Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  Valerie Rhine hadn’t rotted because radiation had fried all the bacteria in her body. She could have lasted a million years, a billion, without my hindrance.

  I turned back to Maxim Shreve as he had been when he had registered as Shreve Development, a lunar corporation, thirty-six years ago. He was posing with five others, and one was Geraldine Randall. A younger man, he already looked sick … or just worn down, working himself to death. It’s one way to get rich. Give everything to your dream. Six years later, A.D. 2097 and looking a little better, he and his partners had an active shield up for patent.

  Did lunies just get old quicker? I tapped Hecate’s shoulder. She turned off privacy, and I asked, “How old are you, Hecate?”

  “I’m forty-two.”

  She met my stare. Older than me by one year and healthy as a gymnast. The lunie doctor Taffy saw when I wasn’t around is in his sixties. I said, “Shreve must be sick. He’s less than ninety. What’s his problem?”

  “Doesn’t it say?”

  “I couldn’t find it.”

  She slid into my spot and began diddling with the virtual keys. “The file’s been edited. Citizens don’t have to tell all their embarrassing secrets, Gil, but … he must be crazy. What if he needed medical help and it wasn’t in the records?”

  “Crazy or guilty.”

  “You think he’s hiding something?”

  I said, “Call him.”

  “Now, Gil. Maxim Shreve is one of the most powerful men on the moon, and I wasn’t thinking of changing careers.” She studied me, worried. “Are you just harassing the man in the hope he’ll tell us something?”

  I said, “It seems pretty clear what happened, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re thinking he killed her and took the money himself. Set down in Del Rey and pushed her out of the ship, still alive. But why not kill her first? Then there wouldn’t be any footprints or dying messages.”

  “Nope, you’ve only got half of it.”

  She flapped her arms in exasperation. “Go for it.”

  “First: Mark Twenty-nine. You said Shreve Development has been trying to build a little shield ever since they got the big ones. I believe it. Twenty-nine is a big number. Maybe a small version is the first thing he tried. That’s what told him about the, what she said, hysteresis problem.

  “Second: He didn’t act like a thief running away with the money. When he founded Shreve Inc., he acted like a man who wants to build something and almost knows how. I think he and Rhine spent all they had on experiments.

  ‘Third: Someone sprayed part of the crater from the rim, and I think that was Shreve. There’s no sign he was in the crater except for Rhine’s footprints, and we already know something was erased.

  “Fourth: Why Del Rey Crater? Why walk around in the most radioactive crater on the moon?”

  Hecate was looking blank. I said, “They were testing a prototype Shreveshield. That’s why she walked in. I even know what he was hiding when he sprayed the crater.”

  She said, “I’ll call him. Your theory; you talk.”

  Hecate looked around at me. “Mr. Shreve isn’t taking calls. It says he’s in physical therapy.”

  I asked, “Where’s the Mark Twenty-nine now?”

  “They took off almost an hour ago.” It took her only a few seconds. “En route to Copernicus. That’s the Shreve Inc. labs. ETA ten minutes.”

  “Good enough. Luke Garner’s travel chair has a sender in it in case he needs a serious autodoc or even a doctor. What do you think? Would a lunie’s chair have one, too?”

  It took her longer (I got her coffee and a handmeal) to work her way through the lunar medical network. Finally she sighed and looked up and said, “He’s in motion. Moving toward Del Rey Crater. I have a number for the phone in his chair, Gil.”

  “Futz! Always I get it almost right.”

  “Call him?”

  “I’m inclined to wait for him to touch down.”

  She studied me. “He’s going after the body?”

  “Seems right. Any bets on what he might do with it?”

  “It’s a big moon.” She turned back. “He’s crossing Del Rey. Slowing. Gil, he’s going down.”

  “Phone him.”

  His phone must have been buzzing during the landing. When he answered, it was by voice, no picture. “What?”

  I said, “The thing about poetic justice is that it requires a poet. I’m Ubersleuth Gil Hamilton, with the ARM, Mr. Shreve. On the moon by coincidence.”

  “I’m a lunie citizen, Hamilton.”

  “Valerie Rhine was of Earth.”

  “Hamilton, I’m supposed to run now. Let me set my headphones and get on the track.”

  I laughed. “You do that. Shall I tell you a story?”

  I heard irregular puffing, less like a sick man running on an exercise track in low gravity than like the same man climbing out of a spacecraft. No sound of fiddling with headphones: they’d be already in place inside his bubble helmet.

  Fair’s fair. I said, “I’m perched on the rim of Del Rey Crater, safely protected by my Shreveshield, vidding you through a telescopic lens.”

  Hecate covered her face, muffling laughter.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Shreve said.

  “Sure you do. With the radiation you’ll be facing in the next few minutes, you’re already dead. That is, if you intend to go somewhere with a body. Do you have a portable Shreveshield? A Mark Twenty-eight or Twenty-seven? An experiment that almost worked? I admit I thought you’d wait for the Twenty-nine.”

  The puffing continued.

  “If you checked out an early experimental Shreveshield, we can track that. They were handy before you retired, but now you’d have to go through someone and get some men to load it, too.”

  Puffing. Regular exercise: a man on a track or the same man pulling a heavy cart across a bumpy craterscape. He was going to bluff it out.

  “Retiring took you out of the system, Shreve. You weren’t on top of things when Helios Power One started sending waldo tugs into Del Rey, and when Lawman Bauer-Stanson asked your Ms. Kotani if she could borrow your new prototype, you didn’t know it for hours.”

  He said, “Where is she?”

  Hecate spoke. “We’ve already dissected it, Mr. Shreve.”

  The puffing became much faster.

  I said, “Shreve, I know you’re not afraid of the organ banks. The hospitals wouldn’t take anything you’ve got. Come in and tell your story.”

  “No. But I’ll—tell you a story, Ubersleuth. Lawman.

  “It’s about two brilliant experimenters. One didn’t have any money sense, so the other had to keep track of expenses when he’d rather have been working on the project. We were in love, but we were in love with an idea, too.”

  His breathing had become easier. “We developed the theory together. I understood the theory, but the prototypes kept burning out and blowing up. And every time something happened, Valerie knew exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. Warble the power source. More precision in the circuitry. I couldn’t keep up. All I knew was that we were running out of money.

  “Then one day we had it. It worked. She swore it worked. We already had all the instruments we needed. I spent our last few marks on videotape. Camera. Stacks of batteries. The—we called it the Maxival Shield—it ate power like there was no tomorrow.

  “We went out to Del Rey Crater. Valerie’s idea. Test the device and film the tests. Anyone who saw Valerie dance around in Del Rey Crater would throw funding at us with both hands.”

  “Gil, he’s taking off.”

  Too fast. I suddenly realized why his breathing had eased. He’d left his Mark Twenty-odd sitting in the dust. Maybe it had quit working; maybe he had stopped caring.

  I asked, “Shreve, what went wrong?”

  “She went out into Del Rey with the prototype. Just walking, turning to cross in front of the camera, then some gymnastics, staying within the shield effect, and all with that glow around her and
her face shining in the bubble helmet. She was beautiful. Then she looked at the instruments and started screaming. I could see it on my own dials; the field was just gradually dying out.

  “She was screaming, ‘Oh, my God, the shield’s breaking down!’ And she started running. ‘I think I can get to the rim. Call Copernicus General Hospital.’”

  “Running with the shield? Wasn’t it too heavy?”

  “How did you know that?”

  Hecate said, “Gil, he’s just cruising along the crater rim. Hovering.”

  I nodded to her. I told Shreve, “That was our biggest problem. What were you erasing when you sprayed rocket flame across the crater? I figure your shield generator was big. You had it on some sort of cart that Rhine could pull. She pulled a superconducting cable. She left her power source with you.”

  “That’s right, and then she ran away and left it. If a hospital got her, every cop on the moon would want to look into our alleged radiation shield. The doctors would have to know exactly what she was exposed to. We didn’t have a tenthmark left. Nobody would believe we had anything, what with Valerie glowing in the dark, and if anyone did, he could get the designs on the four o’clock news.”

  “So you pulled it back.”

  “Hand over hand. Was I supposed to leave it sitting out on the moon? But she saw me doing it. She—I don’t know what she was thinking—she ran away, toward the center of the crater. I’d already had more radiation than I wanted, but those tracks … not just the footprints but—”

  “The tracks of the cable,” I said. “All over the dust like a rattlesnake convention.”

  “Anyone could see them just by looking over the rim! So I moved the lemmy up onto the crater wall and turned it on its side and used the rocket. I don’t know what Valerie was thinking by then. Did she write some kind of last message?”

  Hecate said, “No.”

  “Even if she did, who would see it? But I picked up too much radiation. It’s nearly killed me.”

  “Well, it kind of did,” I said. “Rad sickness retired you early. It was part of what tipped me off.”

  “Hamilton, where are you?”

  “Wait, Hecate! Shreve, it wouldn’t be prudent to answer.”

  Hecate said edgily, “Gil, he’s accelerating straight up. What was that all about?”

  “Last gestures. Right, Shreve?”

  “Right,” he said, and turned off his phone.

  I told Hecate, “When his Mark Twenty-odd shut down, he had nothing left. He went looking for me. Spray my ship with rocket flame. I lied about being on the rim of Del Rey, but we don’t know what he’s flying, Hecate, and I don’t want him to know where we are. Even a lemmy could do severe damage if you dropped it on Helios Power One at maximum thrust. What’s he doing now?”

  “Coasting. I think … I think he’s out of fuel. He burned up a lot, hovering.”

  “We should keep watching.”

  Two hours later Hecate said, “His travel chair just quit sending.”

  “Where did he come down?”

  “Del Rey, near the center. I want to look at it before I assume anything.”

  “It could have been very messy. He was a hero, after all.” I yawned and stretched. I could be back in Hovestraydt City by tomorrow morning.

  AFTERWORD

  SCIENCE/MYSTERY FICTION

  I have always gotten too involved with my characters.

  I certainly did while finishing “Death by Ecstasy.”

  Even now, I don’t generally write of purely black-hearted villains. Loren the organlegger was my first. I finished the first draft of that story at six o’clock one morning … went to bed … stared at the ceiling … gave up at about ten and went looking for company.

  I finished rewriting that scene a week or two later, at six in the morning. I gave up trying to sleep at around eight. Stopping Loren’s heart with my imaginary hand was a rough experience. It may not shake you, but it shook me.

  That was the first of the tales of Gil Hamilton of the Amalgamated Regional Militia, the police force of the United Nations. The second story bubbled in my head for a long time before I wrote down anything but notes.

  Bouchercon is a gathering of mystery fans held annually in memory of Anthony Boucher, for many years the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the author of the classic “Nine-Finger Jack.” At the first Bouchercon, I already had in mind a most unusual crime with a most unusual motive. I outlined that crime to an audience during a panel discussion. “Death by Ecstasy” just sort of grew, but “The Defenseless Dead” was meticulously plotted in advance, and it didn’t hit me nearly as hard. Maybe it should have. The story and the assumptions behind it are terrifying, and uncomfortably real.

  Gil the Arm is one of my favorite characters. Riiight. Thirty years of writing, and still there are only these five stories! If I like him so freezing much, why not write more stories?

  Because following two sets of rules is hard work, that’s why.

  A detective story is a puzzle. In principle the reader can know what crime was committed, by whom, and how and where and why, before the story hits him in the face with it. He must have enough data to make this obviously true, and there must be only one answer possible.

  Science fiction is an exercise in imagination. The more interesting an idea, the less justification it needs. A science-fiction story will be judged on its internal consistency and the reach of the author’s imagination. Strange backgrounds, odd societies following odd laws, and unfamiliar values and ways of thinking are the rule. Alfred Bester overdid it, but see his classic The Demolished Man.

  Now, how can the reader anticipate the detective if all the rules are strange?

  If science fiction recognizes no limits, then … maybe the victim was death-wished from outside a locked room, or stabbed through a keyhole by a psychic killer who ESPed where he was standing. Walls may be transparent to a laser outside the visible band. Perhaps the alien killer’s motive really is beyond comprehension. Can the reader really rule out time travel? Invisible killers? Some new device tinkered together by a homicidal genius?

  More to the point, how can I give you a fair puzzle?

  With great difficulty, that’s how. There’s nothing impossible about it. You can trust John Dickson Carr, and me, not to bring a secret passageway into a locked-room mystery. If there’s an X-ray laser involved, I’ll show it to you. If I haven’t shown you an invisible man, there isn’t one. If the ethics of Belt and lunie societies are important, I’ll go into detail on the subject.

  Detective and science fiction (and fantasy and police procedural) do have a lot in common. Internal consistency. Readers. All these genres attract readers who like a challenge, a puzzle. Whether it’s the odd disappearance of a weapon (a glass dagger hidden in a flower vase full of water) or the incomprehensibly violent behavior of a visiting alien (he needs a rest room, bad), the question is, What’s going on? The reader is entitled to his chance to out-think the author.

  Much detective fiction, and most science fiction, is also sociological fiction. See Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, and Brunner’s Puzzle on Tantalus. Bester’s The Demolished Man is that, and is also an involuted psychological study, a subject well suited to its society of telepaths. Psychological studies are common in crime fiction, too. So are puzzles in basic science, like Asimov’s Wendell Urth stories. Garrett’s Lord Darcy operates in the world of working magic, but the stories are puzzles in internal consistency. Ellery Queen would feel at home with them.

  Mystery/sf needed defending once upon a time, back when Hal Clement took up John W. Campbell’s challenge (Needle, with an intelligent parasite/symbiote as detective), but you’re not really in doubt, are you? We could shape a sizable library from detective science fiction. Needle is half a century old, and there are older yet if we include Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” (His murderous ape was more fiction than animal research). Detectives seem to live beyo
nd their stories: Asimov’s Dr. Wendell Urth and Lije Bailey, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy (fantasy/detective fiction!), and scores of pastiches (particularly stories by Poul Anderson and Gene Wolfe) in which Sherlock Holmes’s niche is taken by aliens, mutants, downloads, artificial intelligences, or robots.

  In the mixed marriage of mystery and science fiction there are pitfalls. A 1950s novel of matter duplicators, Double Jeopardy, suffered from internal inconsistency: a coin reversed except for the lettering, a crucial error in multiplication. Edward Hoch writes good tight puzzles, but his near-future mystery The Transection Machine twisted human nature far beyond credibility, merely to make a tighter puzzle.

  And me?

  I was working on “ARM,” which becomes the third story in this volume, before I ever sold a story. Frederick Pohl (Galaxy) turned down that primitive version. So did John W. Campbell (Analog). What came of that was two letters telling me why mystery/sf is so difficult to write, and what was wrong with “ARM” in particular.

  “ARM” needed help. There were too many characters. There were holes in the science, the sociology, the logic. The puzzle grew far too complex.

  So I put it away until I could learn more about my craft.

  Most of my stories are puzzle stories. Naturally a lot of them become crime and detective stories.

  “The Hole Man” involves murder committed with a weapon no normal jury could be expected to understand. “The Meddler” showed a Mike Hammer clone trying to operate with an alien sociologist at his elbow. “The Tale of the Genie and the Sisters” showed Scheherazade in a detective role. “All the Myriad Ways” was a crime story about quantum mechanics. “The Deadlier Weapon” and “$16,940.00” are straight crime stories.

  These aside, I generally write more than one story within any imaginary world. It isn’t laziness. Honest! It’s just that, having designed a detailed, believable, even probable future, I often find that I have more to say about it than will fit in a story.