by Larry Niven
Shreve seemed to have recovered his aplomb. He floated back into his chair. “Lawman, the device is experimental. We’ve never put any test subject in an experimental Shreveshield without medical monitors, and I include whole herds of minipigs! What if the field hiccoughed with your man in it? Is she even a lunie citizen? Is her suit equipped with medical ports?”
“Yes, I see. I’ll call Lawman Cervantes.”
“Wait, Lawman. Did it work?”
Hecate frowned.
“Did the shield perform as it should? Is everyone all right? No radiation?”
Hecate said, “The, um, user tracked some radioactive material into the shield, but that certainly wasn’t the Shreveshield’s fault. It worked fine, far as we can tell.”
Maxim Shreve’s eyes rolled up in his head, and all his pain wrinkles smoothed out. In that instant it was as if his life had been vindicated. Then he remembered us.
“I wish you could tell me more of the circumstances,” he said briskly. “We will certainly want recordings if our device resolved a calamity. Without frying anyone!”
“We’ll have the device back in your hands within hours, and of course we’re very grateful,” Hecate said. “I expect we’ll be able to tell you the complete story within the week, but even then it may be confidential for a time.”
“That’s all right, then. Good-bye, Lawman, ah, Bauer-Stanson.” He was gone.
She didn’t turn. “Now what?”
I said, “Tell your men to get the pilot inside.”
“Pilots. Sanchez and a new voice heard from. Better if you invite them in, O Prince from a Foreign Land.”
“All right.”
“Cameras on their vehicle,” she said.
“Um … stet. Hecate, what have you got to work with?”
“Six of my police. They’ve been setting up to examine the body. Two Helios personnel. They cooperated when we buried the Mark Twenty-nine, so they’ll cooperate when we uncover it. Two police lemmies—”
“Stet. Here’s what we do. One lemmy takes off out of sight. Then the other hovers while the first one lands. We only want the dust cloud and a fast shuffle of police lemmies while your men uncover the Mark Twenty-nine.”
“This had better be worth the hassle.” She got up and reached past me to connect my phone to the lunie cops outside. “Wylie, ARM Ubersleuth Hamilton wants to talk to your visitors. Then get back to me.”
I waited.
Sanchez and a woman with short crisp blond hair fitted their heads into camera view. Bubble helmets still reflect light and hide a jawline. Sanchez said, “We came for the Mark Twenty-nine, Hamilton.”
The woman edged him out. “Hamilton? I’m Geraldine Randall. We were told we could pick up the Shreveshield here. I hope it hasn’t got itself lost.”
Randall was in charge, very much so. I said, “No, no, not at all, but things are a bit complicated at present. Come in and wait, won’t you.”
“I’ll be right in,” Randall said with a glowing smile.
She was going to leave Sanchez to watch the damn cargo shell. “Both of you, please,” I added. “You may have to sit in. I don’t know what authority I have here. Probably whatever nobody else wants.” Just a touch of bitterness showing.
She frowned, nodded.
I switched off. Hecate was still miming. My own message light was blinking, but I waited. Presently Hecate sat back and blew hair out of her eyes.
I said, “Sanity check. When you gave him details, Shreve calmed down. Yes?”
She thought about it. “I guess he did.”
“Uh huh. But you didn’t tell him anything reassuring. Device hasn’t been loaded for return? It’s sitting around the site of a disaster? Involving spacecraft and extralunar celebrities? Waiting for someone to use it? Again?”
Hecate said, “Maybe his med-chair doped him to stop a stroke. No, dammit, he was lucid. And who the hell is Geraldine Randall?”
* * *
“Bauer-Stanson? Hamilton? I’m Geraldine Randall.” We stood, and my feet left the floor, and Randall reached up to shake hands with Hecate and down to shake hands with me. She was six feet five and lush, with short curls of buttery blond hair, full lips, and a wide smile. A short lunie in her forties, I judged her, carrying enough weight to round her out “What news?”
“Cervantes says it’s on the way,” Hecate said. “Knowing Cervantes, it could mean he’s almost ready to launch.”
Sanchez looked miserable. Randall was losing her smile. “Hamilton, I hope you’re using the device only for the purpose intended. Max Shreve is seriously worried about security.”
I said, “Randall, I was pulled out of bed because there was flatlander politics involved, and I’m an ARM with the rank of Ubersleuth. If somebody’s been high-handed, he’ll have two governments on his tail, not just Shreve Inc.”
“Persuasive,” she said.
“Ms. Randall, it’s all being recorded. Think of the movie rights!”
“Not persuasive. We may not hold those. The disaster didn’t take place on our turf. Hamilton, we want the device back.”
“Are you with Shreve Inc. or the government?”
“Shreve,” she said.
“In what capacity?”
“I’m on the board.”
She didn’t look that old. “For how long?”
“I was one of the original six.”
“Six?”
Hecate was offering coffee. Randall took one and added sugar and cream. She said, “Thirty-five years ago Max Shreve came to five of us with the designs for an active shield against radiation. Everything he told us proved out. He made us rich. There’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for Max Shreve.”
“He sent you? He wants it back that urgently?”
She ran a long-fingered hand through her short curls. “Max doesn’t know I came, but he seemed very upset on the phone. I don’t see it as that urgent myself, but I’m starting to wonder. How many lunie police have left eye tracks and fingerprints on the Mark Twenty-nine? And what do I have to do to get it back?”
Message light for Hecate. She picked up. I said, “It’s probably incoming now. Randall, I suppose I’ll sound naive, but I can’t believe you’re old enough—”
She laughed. “I was twenty-six. I’m sixty-one now. Lunar gravity is kind to human bodies.”
“Would you try the same gamble again?”
She thought it over. “Maybe. I’m not sure a con man could have put together as good a package as Max had. He was a lunie; we could track him. He did very well at Luna City University. He could talk fast, too. Kandry Li wanted to go for a smaller version of the shield, and we watched Max talk her out of it. He made diagrams, charts, models, all on the spot. He played Kandry’s own computer like a pipe organ. I think I could do his damn lecture myself.”
“Do it.”
She stared at me.
“I was just a kid when the Shreveshield came out. I wanted one just big enough for me. Why can’t I have it?”
She laughed, trailed off. “Well. It doesn’t scale up. You need a bigger template to retain the hysteresis effect that traps the neutrons. Otherwise the shield effect just fades out on you. That’s what the—” She caught herself.
“Right,” I said.
Hecate Bauer-Stanson flicked off her privacy. “It’s down,” she said. “You can collect it any time. Shall I give you some men to load it?”
“I’d be most grateful,” Randall said to Hecate. She didn’t have to tell Sanchez to see to it, because he was already leaving. To me she said, “We had to reconfigure the circuitry pattern. It’s not the same fractal on the Mark Twenty-nine; it’s not even related. Well, thank you both,” and she was gone, too.
* * *
“Gil, you’ve got a message light.”
Hecate watched over my shoulder as I played the message from the Los Angeles ARM. Split field, a computer composite of the dead woman’s suit manifested next to Luke Garner in a travel chair.
Luke at 188 was
paraplegic, had been for years, but he looked healthier than Maxim Shreve. Happier, too. He spoke rituals of courtesy, then, “We think your suit was customized from one of the pressure suits that came up with the first moon colony. Thing is, those suits were returned to NASA for study. Your deader really did get it from Earth. It’s ninety to a hundred years old.
“So right now you’re probably wondering, ‘Why didn’t she just buy a new pressure suit?’ And the answer might be these.” Luke’s cursor highlighted points on the old suit. “Medical sensors. Those early suits didn’t just keep an astronaut alive. NASA wanted to know what was happening to them. If they died, maybe the next one wouldn’t.
“In the early space program the medical probes were invasive. You wince just reading about it. These later suits weren’t so bad, but your deader may have upgraded them anyway. What she wanted was the medical ports on the suit. There are suits like that still being made, of course, but they’re expensive and the sale would be remembered. Take your choice; she was secretive or cheap.
“Let me know, will you? And remember, criminals don’t like locked rooms. They’re usually accidents.”
I watched the empty space where Luke had been. “Hecate, didn’t Shreve say that Shreve Development labs have pressure suits with medical ports? We might’ve guessed that—”
“I bet they’re a lot less than a hundred years old, Gil. You want to see them anyway? I’ll arrange that.”
Four off-duty technicians had been watching our antics. Now they seemed to be losing interest. I didn’t blame them. I got up and paced for a bit, wondering if there was anything more I could do.
Hecate said, “I’ve got your overhead view, Gil.”
“Put it on.”
A camera was panning slowly across a shrinking moonscape tinted with violet from the fusion drive of a rising Belt trading ship. Del Rey Crater slid into view, shrinking. Little craters all the same size. Bits of silver in the little craters. Three bronze bugs … four crawling around near the southern rim. We watched until Del Rey was sliding off the edge of the field, shrunk too small to show detail.
Then Hecate replayed it, slowing it, slower yet. “See it?”
It’s amazing what you can see from orbit.
Waldo tugs had made random tracks all across the south-em quarter of Del Rey, like the tunnels in an ant farm. Down there they had obscured the flow lines. But from up here …
Something on the southern rim had sandblasted Del Rey Crater from the rim as far as the battered central peak.
Down there would be surfaces clean of dust, sharp crater rims slightly rounded, minicraters erased. Down there you would see only details. Close up I had seen nothing of the overall fan-shaped pattern.
I didn’t believe that had been done by a spacecraft’s oxygen tanks. It was too intense. That smooth wash must have been made by the rocket motor itself.
“The footprints must have been made afterward,” I speculated. “Anything earlier was washed out. I’m going to have to apologize to Luke.”
“No. He called it,” Hecate said. “Nobody sets out to make a locked room mystery. The perp was hiding something else. Now, he fired from the south rim? And prints made afterward lead from the center south-southeast. She ran toward the killer?”
“Right toward her only source of escape. And oxygen. And medical help.”
“She was hoping for mercy,” Hecate said.
I looked over at her. Hecate didn’t seem unduly disturbed, only bemused. Whoever had set a woman down in that radioactive hell would not offer mercy.
I said, “She might have begged. Who knows? I know people who would have been gasping curses. She might run to the center to leave a message, then run away from it to distract the killer.”
“Did you see a message?”
“No.” I wasn’t even sure I liked the notion. “That rocket flame had to be erasing something. It looks like the killer didn’t have the guts to go into the crater, but propping his lemmy right on the rim took some nerve. Why? To erase footprints?”
“Gil, only a madman would trudge out into the middle of Del Rey Crater unless he already knew something was there.” She caught my smile. “Like you did. But someone might peek over an edge. The perp erased the bootprints that led in from the edge. The ones in the center, he left.”
“Could have waited and got them all. And any later message.”
“Your turn,” she said.
The last time I had read a murdered man’s dying message, he’d been lying. But at least Chris Penzler hadn’t erased it and then made me guess what it said!
“I need a nap,” I said. “Give me a call when you know something.”
It felt like I’d been asleep for some time. I was on the rug, totally comfortable in lunar gravity. I had a view of Lawman Hecate Bauer-Stanson’s back. She was studying a diffuse rainbow glow. I couldn’t see the hologram from down here.
I got to my feet.
Hecate had a split screen going. Through one holo window they were carving a woman like a statue of petrified wood. The band saw was running itself. I could see vague human shapes out of focus behind a wall of thick glass.
One of the slices was passing through a second window. The view would zoom in on some detail: arteries and sections through the liver and ribs. Details might fluoresce before the view backed off.
A third window showed the archaic suit.
“The damn trouble,” I said, talking to myself because Hecate had her privacy on, “is that there’s nobody to pull in. No witnesses, no suspects … millions of suspects. With a proper leak in her suit she could have died yesterday. With no leak she could have been out there ten years. More.”
What if her suit was new when she lay down?
No. Even sixty years ago the missiles were still falling in Del Rey Crater. “From ten to sixty years. Even on the moon that’s a million suspects, and nobody has an alibi to cover a fifty-year span.”
A fourth window blinked on, showing a fingerprint— another—another—something unidentified— “Retina,” Hecate said without turning. “Completely degraded. But I got fingerprints and partial DNA. Maybe the ARM can match them.”
I said, “Boot them over to me.”
She did. I called the Los Angeles ARM. I left a message on Bera’s personal code, then got through to a duty clerk. He showed signs of interest when he realized I was calling from the moon. I gave him the dead woman to track down.
Hecate was looking at me when I clicked off. I said, “There are short lunies.”
She said, “Bet?”
“What odds?”
She considered, and my phone blinked. I picked it up.
Valerie Van Scopp Rhine. Height: 1.66 meters. Born 2038 A.D., Winnetka, North America. Mass: 62 kg. Gene type … allergies … medical…. She was forty or so when the picture was taken, a lovely woman with high cheekbones and a delicately shaped skull under a golden crest of hair. No children. Single. Full partner, Gabne Vs Shield, Inc., 2083-2091 A.D. No felony convictions. WANTED on suspicion of 28.81, 9.00, 9.20—
Hecate was reading over my shoulder.
I said, “The codes mean she’s wanted on suspicion of embezzlement, flight to escape arrest, violation of political boundaries, misuse of vital resources, and some other stuff as of thirty-six years ago.”
“Interesting. Vital resources?”
“It used to be the custom; you named every possible crime and then trimmed. Boundaries—that’s an old law. Here it means they think she escaped to space.”
“Interesting. Gil, her suit isn’t leaking.”
“Isn’t it?”
“There was a fair vacuum inside. We got traces of organics, of course, but it would have taken years—decades to lose all of her air and water.”
I said, “Thirty-six years.”
“All that time. In Del Rey Crater?”
“Hecate, at a distance her suit looked just like another of the Boeing packages, and nobody was looking, anyway.”
“Then we can
guess why the body’s in such good shape. Radiation,” Hecate said. “What’s she supposed to have embezzled?”
I scrolled through the file. “Looks like funds from Gabriel’s Shield. And Gabriel’s Shield turns out to be a research group … Two partners: Valerie Van Scopp Rhine and Maxim Yeltzin Shreve.”
“Shreve.”
“Bankrupt in A.D. 2091, when Rhine allegedly disappeared with the funds.” I stood up. “Hecate, I’ve got to go sharpen my skates. You can study this, or you can summon up a dossier on Maxim Shreve.”
She stared, then laughed. “I thought I’d heard every possible way to say that. Go. Then drink some more water.”
I waited for a woman to step out of the recycler booth, then went in.
Hecate had a display up when I got back.
Maxim Yeltzin Shreve. Height: 2.23 meters. Born 2044 A.D. Outer Soviet, Moon. Mass: 101 kg. Gene type … allergies … medical … No felony convictions. Married Juliana Mary Krupp 2061, divorced 2080. Children: none. Single. A videoflat of his graduation, looking like a burly soccer champ, used with permission. A holo taken at the launch of the fourth slowboat, the colony ship bound for Tau Ceti, bearing the larger model Shreveshield, in A.D. 2122. He didn’t need a medical chair then, but he didn’t look good. Chairman of the board of Shreve Development 2091, retired November 2125. Two years ago.
When your body gets sick enough, your mind starts to go, too. I could be putting too much weight on any oddities in this man’s behavior.
I hit the key that got me the next dossier.
Geraldine Randall. Height: 2.08 meters. Born 2066 A.D., Clavius, Moon. Mass: 89 kg. Gene type … allergies … medical… She’d had a problem carrying a child, corrected by surgery. No felony convictions. Married Charles Hastings Chan 2080. Children: 1 girl, Marya Jenna. She’d been at the launch of the fourth slowboat, too. Member of the board of Shreve Development 2091.
Over Hecate’s shoulder they were still carving the dead woman. I understood why they were so casual about it. The remains of lunar dead become mulch, whatever can’t be used as transplants. Hecate was listening to a running commentary, but if they’d found evidence of disease, she’d have told me.
