Scatterbrain (2003) SSC

by Larry Niven

  “Okay. What have you got?”

  “She was a woman. Hecate, she’s shorter than I am.”

  “Flatlander.”

  “Likely. No markings on the suit. Corruption isn’t advanced, but she’s dried out like a mummy. We should check the suit for a leak.” I continued to search as I talked. “She’s covered with medical telltales outside and in. Big, old-fashioned things. Maybe we can date them. Her face feels two hundred years old, but that’s no sign of anything. Air tanks are dry, of course. Air pressure’s near zero. I haven’t found an injury yet. Hel-lo!”

  “Gil?”

  “Her oxygen flow is twisted right over, all the way up.”

  No comment.

  I said, “Bet on a leak. Even money, a leak got her before the radiation did.”

  “But what the hell was she doing there?”

  “Funny how that thought occurred to both of us. Hecate, shall I collect the body?”

  “I sure don’t want it in my cargo hold.—Gil, we don’t want it on the Mark 29. If you let me start up the waldo tugs, I can guide one to the body and move it that way.”

  “Start ’em up.”

  I rolled past the dead woman. I stayed wide of the line of footprints leading north-northwest, but that was what I was following.

  …Bounding across a crater that was the most radioactive spot in the Solar system, barring the Sun itself, and maybe Mercury. Frightened out of her mind? Even if there was no leak, it was a sane decision, giving herself maximum oxygen pressure, nothing left for later as she ran for the crater rim like a damned soul escaping Hell. But what was she doing in the crater?

  I stopped. “Hecate?”

  “Here. I’ve started the waldo tugs. Shall I send you one?”

  “Yah. Hecate, do you see what I see? The footprints?”

  “…They just stop.”

  “In the middle of Del Rey Crater?”

  “Well, what do you see?”

  “They start here in the middle, already running. They get halfway to the rim. The way my rad sensor is losing its lunch, I’d say she made a good run of it.”

  I trundled back to where I’d left the corpse. There was a signal laser in the service pack on my back. I spent a few minutes cutting an outline in the rock around the corpse.

  “Hecate, how fast are those tugs?”

  “Not exactly built for speed. It’s more important that they don’t turn over, but they’ll do 25 K on the flat. Gil, you’ll have your tug in ten minutes. How’s your shield holding?”

  I looked at the rad counters. Hell raged around me, but almost nothing was getting inside the shield. “Whatever got through, I probably brought it in on my boots. From outside Del Rey at that. I’d still like to leave.”

  “Gil, give me a camera view of the boots.”

  I wheeled into place and leaned far over the corpse’s boots. Without Hecate’s mention I might never have noticed them. They were white. No decoration, no custom touches. Big boots with thick soles for lunar heat and cold, heavy treads for lunar dust. Built for the Moon. But of course they would be, even if they’d come straight from somewhere on Earth.

  “Now the face. The sooner we find out who she was, the better.”

  “She’s lying on her face.”

  “Don’t touch her,” Hecate said. “Wait for the tug.”

  I spent some of my waiting time easing a rope line under the body. Then I just waited.

  A pair of arms on tractor treads was bumping toward me. It crossed crater after crater like it was bobbing on waves. It was making me queasy…if that wasn’t the radiation…but the counters were quiet. I watched, and it came.

  “I’ll turn her over first,” Hecate told me. Metal arms a little bigger than mine reached out. I lifted the rope. The arms went under and over the pressure suit, and rotated.

  “Hold that,” I said.

  “Holding.”

  Three centimeters from her faceplate I still couldn’t see through. Maybe the camera could, in one frequency or another. I said, “She’s likely still got fingerprints, and we’ll get her DNA, but not retina prints.”

  “Yah.” The cargo tug backed and began moving away. “Get a view of where it was lying,” Hecate said, but I already was. “Can you get closer? Okay, Gil, move out. You don’t have to wait for the tug.”

  I passed another waldo tug as it was latching on to a canister. A third crawled over the crater rim ahead of me. I followed it over the rim and out.

  I said, “I suppose nobody will disturb the scene of the crime? If there’s a crime.”

  “We’ve got cameras on the waldo tugs. I’ll set up a watch.”

  I watched the tug drag its canister toward the hole in the mound.

  In my mind’s eye that hill was an ancient British barrow, and all the ancient dead were pouring through the portal in its side, into the living world. But on this dead world what crawled out of the factory was only another set of arms riding tractor treads. Still, it was more deadly than any murderous old king’s risen army.

  Hecate Bauer-Stanson said, “Soon as we reach civilization, you start a search for missing flatlanders who could have wound up on the Moon, and a search for that model pressure suit. We’ve already ruled out anything manufactured here. It’s got to be flatlander.”

  “Not Belter?”

  “The boots, Gil. No magnets. No fittings for magnets.”

  Well, hell. I’d just lost serious sleuthing points to Lawman Hecate Bauer-Stanson.

  “Come on, Gil. We’ll let the waldo tug take the body back—”

  “You can program it?”

  “I can get it done from Helios Power One, which is where we’re going. It’ll be five hours en route. She’s waited a long time, Gil, she’ll wait a little longer. Come on.”

  “We taking the Mark 29?”

  “It could go back by itself…no. If anything happened…no, I think we bloody have to.”

  Hecate directed me: we set the Mark 29 on a rock ridge. I didn’t guess why until she went back to the lemmy for an oxygen tank.

  I asked, “Can we spare that?”

  “Sure, the whole lunar surface is lousy with bound oxygen. I have to get the dust off, don’t I?” She pointed the tank and opened the stopcock. Dust flew from the Mark 29 and I stepped back.

  “I mean, we wouldn’t want to run out of breath.”

  “I packed plenty.” She emptied the tank. Then we lifted the Mark 29 back into the lemmy’s cargo hold. Hecate took us up and away.

  How hard would she hit? Isaac Newton had it all worked out. I was trying to remember the equation, but it wouldn’t come. Postulate a mass driver on the rim wall. Launch her in lunar gravity, three kilometers to the center. Up at forty-five degrees, down the same way, Sir Isaac had that straight, and land running. Keep running. Switch the oxygen to high and run, run for the far side of the rim, away from the RAP RAP RAP mad scientist who set her flying. “Gil?” RAP RAP RAP.

  Knuckles on my helmet, an inch from my eye sockets. “Yah?” I opened my eyes.

  We were falling toward a hole in the Moon, a vast glittering black patch with fine lines of orange and green scrolling across it. As we dropped—as the lemmy’s thrust pulled me into my couch, creating a sudden scary sense of down—I could make out the shape of a rounded hill with a few tiny windows glittering in the black.

  Hecate said, “I thought you might freak if thrust started while you were asleep.”

  The orange-and-black logo was upside down. Helios Power One was sheathed in Black Power™. I was amused, but it made sense: if the fusion plant went down, they’d still want lights, cooling, and the air recycler.

  “What were you dreaming? Your legs were kicking.”

  I’d been dozing. What had I been dreaming? “Hecate, she turned the oxygen all the way up. Maybe there was no leak. Maybe it was to run better.”

  We settled into an orange-and-green mandala, Helios One’s landing pad. Hecate eeled out of the cabin, then hustled me out. She said, “We’ll see if her
suit really has a leak. Anything else?”

  “I was thinking a ship landed in the middle of Del Rey and left her there. A little ship, because you’d want the drive flame spashing into a crater, and those are little craters. Your lemmy could do that, couldn’t it? And nothing would show—”

  “Don’t bet on that. It’s always amazing what you can see from orbit. Anyway, I’d hate to ride anything into Del Rey Crater. Gil, I’m feeling a little warm.”

  “Just your imagination.”

  “Let’s get to Decontamination.”

  Copernicus Dome was three hundred kilometers northeast of Del Rey. Helios Power One was only a hundred, in a different direction, but both would be just a hop in the lemmy.

  Copernicus Dome certainly had medical facilities for rad poisoning. Any autodoc off Earth could treat us for that. Radiation treatment must date back to the end of the Second World War! Near two centuries of improved techniques leave it difficult to die of radiation…but not impossible.

  But decontamination, washing the radiation off something you want to live with afterward, is something else again. Only fission and fusion power plants would have decontamination facilities.

  So far so good. But Helios One used He3 fusion.

  There’s He3 all over the Moon, adsorbed onto the rocks. The helium-three nucleus includes two protons and a neutron. It fuses nicely with simple hydrogen—which has to be imported—giving He4 and energy, but only at ungodly temperatures. The wonderful thing about He3 fusion is that it doesn’t spit out neutrons. It’s not radioactive.

  Why would Helios Power One have decontamination rooms? It was another intelligence test, and I hadn’t solved it yet. I could ask Hecate…eventually.

  I have used decontamination procedures to get evidence off a corpse. At Helios Power One they were far more elaborate. There were rad counters everywhere. Still in my suit, I went through a magnetic tunnel, then air jets. I crawled out of my suit directly into a zippered bag. The suit went somewhere else. Instruments sniffed me. Ten showerheads gave me the first decent shower I’d had since leaving Earth.

  Then on to a row of six giant coffins. They were Rydeen MedTek autodocs, built long for lunie height, and I wondered: why so many? They didn’t look used. That was a relief. I lay down in the first and went to sleep.

  I woke feeling sluggish and blurred.

  Two hours had passed. I’d picked up less than two hundred millirem, but a red blinker on the readout was telling me to drink plenty of liquids and be back in the ’doc in twenty hours. I could picture Rydeen MedTek’s funny molecules cruising my arteries, picking up stray radioactive particles, running my kidneys and urogenital system up to warp speed, shutting down half-dead cells that might turn cancerous. Clogging my circulation.

  I used a phone to track Hecate Bauer-Stanson to the director’s office.

  She stood and turned as I came in, graceful as hell. When I try that, my feet always leave the floor. “Nunnally, this is Ubersleuth Gil Hamilton of the Amalgamated Regional Militia on Earth. Gil, Nunnally Sterne’s the duty officer.”

  Sterne was a lunie, long-headed, very dark. When he stood to shake hands he looked eight feet tall, and maybe he was. “You’ve done us a great favor, Hamilton,” he said. “We didn’t like having the waldo tugs shut down. I’m sure Mr. Hodder will want to thank you in person.”

  “Hodder is—?”

  “Everett Hodder is the director. He’s home now.”

  “Is it still nighttime?”

  Sterne smiled. “Past noon, officially.”

  I asked, “Sterne, what do you want with radioactive sludge?”

  I’d heard that sigh everywhere on the Moon. Flatlander. Talk slow. Sterne said, “This isn’t exactly a secret. It just wouldn’t exactly be popular. The justification for these generators, on Earth and anywhere else, is that helium-three fusion isn’t radioactive.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The flatlanders started lobbing these packages into Del Rey in…early last century. They—”

  “Boeing Corporation, USA, A.D. 2003,” I said. “Supposed to be 2001, but there was some kind of legal bickering. Makes it easy to remember.”

  “R-right. They kept it up for near fifty years. At the end the targeting was more accurate, and that’s when they used the packages to paint that verboten sign across the crater. You must have—”

  “We saw it.”

  “It could just have easily have been Coca-Cola. Well, deuterium-tritium fusion was better than fission, but it wasn’t much cleaner. But when we finally got the helium-three plants going, it all turned around.

  “We ship He3 to Earth by the ton. When we had enough money we built four He3 plants on the Moon, too. Del Rey Crater was out of business. And that held for another fifty years.”

  “Sure—”

  “What’s finally knocked the bottom out is this new solar-electric paint. Black Power™, they call it. It turns sunlight into electricity, just like any solar power converter, but you spray it on. Place your cables, then spray over them. All you need is sunlight and room.

  “On Earth they’re still buying He3, and we can keep that up until your eighteen billion flatlanders start spraying the tops of their heads for power.”

  “You use it yourselves?”

  “Stet, Black Power™ is a great invention, but it’s so cheap that it’s no longer feasible for us to build new He3 fusion plants. You see? But running the old ones is still cheaper than the paint.”

  I nodded. Hecate was pretending she already knew all this.

  “So my job is safe. Except that He3 fusion has to be ten times hotter than D-T fusion. The plant is starting to leak heat. Fusion is running slow. We have to inject a catalyst, something to heat up the He3. Something that fissions or fuses at a lower temperature.”

  Sterne was enjoying himself. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was something already measured out in standard units and uniform proportions, just lying around ready to pick up—”

  “Stet, I see it.”

  “This radioactive goo from Del Rey Crater works fine. It hasn’t lost much of its kick. The processor doesn’t do much more than pop off the boosters and lift off the dust—”

  “How?”

  “Magnetically. We had to build an injector system, of course, with a neutron reflector chamber. We had to install these decontamination rooms and the autodocs and a human doctor on permanent call. Nothing is simple. But the canisters, we just pop them in and let them heat up until the stuff sprays out. We’ve been using them for two years. Eventually the waldo tugs moved enough canisters that we noticed the body. Hamilton, who was she?”

  “We’ll find out. Sterne, when this leaks out—” I saw his theatrical wince. “Sorry—”

  “Don’t say leak.”

  “Nothing gets attention like a murder. Then the media will all be looking at a fusion plant that was supposed to be radiation-free, that you guys have got running radioactive. We can keep that half-secret for a day or two while we thrash around, and you work on your story. If you’ll do the same.”

  Sterne looked puzzled. “It was all fairly public, but…yes. Be glad to.”

  Hecate said, “We need phones.”

  We bought water bottles from a dispenser wall in the Technicians’ Lounge. The Lounge had a recycler booth too. Hecate hadn’t got nearly the dose I had, but we were both taking in water and funny molecules, and we’d be needing the recycler.

  There were four phones. We settled ourselves under the eyes of curious techs and turned on privacy dampers. I called the Los Angeles ARM.

  A message light was blinking on Hecate’s phone. I watched her ignore it while she talked rapid fire in mime.

  I waited.

  It always takes forever to connect, and you never learn the problem. No satellite in place? Lightning sends its own signals? Someone left a switch point turned off? Muslim Sector is tapping ARM communications, badly? Sometimes a local government tries that—

  But a perfect multiracial androgynous i
mage was inviting me to speak my needs.

  I tapped in Jackson Bera’s code. I got Jackson explaining that he wasn’t there.

  “Got a locked room for you, Jackson,” I told the hologram. “See if Garner has an interest. I need an ancient pressure suit identified. We think it was made on Earth. I can’t send the suit itself, it’s radioactive as hell.” I faxed him the video I’d taken in Del Rey Crater, dead woman, footprints and all.

  That should get their attention.

  Hecate was still occupied. Given a free moment, I called Taffy in Hovestraydt City. “Hi, love, the lu—”

  “I’m off performing surgery,” the recording cried wildly. “The villagers say I’m mad, but this day I have created life! If you want the heeheehee patient to call back, leave your vital stats at the chime.”

  BONG! I said, “Love, the lunie law has me halfway around the Moon looking at something interesting. Sorry about tomorrow. I can’t give you a time frame or a number. If the monster wants a mate, I’ll look around.”

  Hecate had been watching me as she talked. Now she rang off grinning. “You’ll get your view of Del Rey,” she told me. “None of the sputniki are handy, but I got a Belt miner to do the job for a customs break. He’ll do a low pass over Del Rey. Forty minutes from now.”

  “Good.”

  “And I’ve got another bugful of men coming here. We can send the Mark 29 back with one of them. Who was that?”

  “My highly significant other.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “You have others of lesser significance?”

  I lied to keep things simple. “No, we’re lockstepped.”

  “Ah. Next?”

  “I sent what we’ve got on the suit to the ARM. If we’re lucky, I’ll get Luke Garner’s attention. He’s old enough to recognize that suit. And your message light’s doing backflips.”

  She tapped acknowledge. A male head-and-shoulders spoke to her, then fizzed out. Hecate said, “Shreve Development wants to talk to me. Want in?”