by Larry Niven
"They didn't know." He did a pretty accurate double take. "You thought... Cheseborough, have I made rude comments about your sex life?"
"No. Why?"
"Then you can leave mine alone."
He had to be kidding. No be didn't; he could take any shape he liked. Wow, I thought. Sinc's really gone native. Maybe he was laughing, or thought be was.
Sinc moved slowly toward me. I backed away, holding the useless gun.
"You realize what happens now?"
I took a guess. "Same thing that happened to Domingo's body. All your embarrassing bodies."
"Exactly. Our species is known for its enormous appetite." He moved toward me, the squirt gun forgotten in his right hand. His muscles had sagged and smoothed. Now he was like the first step in making a clay model of a man. But his mouth was growing larger, and his teeth were two sharp-edged horse shoes.
I fired once more.
Something smashed heavily against the door. Sinc didn't hear it. Sinc was melting, losing all form as he tried to wrap himself around his agony. From the fragments of his shattered plastic squirt gun, rubbing alcohol poured over what had been his hand and dripped to the floor.
The door boomed again. Something splintered.
Sinc's hand was bubbling, boiling. Sinc, screaming, was flowing out of his slacks and smoking jacket.
And I... I snapped out of whatever force was holding me rooted, and I picked up the silver thermos and poured hot spiked coffee over whatever it was that writhed on the floor.
Sinc bubbled all over. White metal machinery extruded itself from the mass and lay on the rug.
The door crackled and gave. By then I was against the wall, ready to shoot anything that looked my way. Handel burst into the room and stopped dead.
He stood there in the doorway, while the stars grew old and went out. Nothing, I felt, could have torn his eyes from that twitching, bubbling mass. Gradually the mass stopped moving... and Handel gulped, got his throat working, shrieked, and ran from the room.
I heard the meaty thud as he collided with a guard, and I heard him babbling, "Don't go in there! Don't... oh, don't..." and then a sob, and the sound of uneven running feet.
I went into the bedroom and out the window. The grounds still blazed with light, but I saw no motion.
Anyway, there was nothing out there but dogs and men.
Dry Run
By habit Simpson was a one-hand driver. On this day he drove with both hands wrapped tight around the wheel strangling it. He looked straight ahead, down the curving length of the freeway, and he stayed in the right-center lane.
He wanted a cigarette; yet he was almost afraid to let go of the wheel. The air-conditioning nozzle blew icy air up at his face and down at his belt buckle; icy because of the way he was perspiring. He felt the weakness in his bowels, and he cursed silently, trying to relax.
The dog in the trunk—
Too late now, too late to change his mind—
He stabbed a finger at the cigarette lighter, missed— Jesus! He'd only been driving the Buick for five years!—found it and pushed it in. He fumbled a Camel from the central glove compartment, one-handed, without looking. Traffic was not too heavy. It was past seven o'clock, though the July sun was still a falling glory below red streamers of cloud. A few cars had their lights on, unnecessarily. Were the drivers afraid they'd forget later? The cars in this lane were doing sixty to sixty-five. Usually Simpson chose the fast lane. This time was different. No risks on this trip.
Too late now, too late to back out. He wouldn't if he could. He lit the cigarette, dragged, put the lighter back, and gripped the wheel again with both hands. The cigarette bent and flattened between his fingers.
Red taillights. This lane was slowing. He touched the brake with his foot, eased down, harder. Hard! He tried to push the brake through the floor. He stopped a foot behind a vintage Cadillac, and stalled.
Simpson swore and turned the ignition hard over. The motor caught instantly.
It didn't matter. Nobody was moving.
Overhead were the swooping concrete noodles of the Santa Monica Freeway ramps. A carpet of cars was stalled underneath, stalled for as far ahead as Simpson could see. Then there was motion in the distance. He waited.
The vintage Cadillac jerked half a car length forward. Simpson followed. Another ripple of motion, another car length forward.
The freeway shouldn't be this crowded. Seven-thirty on a week night? He'd picked his time carefully enough. What was happening?
The Cad moved again. Its driver looked back over his shoulder: angry, middle-aged, sweaty, and somewhat overweight. He looked like he'd bite anyone who came close enough.
Simpson felt the same way. He eased forward.
Murray Simpson was six inches too tall for the driver's seat of the Buick. He banged his elbows and knees getting in and out. The driver's seat cramped his legs, bending them too far at the knee, even when it was as far back as it would go.
In repose he always looked unhappy. He had that kind of face. His most genuine laughter looked forced. See him now, stalled in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway in a car too small for him. Stalled partway through a murder plan which was too complex to begin with...
He looked frantic. His brown eyes burned; his no-color hair had lost all semblance of civilization. His forgotten cigarette burned threateningly between white knuckles.
Ahead of the blue Cadillac was a Jaguar convertible whose custom paint job glowed with fiery tangerine brilliance. Ahead of that, a long gray anonymous Detroit car with huge delta fins. The gray car was stalled.
Someone behind Simpson was honking madly.
Cars poured into the gap in his lane, the gap ahead of the stalled car.
At Hermosa Beach the red tide was in. Trillions and quadrillions of plankton made a dirty red-and-brown soup of the ocean. By night the breakers glowed with cold blue fire. By night and day, the ocean air stank of too much life.
In the trunk of the Buick, Simpson's dun-colored Great Dane lay dead with a hole in his head. He was beginning to stiffen.
No room to get out of this lane. Simpson clenched his teeth and clung to his temper. Part of him wanted to stamp on the throttle and swoop out into the next lane, and damn the car that got in his way! But there was Harvey in the trunk, with his head in a Baggy. Simpson lit another cigarette.
What was Janet doing now? Who was she with? Did Simpson know him? No; Janet wasn't stupid, nor was the divorce yet final. Anyone with her now would be female.
Had she missed Harvey yet? Was she searching for him now, wondering how he'd got out, hoping he hadn't reached the street?
How would Janet look in the trunk of the Buick, with her head in a Baggy to hold the blood?
Cars swept by on the left and right, going ten and fifteen miles per hour.
A woman in a peach-colored dress got out of the gray car and opened the hood. She fiddled in the guts of the motor, then got back in. The gray car lurched forward. She'd fixed it! Amazing!
And the whole lane crawled off at ten miles per hour, southbound on the San Diego Freeway. Toward Simpson's tiny house on the Strand at Hermosa Beach.
Driving was torture. Ripples crawled backward along the lines of cars. Some deadhead in front was moving in spurts, and the spurts became waves traveling backward, communicating their motion to every car behind him. Accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake. Brake! Accelerate. Maddeningly slow. There was the car that had blocked the lanes, twisted across the right lanes with its side smashed in, a police car alongside. Now the lanes moved faster.
On Simpson's left they were getting up to speed. Simpson saw a gap. He twisted the wheel, depressed the throttle, and looked quickly over his shoulder. Nobody coming... he stamped on the throttle and brought his eyes back to the road.
Every car in his lane must have stopped dead the moment he turned his head. His foot was still on the throttle when he hit.
Discontinuity. He knew he was about to crash... and he was getting
out to look at the damage. He'd bumped his head, and his ribs must have smacked hard into the steering wheel, but he had no trouble walking.
He walked through a nightmare.
The Buick's hood looked like a squashed banana. The fat man in the Cadillac was getting out, rubbing his thick neck, his eyes squinted against pain. Whiplash, thought Simpson, and moved toward him.
Then the weakness came, and Simpson dropped hard on his knees. The shock should have hurt, but it didn't. "Sorry," Simpson told the man. Sorry about your car, your neck. Sorry to be such a fool. Sorry, I feel weak. Sorry. He fainted.
He knew he had fainted, though he had not felt his chin hit concrete. Now, without transition, he was totally alert. But alert to what?
There was darkness around him, and a lack of sensation. No sound. Nothing to see or feel. No up or down. The position of his body was a mystery. He visualized himself in a hospital bed, his spinal cord severed at the neck, his eyes bandaged. The thought should have frightened him. It didn't.
Once hed smoked marijuana. It was unplanned; he'd seen some friends smoking a small-bowled cigarette pipe, using a mechanical roller to make their own cigarettes, and curiosity had got the better of him. He remembered the awful taste at the back of his nose, and the deep, all-embracing peace, and a queer somatic hallucination: the feeling that all the mass of his body had withdrawn into his feet, below a line drawn at the ankles. It seemed that he could lean as far as he liked in any direction and he would not fall, because his center of mass was only an inch above the floor.
The deep peace was the same, but now his body was entirely massless. As before, his memory was unimpaired. The body in the trunk, the crash... how, now, could he keep Harvey's death a secret?
But it didn't seem to matter.
Suddenly he knew why.
He was dead. Murray Simpson was a dead issue, an embarrassing mass of tissue associated with an equally embarrassing mass of torn metal. And that didn't matter either.
The voice spoke close in front of him. "That was silly, Simpson."
Simpson tried to move. Massless body? He had no body at all. He was a viewpoint. Blind, motionless, without sensation... he waited.
"The worst possible time to die is when you're involved in a murder." There was no character to that voice, no accent, no timbre, no emphasis, no loudness or softness. It was neither sharp nor dull, neither hoarse nor smooth. A voice with no handle. Like print in a typewriter, that voice.
Simpson said, "Murder?" To his own horror, his voice was exactly like the other's.
"Do you deny it?"
"I admit to killing a dog. My own dog, Harvey, a Great Dane."
"Not your own. Harvey belonged to you and to Janet Grey Simpson, your wife. Your wife has had possession of Harvey for seven months, ever since the two of you separated. Do you deny your intent to commit murder?"
Life after death. Reward and punishment? Simpson said, "I refuse to answer. Are you my judge?"
"No. Another will judge you. I collect only evidence, and you."
Simpson didn't answer. The strange peace was still with him, and he felt that he'd already found the right answer.
"Well, we must find out," said the voiceless voice.
What a weird nightmare, Simpson thought, and tried to pull himself awake. I dreamed I was in an accident... at the worst possible time... I'd already killed Harvey... poor Harvey. Why would I pick Harvey? There were voices around him.
Cold reality touched him, icy cold, icy and rough against his cheek. He lay on hard concrete. His chin hurt, and his belly hurt below the edge of his rib cage.
He looked up into the face of a policeman. "Am I dying?"
"Ambulance will be here... moment."
The car! Harvey! He tried to say, "What did you do with the car?"
The policeman spoke calmly. "Take it to ... get it whenever ... address ..." His voice faded in and out; and out.
He woke again, thinking, nightmare! And again it was too real. There was a cloth under his cheek.
Someone had been a good Samaritan.
He asked nobody, "Am I dying?"
"Just take it easy." Two men folded his arms around him and picked him up in a peculiar grip that supported his innards. The pain under his ribs was not great, but it felt unnatural, terrifying.
"I think he could walk himself," said one.
"I don't dare," Simpson got out, trying to convey his fear. Something broken in my belly or in my skull.
Broken, bleeding, slowly bleeding away my life with nothing to show on the outside. He was convinced he was dying. It was all that remained of a part of the nightmare that he could not visualize at all.
The men put him on a stretcher and unfolded him into prone position.
The rest of it was hazy. The ride in the ambulance, the doctor asking him questions, the same questions asked earlier by the police. Questions he answered without thought, almost without memory. He didn't become fully aware until an intern said, "Nothing broken. Just bruises."
Simpson was startled. "Are you sure?"
"Have your own doctor take a look tomorrow. For tonight you'll be all right. No broken bones. Is that the only pain, under your ribs?"
"My chin hurts."
"Oh, that's just a scrape. Did you faint?"
"Yes."
"Probably got it then. You're lucky, you know. Your spleen is right under those bruised ribs."
"Jesus."
"You think you can get up? Your wife is coming for you."
Janet, coming here? Janet! "I'll take a taxi," said Simpson. He rolled onto his side, sat up on the high operating table and climbed down to the floor, treating himself like a sackful of expensive raw eggs.
"Where did they take my car?"
"The police gave me the address." The man tapped his pockets. One crackled. "Here."
Simpson took the slip, looked at it and shoved it in his pocket. There was a chance he could get the car transferred to his own company before the police looked in the trunk. Or was there? They might have looked already.
What would the police do about a Great Dane with a bullet in his head?
Undoubtedly they'd tell Janet.
He must get the car tomorrow.
The intern showed him to a telephone and loaned him a cigarette. After he called the cab, someone else showed him where to wait. He'd waited five minutes when Janet came.
Her hair was back to auburn. The dress she wore was severe, almost a suit, and it was new. She looked competent and sure of herself.
"How did you know?" he asked her.
"How do you think? The police called my house. They must have found the number on your license, if you didn't tell them."
"I've got a taxi coming."
"Let it come. You're going with me. How did you manage to bang yourself up?"
"There was a traffic jam. I got—"
"Can you stand up?"
She was always interrupting. Once he'd thought she did it deliberately. Once she had, perhaps, but it was a habit she'd never lose.
He stood. The pain under his ribs made him walk carefully. He dreaded what it would feel like tomorrow.
"I'll take you to the beach," she said.
"Okay."
He lived in the beach house now. Janet had been awarded the main house.
He reached the car by leaning on Janet's shoulder. The touch of her was disturbing, and her perfume roused sharp memories. Aside from premarital prostitutes, he had never carnally known a woman other than Janet. Now she distracted him, and he kept landing hard on his feet and jarring his ribs. But her strength was an asset in settling him into the passenger seat.
"Now. How did it happen?"
He told her, in detail. Reaction made him want to babble. Somehow he managed to leave the dog out of it. But he told her how sure he had been that he was going to die, and he spoke of his surprise when the intern told him he wasn't. By the time he finished they were back on the freeway.
The lights, the flying lights . He
planted his feet and tried to push himself through the seat. Janet didn't notice.
"Harvey's missing," she said.
He should have said, "Oh?"
Instead, he stopped with the word on his lips. He had suddenly realized that it didn't matter. It hadn't mattered since the accident, though he hadn't realized it until now.
"I killed Harvey," he said.
She glanced across at him, with distaste. She didn't believe him.
"He's in the trunk of my car. That's why I was in such a hurry tonight."
"That's ridiculous. You like Harvey."
"It was a sort of dry ran. I was planning to kill you."
"I don't understand."
"I had it all planned out," he said. "There's a red tide down at the beach. Maybe you knew."
"No." She was beginning to believe him, he thought.
"At night it's lovely. The breakers glow like blue fire. In the daytime it stinks, and the water's filthy. I could bury a body anywhere on the beach, and nobody would notice the smell. But I had to know I could go through with it. Wouldn't I be seven kinds of idiot if I murdered you and then froze up?"
"Yes," she said, very coldly.
"So I went up to the house and shot Harvey. It was sort of a dry run. If it had worked, you would have been next. The gun in the pillow, the drive to the beach—"
"What an idiotic idea. Didn't it occur to you that they'd search harder for a missing woman than a missing dog?"
"Well—"
"And why Harvey? Why not pick up a dog at the pound? Suppose they were searching for my body on the beach and found Harvey's instead. They'd trace me right to you! Then they'd know they were on the right track!"
"I—"
"I suppose you planned to use the same gun on us both?"
"Yes, I did, as a—"
"And how long do you think a red tide lasts, anymway?"
"The ocean always stinks. There's always a breeze, too."
"Remember the seal that washed up last year? It probably weighed less than seventy pounds. Remember the smelI? Think how much worse—"
"All right, all right! It was a stupid plan!"
The angry silence was very, very familiar. It didn't help Simpson to know that his wife was probably right. It never had.