim of Del Rey. Wilderness.

  “I’m just asking, but couldn’t you have set us down closer to Del Rey? Or else near the processing plant?”

  She leaned across me, our helmets brushing. “Look that way, the right edge of the crater. Now lots closer and a bit right. Look for wheel treads and a mound—”

  “Ah.” A kilometer out from the rim wall: a long low hill of lunar dust and coarser debris with a gaping hole in one end.

  “You should know by now, Hamilton. We bury everything. The sky is the enemy here. There’s meteors, radiation … spacecraft, for that matter.”

  I was watching the mound, expecting some kind of minitractor to pop out.

  She caught me looking. “We turned off the waldo tugs when we found the body. They’ve been off for twenty hours or so. You get to tell us when we can turn them on again. Shall we get to it?” Bauer-Stanson’s fingers danced over pressure points on the panel. A whine wound down to profound silence as air was sucked from the cabin.

  We were dressed alike in skintight pressure suits under leaded armor, borrowed, that didn’t fit well. I felt my belly band squeeze tight as vacuum enclosed us. Bauer-Stanson tapped again, and the roof lifted up and sideways.

  We moved back into the cargo bay and positioned ourselves at either end of a device built along the lines of a lunar two-wheeled puffer. We lifted it out of the bay and dropped it over the side.

  The Mark Twenty-nine’s wheels were toroidal birdcages as tall as my shoulders with little motors on the wheel hubs. In lunar gravity wheels don’t have to be sturdy, but a vehicle needs a wide stance because weight won’t hold it stable. The thing stood upright even without the kickstands. Low-slung between the wheels, a bulky plastic case and a heavy lock hid the works of Shreve Development’s experimental radiation shield, power source, sensor devices, and other secrets, too, no doubt. A bucket seat was bolted to the case, with cameras and more sensing devices behind that.

  Bauer-Stanson scrambled after it. She pulled it several feet from the lemmy and turned on the shield.

  I’d done spot repairs on the Shreveshield in my own ship, years ago when I was a Belt miner. The little version is a flat plate, twelve feet by twelve feet, with rounded corners and a small secured housing at one corner. Fractal scrollwork covers it in frilly curves of superconductor, growing microscopically fine around the edges. You can bend it, but not far. In my old ship it wrapped around the D-T tank, and the shield effect enclosed everything but the motor. In a police lemmy it wraps the tank twice around.

  No Shreveshield could have been fitted into the Mark Twenty-nine puffer.

  But a halo had formed around it, very like the nearly imperceptible violet glow around the lemmy itself. I’d never seen that glow before. The rad shield normally doesn’t have to fight that hard.

  Lawman Bauer-Stanson stood within the glow. She waved me over.

 
I crossed the space between one shield and the other in two bounces. Vacuum and hard bright stars and alien landscapes and falling don’t scare me, but radiation is something else.

  I asked, “Lawman, why did we only bring one of these puffers?”

  “Ubersleuth Hamilton, there is only one.” She sighed. “May I call you Gil?”

  I’d been getting tired of this myself. “Sure. Hecate?”

  “He-ca-tee,” she said. Three syllables. “Gil, Shreve Development makes active radiation shields. They only make the two kinds, and they’re both for spacecraft.”

  “We use them on Earth, too. Some of the old fusion plants are hotter’ hell. The Shreveshield was big news when I was, oh, eight years old. They used it to make a documentary on South-Central Los Angeles, but what got my attention was the spacecraft.”

  “Tell me about it. Thirty years ago a solar storm would have us marooned, huddling underground. We couldn’t launch ships even as far as Earth.”

  The big shields had come first, I remembered. They were used to protect cities. There was a Shreveshield on the first tremendous slowboat launched toward Alpha Centauri. The little shields, eight years later, were small enough for three-man ships, and that was enough for me. I lofted out to mine the Belt.

  “I hope they got rich,” I said.

  “Yah. When nobody gets rich, they call that a recession,” Hecate said. “They spend some of the money on research. They’d like to build a little man-sized shield. They don’t talk about the mistakes, but the Mark Twenty-nine is what they’ve got now.”

  “You must be persuasive as hell.”

  “Yonnie Kotani’s my cousin’s wife. She let us borrow it. Gil, whatever we learn about this is confidential. You are not to open that lock, ARM or no. Puffer,” she said in fine disgust.

  “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?”