by Larry Niven
“That’s right.”
“A stun gun could do that…Well, we’ll put you under deep hypnosis and see what we come up with. I don’t suppose you have any objections? You’ll have to file some permission forms.”
“Fine.”
“You, ah, may not like what we find out.”
“I know.” Truesdale was already bracing himself against what he could find out. The voice had been his own. What had he been afraid to remember about himself?
“If you committed any crime during that period you can’t remember, you may have to pay the penalty. It’s not that useful an alibi.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Okay.”
“You think I’m faking this?”
“The thought crossed my mind. We’ll find out.”
“Okay, snap out of it,” said a Voice. And Truesdale snapped out of it like a man awakened too suddenly, dreams dying in his mind.
The Voice was Doctor Michaela Shorter, a broad-shouldered black woman in a loose blue business jumper. She said, “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” said Truesdale. “What luck?”
“It’s very peculiar. You not only don’t remember anything during those four months; you didn’t even sense time passing. You didn’t dream.”
The ARM lieutenant was off to the side, where Truesdale didn’t notice him until he spoke. “Do you know of any drugs that would do that?”
The woman shook her head.
“Doctor Shorter is an expert at forensic medicine,” the lieutenant said to Truesdale. “It sounds like somebody’s thought of something new.” To Doctor Shorter he said, “It could be something really new. Would you do some computer work?”
“I did,” she said shortly. “Anyway, no drug could be that selective. It’s as if he’d been stunned asleep, then put in frozen storage for four months. Except that he’d show medical signs of thawing: cell ruptures from ice crystallization and like that.” She looked sharply at Truesdale. “Don’t let my voice put you under again.”
“I wasn’t.” Truesdale stood up. “Whatever was done to me, it would take a laboratory, wouldn’t it? If it was that new. That’ll narrow the search a bit, won’t it?”
“It should,” said Doctor Shorter. “I’d look for a byproduct of genetic research. Something that decomposes RNA.”
The ARM lieutenant growled, “You’d think snatching you off a mountain would leave some traces too, but it didn’t. A car would have been spotted by radar. Vandervecken must have had you carried down to the parking lot on a stretcher, around oh four hundred, when there wouldn’t be anyone around.”
“That’d be goddam dangerous, on those paths.”
“I know. Have you got a better answer?”
“Haven’t you learned anything?”
“The money. Your car stayed in the parking lot because the parking fee was paid in advance. So was your annuity. All from an account registered to the name of Vandervecken. A new account, and it’s been closed.”
“Figures.”
“Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No. Probably Dutch.”
The ARM nodded to himself. He stood up. Doctor Shorter was looking impatient to get her examining room back.
Half a million marks was a lot of money. Truesdale played with the idea of telling his boss to go to Hell…but, despite tradition, Jeromy Link didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. No point in sticking him for an emergency replacement. Truesdale gave Jeromy a month’s notice.
Because it was temporary, his job became more pleasant. A shoe clerk…but he met some interesting people that way. One day he took a hard look at the machinery that molded shoes around human feet. Remarkable, admirable widgetry. He’d never realized it before.
In his off hours he was planning a sightseeing vacation.
He resumed acquaintance with numberless relatives when Greatly ’Stelle’s will was executed. Some had missed him at her funeral and at her last birthday party. Where had he been?
“Damndest thing,” said Truesdale—and he had to tell the story half a dozen times that evening. He took a perverse delight in doing so. “Vandervecken” hadn’t wanted publicity.
His delight was punctured when a second-cousin-in-law said, “So you were robbed again. You seem to be robbery-prone, Roy.”
“Not any more. This time I’m going to get the son of a bitch,” said Truesdale.
The day before his backpacking trip began, he stopped in at ARM Headquarters. He had trouble remembering the brawny ARM lieutenant’s name. Robinson, that was it. Robinson nodded at him from behind a boomerang desk and said, “Come on in. You enjoying life?”
“Somewhat. How are you making out?” Truesdale took a seat. The office was small but comfortable, with tea and coffee spigots set in the desk.
Robinson leaned back from the desk as if glad of the interruption. “Mostly negatives. We still don’t know who kidnapped you. We couldn’t trace the money anywhere, but we’re sure it didn’t come from you.” He looked up. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I was sure you’d check on me.”
“Right. Assume for the moment that someone we’ll call Vandervecken has a specific amnesia treatment. He might go around selling it to people who want to commit crimes…like murdering a relative for her inheritance.”
“I wouldn’t do that to Greatly ’Stelle.”
“Regardless, you didn’t. Vandervecken would have had to pay you, and a hefty sum, too. The idea’s ridiculous. Other than that, we found two other cases of your type of selective amnesia.” There was a computer terminal in the desk. The ARM used it. “First one was a Mary Boethals, who disappeared for four months in 2220. She didn’t report it. The ARMs got interested in her because she’d stopped getting treatments for a kidney ailment. It seemed likely shed got a transplant from an organlegger. But she told a different story, very much like yours, including the annuity.
“Then there was a Charles Mow, disappeared in 2241, came back four months later. He had an annuity too, but it got cut off because of some embezzling in Norn Insurance. It made Mow mad enough to come to us. Naturally the ARMs started looking for other cases, but they didn’t find any. And that was it for a hundred years. Until you showed up.”
“And my annuity’s been cut off.”
“Tough. Now, in those two previous cases the money was to go to prosthetics research. There wasn’t any criminal rehabilitation a hundred years ago. They all went into the organ banks.”
“Yah.”
“Otherwise the cases were all quite similar. So it looks like were looking for a struldbrug. The time fits: the earliest case was a hundred and twenty years ago. The name Vandervecken fits. The interest in prosthetics fits.”
Truesdale thought about it. There were not that many struldbrugs around. Minimum age for admission to that most exclusive of clubs had been frozen at one hundred and eighty-one. “Any specific suspects?”
“If there were, I couldn’t tell you. But, no. Mrs. Randall definitely died of natural causes, and she definitely wasn’t Vandervecken. If she had some connection with him, we haven’t been able to find it.”
“Have you checked with the Belt?”
Robinson looked at him narrowly. “No. Why?”
“Just a thought.” Distance in time equals distance in space?
“Well, we can ask. They might have had similar cases. Personally, I don’t know where to go from here. We don’t know why it was done, and we don’t know how.”
There wasn’t room in all of Earth’s national and international parks for the potential backpackers alive in the year 2341. The waiting list for the Amazon jungle was two years long. Other parks had similar lists.
Elroy Truesdale carried a backpack through London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Morocco, Cairo. He rode supersonic trains between the cities. He ate in restaurants, carrying credit cards rather than dehydrated foods. This was something he had planned for a long time, but he had not had the money.
He saw the py
ramids, the Eiffel Tower, and Tower of London, the Leaning Tower—which had been propped up. He saw the Valley of the Fallen. He walked Roman roads in a dozen nations.
Everywhere there were other backpackers. At night they camped in places set aside for them by the individual cities, usually old parking garages or abandoned freeways. They would pool their lightweight stoves to form a campfire and sit around it teaching each other songs. When he tired of them Truesdale would stay at a hotel.
He wore out disposable hiking socks at a furious rate, and bought new ones from dispensers in the campspots. His legs became hard as wood.
A month of this, and he was not finished. Something was driving him to see all of Earth. A cancellation got him into the Australian outback, probably the least popular of the national parks. He spent a week there. He needed the silence and the room.
Then on to Sydney, and a girl with a Belter haircut.
Her back was to him. He saw a pony’s tail of bobbing hair, black and wavy and almost long enough to reach her waist. Most of her scalp was bare and as darkly tanned as the rest of her, on either side of a two-inch-wide crest.
Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have jarred. There had been a fad for the Belter crest. But it had passed, and now she was like an echo from long ago…or far away? She was tall as a Belter, but with musculature far better developed. She was alone; she had not joined the campfire congregation at the other end of this, the eighth floor of a ten-story parking garage.
Inexpert singing echoed between the concrete roof and floor. I was born about ten thousand years from now…When we land upon the Moon I’ll show them how…
A real Belter? Backpacking?
Truesdale picked his way to her through a maze of mummy bags. He said, “Excuse me. Are you a Belter?”
She turned. “Yes. What of it?”
Her eyes were brown. Her face was lovely in a fashion that was all planes and angles, and it held no welcome. She would react badly to a pass. Maybe she didn’t like flatlanders; certainly she was too tired for games.
Truesdale said, “I want to tell a story to a Belter.”
She shrugged her eyebrows: an irritated gesture. “Why not go to the Belt?”
“I’d never get there tonight,” he said reasonably.
“All right, go ahead.”
Truesdale told her of the kidnapping on the Pinnacles. He was getting glib at it. He told it fast. Already he was sorry he had not simply gone to sleep.
She listened with uneasy patience, then said, “Why tell me?”
“Well, there were two other cases of this kind of kidnapping, both a long time ago. I wondered if anything like it has happened in the Belt.”
“I don’t know. There may be records in the goldskin files.”
“Thanks,” said Truesdale, and went away.
He lay in his sleeping bag, eyes closed, arms crossed on his breast. Tomorrow…Brasilia? They were still singing:
Why, I once signed on with Amra, and I damn near lost my skin,
For the blood it flowed like water when the fighting did begin.
I’m the only tar who’s e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew—
Truesdale’s eyes snapped open.
And that’s about the strangest thing a man will ever do.
He’d been looking in the wrong place.
Backpackers tended to wake with the dawn. Some preferred to find an all-night restaurant for breakfast; others made their own. Truesdale was cooking freeze-dried eggs when the girl walked up.
“Remember me? My name’s Alice Jordan.”
“Roy Truesdale. Have some eggs.”
“Thanks.” She passed him a packet, which he mixed with water and poured in with the rest. She was different this morning: rested, younger-looking, less formidable.
“I started remembering things last night. Cases like yours. They really do exist. I’m a goldskin myself, and I heard about them, but I never bothered to look up details.”
“You’re a goldskin?” A cop? Come to that, she was his size; she’d have the muscle to handle any Belter.
“I’ve also been a smuggler,” she said a bit defensively. “One day I decided the Belt needed the income more than the smugglers.”
“Maybe I’ll have to go to the Belt after all,” he said lightly. Thinking: Or talk Robinson into sending for the files. The eggs were ready. He served them into the cups all backpackers carried at their belts.
She said, “Tell me more about the Vandervecken case.”
“Not much more to tell. I wish I could forget about it.” It hadn’t been out of his mind in more than a month. He’d been robbed.
“Did you go to the police right away?”
“No.”
“That’s what I remembered. The Snatcher picks his victims from the main Belt, holds them for four months or so, then bribes them. Most of the time the bribe is big enough. I suppose it wasn’t in your case.”
“Almost.” He was not going to tell a stranger about Greatly ’Stelle. “But if most of them take the bribes, how do you find out about them?”
“Well, it’s not that easy to hide a disappearing ship. Mostly the ships disappear from the main Belt, then reappear four months on in their orbits. But if telescopes don’t find them during the four months, someone may ask questions.”
They poured the remnants of eggs out of their frictionless cups and filled them with coffee powder and boiling water.
“There are several cases of this kind, and they’re all unsolved,” she said. “Some Belters think it’s the Outsider, taking samples.”
“Outsider?”
“The first alien humanity will ever meet.”
“Like the Sea Statue? Or that alien that landed on Mars during—”
“No, no,” she said impatiently. “The Sea Statue was dug up on Earth’s own continental shelf. It was there for over a billion years. As for the Pak, it was a branch of humanity, as far as anyone can tell. No, we’re still waiting for the real Outsider.”
“And you think he’s taking samples to see if we’re ready for civilization. When we are, he’ll come.”
“I haven’t said I believed it myself.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was a charming story, and a little scary. It never occurred to me that he might be sampling flatlanders too.”
He laughed. “Thanks.”
“No offense.”
“I go to Brasilia from here,” he said. It was not quite an offer.
“I rest up. One day on, one day off. I’m strong for a Belter, but I can’t just keep going day after day.” She hesitated. “That’s why I don’t travel with anyone. I’ve had offers, but I’d hate to think I was slowing someone down.”
“I see.”
She got up. So did Truesdale. He had the impression that she towered over him, but that was illusion.
He said, “Where are you stationed? Ceres?”
“Vesta. ’Bye.”
“’Bye.”
He trekked Brasilia and Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He saw Chichen Itza and grooved on Peruvian cooking. He came to Washington, D.C., with the theft of four months of his life still itching in his brain.
The center of Washington was under a weather dome. They wouldn’t let him in with a backpack. Washington was a business city: it governed a respectable section of the planet Earth.
He went directly to the Smithsonian Institution.
The Sea Statue was a mirror-surfaced, not quite humanoid figure. It stood on its great splayed feet with both three-fingered hands upraised as against a threat. Despite the ages it had lain at the bottom of the sea, it showed no signs of corrosion. It looked like the product of some advanced civilization…and it was; it was a pressure suit with emergency stasis field facilities, and the thing inside was very dangerous. Once it had gotten loose.
The Pak was an ancient, tired mummy. Its face was hard and inhuman, expressionless. Its head was twisted at an odd angle, and its arms were lax at its sides, u
nraised against what had crushed its throat. Truesdale read its story in the guidebook, and felt pity. It had come so far to save us all…
So: there were things out there. The universe was deep enough to hold all manner of things. If something was sampling humanity, the only questions were: why would he bother? And why would he bother to put them back?
No, there was more. Itchy questions: why go to Earth for flatlanders? Couples of sufficient wealth spent their honeymoons on Titan, beneath the huge ringed wonder of Saturn. Surely it would be easy to hijack a honeymoon special. And why pick Belters from the main Belt? Enough of them still went out to mine the outer reaches.
He had a glimmering then, but it wouldn’t come clear. He filed it away…
There was a trek, along the Mississippi, and some climbing in the Rockies. He broke his leg there and had to be flown to a nearby arcology city built into a jagged canyon. A doctor set his leg and used regrowth treatments. Afterward he flew home. He’d had enough.
The San Diego Police had no new information on Lawrence St. John McGee. They were used to seeing Truesdale, and in fact were getting a little tired of him. It was becoming clear to Truesdale that they did not ever expect to find McGee and Truesdale’s money.
“He had more than enough to buy a face and fingertip transplant,” an officer had told him once. Now they just made soothing noises, and waited until he went away. It had been a year since he last dropped in.
Truesdale went to ARM Headquarters. He took a taxi rather than a slidewalk; his leg still hurt him.
“We’re working on it,” Robinson told him. “A case this strange doesn’t get forgotten. In fact—well, never mind.”
“What?”
The ARM grinned suddenly. “It’s got no real connection. I asked the basement computer for other unsolved crimes with a technologically advanced base, no time limit. I got some weirdies. You ever hear of the duplicate Stonehenge?”
“Sure. I was there, a month and a half ago.”
“Aren’t they amazing? Some clown put up that duplicate in a single night. Next morning there were two Stonehenges. You can’t tell the difference except by position: the duplicate is a few hundred yards further north. There are even the same initials carved in the duplicate.”