03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  An elevator opened. Someone stepped out.

  Something warned me, something about the way he moved. I turned, quick drawing from the shoulder. The taxi might have made good cover—if it hadn’t been already rising. Other figures had stepped from the shadows.

  I think I got a couple before something stung my cheek. Mercy bullets, slivers of crystalline anesthetics melting in my bloodstream. My head spun, and the roof spun, and the centrifugal force dropped me limply to the roof. Shadows loomed above me, then receded to infinity.

  Fingers on my scalp shocked me awake.

  I woke standing upright, bound like a mummy in soft, swaddling bandages. I couldn’t so much as twitch a muscle below my neck. By the time I knew that much, it was too late. The man behind me had finished removing electrodes from my head and stepped into view, out of reach of my imaginary arm.

  There was something of the bird about him. He was tall and slender, small-boned, and his triangular face reached a point at the chin. His wild, silken blond hair had withdrawn from his temples, leaving a sharp widow’s peak. He wore impeccably tailored wool street shorts in orange and brown stripes. Smiling brightly, with his arms folded and his head cocked to one side, he stood waiting for me to speak.

  And I recognized him. Owen had taken a holo of him somewhere.

  “Where am I?” I groaned, trying to sound groggy. “What time is it?”

  “Time? It’s already morning,” my captor said. “As for where you are, I’ll let you wonder.”

  Something about his manner … I took a guess and said, “Loren?”

  Loren bowed, not overdoing it. “And you are Gilbert Hamilton of the United Nations. Police. Gil the Arm.”

  Had he said Arm or ARM? I let it pass. “I seem to have slipped.”

  “You underestimated the reach of my own arm. You also underestimated my interest.”

  I had. It isn’t much harder to capture an ARM than any other citizen if you catch him off guard and if you’re willing to risk the men. In this case his risk had cost him nothing. Cops use hypo guns for the same reason organleggers do. The men I’d shot, if I’d hit anyone in those few seconds of battle, would have come around long ago. Loren must have set me up in these bandages, then left me under “Russian sleep” until he was ready to talk to me.

  The electrodes were the “Russian sleep.” One goes on each eyelid, one on the nape of the neck. A small current goes through the brain, putting you right to sleep. You get a full night’s sleep in an hour. If it’s not turned off, you can sleep forever.

  So this was Loren.

  He stood watching me with his head cocked to one side, birdlike, with his arms folded. One hand held a hypo gun, rather negligently, I thought.

  What time was it? I didn’t dare ask again, because Loren might guess something. But if I could stall him until 0945, Julie could send help …

  She could send help where?

  Finagle in hysterics! Where was I? If I didn’t know that, Julie wouldn’t know, either!

  And Loren intended me for the organ banks. One crystalline sliver would knock me out without harming any of the delicate, infinitely various parts that made me Gil Hamilton. Then Loren’s doctors would take me apart.

  In government operating rooms they flash-burn the criminal’s brain for later urn burial. God knows what Loren would do with my brain. But the rest of me was young and healthy. Even considering Loren’s overhead, I was worth more than a million UN marks on the hoof.

  “Why me?” I asked. “It was me you wanted, not just any ARM. Why the interest in me?”

  “It was you who were investigating the case of Owen Jennison. Much too thoroughly.”

  “Not thoroughly enough, dammit!”

  Loren looked puzzled. “You really don’t understand?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “I find that highly interesting,” Loren mused. “Highly.”

  “All right, why am I still alive?”

  “I was curious, Mr. Hamilton. I hoped you’d tell me about your imaginary arm.”

  So he’d said Arm, not ARM. I bluffed anyway. “My what?”

  “No need for games, Mr. Hamilton. If I think I’m losing, I’ll use this.” He wiggled the hypo gun. “You’ll never wake up.”

  Damn! He knew. The only things I could move were my ears and my imaginary arm, and Loren knew all about it! I’d never be able to lure him into reach.

  Provided that he knew all about it.

  I had to draw him out.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’d like to know how you found out about it. A plant in the ARMs?”

  Loren chuckled. “I wish it were so. No. We captured one of your men some months ago, quite by accident. When I realized what he was, I induced him to talk shop with me. He was able to tell me something about your remarkable arm. I hope you’ll tell me more.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Really, Mr. Hamil—”

  “Who was it?”

  “Do you really expect me to remember the name of every donor?”

  Who had gone into Loren’s organ banks? Stranger, acquaintance, friend? Does the manager of a slaughterhouse remember every slaughtered steer?

  “So-called psychic powers interest me,” Loren said. “I remembered you. And then, when I was on the verge of concluding an agreement with your Belter friend Jennison, I remembered something unusual about a crewman he had shipped with. They called you Gil the Arm, didn’t they? Prophetic. In port your drinks came free if you could use your imaginary arm to drink them.”

  “Then damn you. You thought Owen was a plant, did you? Because of me! Me!”

  “Breast-beating will earn you nothing, Mr. Hamilton.” Loren put steel in his voice. “Entertain me, Mr. Hamilton.”

  I’d been feeling around for anything that might release me from my upright prison. No such luck. I was wrapped like a mummy in bandages too strong to break. All I could feel with my imaginary hand were cloth bandages up to my neck and a bracing rod along my back to hold me upright. Beneath the swathing I was naked.

  “I’ll show you my eldritch powers,” I told Loren, “if you’ll loan me a cigarette.” Maybe that would draw him close enough …

  He knew something about my arm. He knew its reach. He put one single cigarette on the edge of a small table on wheels and slid it up to me. I picked it up and stuck it in my mouth and waited hopefully for him to come light it. “My mistake,” he murmured, and he pulled the table back and repeated the whole thing with a lighted cigarette.

  No luck. At least I’d gotten my smoke. I pitched the dead one as far as it would go: about two feet. I have to move slowly with my imaginary hand. Otherwise what I’m holding simply slips through my fingers.

  Loren watched in fascination. A floating, disembodied cigarette, obeying my will! His eyes held traces of awe and horror. That was bad. Maybe the cigarette had been a mistake.

  Some people see psi powers as akin to witchcraft and psychic people as servants of Satan. If Loren feared me, then I was dead.

  “Interesting,” Loren said. “How far will it reach?”

  He knew that. “As far as my real arm, of course.”

  “But why? Others can reach much farther. Why not you?”

  He was clear across the room, a good ten yards away, sprawled in an armchair. One hand held a drink; the other held the hypo gun. He was superbly relaxed. I wondered if I’d ever see him move from that comfortable chair, much less come within reach.

  The room was small and bare, with the look of a basement. Loren’s chair and a small portable bar were the only furnishings unless there were others behind me.

  A basement could be anywhere. Anywhere in Los Angeles or out of it. If it was really morning, I could be anywhere on Earth by now.

  “Sure,” I said, “others can reach farther than me. But they don’t have my strength. It’s an imaginary arm, sure enough, and my imagination won’t make it ten feet long. Maybe someone could convince me it was if he tried hard enough. But maybe he’d ruin what
belief I have. Then I’d have two arms, just like everyone else. I’m better off …” I let it trail away because Loren was going to take all my damn arms anyway.

  My cigarette was finished. I pitched it away.

  “Want a drink?”

  “Sure, if you’ve got a jigger glass. Otherwise I can’t lift it.”

  He found me a shot glass and sent it to me on the edge of the rolling table. I was barely strong enough to pick it up. Loren’s eyes never left me as I sipped and put it down.

  The old cigarette lure. Last night I’d used it to pick up a girl. Now it was keeping me alive.

  Did I really want to leave the world with something gripped tightly in my imaginary fist? Entertaining Loren. Holding his interest until—

  Where was I? Where?

  And suddenly I knew. “We’re at Monica Apartments,” I said. “Nowhere else.”

  “I knew you’d guess that eventually.” Loren smiled. “But it’s too late. I got to you in time.”

  “Don’t be so damn complacent. It was my stupidity, not your luck. I should have smelled it. Owen would never have come here of his own choice. You ordered him here.”

  “And so I did. By then I already knew he was a traitor.”

  “So you sent him here to die. Who was it that checked on him every day to see he’d stayed put? Was it Miller, the manager? He has to be working for you. He’s the one who took your holograms out of the computer.”

  “He was the one,” Loren said. “But it wasn’t every day. I had a man watching Jennison every second, through a portable camera. We took it out after he was dead.”

  “And then waited a week. Nice touch.” The wonder was that it had taken me so long. The atmosphere of the place … what kind of people would live in Monica Apartments? The faceless ones, the ones with no identity, the ones who would surely be missed by nobody. They would stay put in their apartments while Loren checked on them to see that they really did have nobody to miss them. Those who qualified would disappear, and their papers and possessions with them, and their holos would vanish from the computer.

  Loren said, “I tried to sell organs to the Belters through your friend Jennison. I know he betrayed me, Hamilton. I want to know how badly.”

  “Badly enough.” He’d guess that. “We’ve got detailed plans for setting up an organ-bank dispensary in the Belt. It wouldn’t have worked anyway, Loren. Belters don’t think that way.”

  “No pictures.”

  “No.” I didn’t want him changing his face.

  “I was sure he’d left something,” Loren said. “Otherwise we’d have made him a donor. Much simpler. More profitable, too. I needed the money, Hamilton. Do you know what it costs the organization to let a donor go?”

  “A million or so. Why’d you do it?”

  “He’d left something. There was no way to get at it. All we could do was try to keep the ARMs from looking for it.”

  “Ah.” I had it then. “When anyone disappears without a trace, the first thing any idiot thinks of is organleggers.”

  “Naturally. So he couldn’t just disappear, could he? The police would go to the ARMs, the file would go to you, and you’d start looking.”

  “For a spaceport locker.”

  “Oh?”

  “Under the name of Cubes Forsythe.”

  “I knew that name,” Loren said between his teeth. “I should have tried that. You know, after we had him hooked on current, we tried pulling the plug on him to get him to talk. It didn’t work. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but getting the droud back in his head. We looked high and low—”

  “I’m going to kill you,” I said, and meant every word.

  Loren cocked his head, frowning. “On the contrary, Mr. Hamilton. Another cigarette?”

  “Yah.”

  He sent it to me, lighted, on the rolling table. I picked it up, holding it a trifle ostentatiously. Maybe I could focus his attention on it—on his only way to find my imaginary hand.

  Because if he kept his eyes en the cigarette and I put it in my mouth at a crucial moment, I’d leave my hand free without his noticing.

  What crucial moment? He was still in the armchair. I had to fight the urge to coax him closer. Any move in that direction would make him suspicious.

  What time was it? And what was Julie doing? I thought of a night two weeks past. Remembered dinner on the balcony of the highest restaurant in Los Angeles, just a fraction less than a mile up. A carpet of neon that spread below us to touch the horizon in all directions. Maybe she’d pick it up …

  She’d be checking on me at 0945.

  “You must have made a remarkable spaceman,” Loren said. “Think of being the only man in the solar system who can adjust a hull antenna without leaving the cabin.”

  “Antennas take a little more muscle than I’ve got.” So he knew I could reach through things. If he’d seen that far— “I should have stayed,” I told Loren. “I wish I were on a mining ship right this minute. All I wanted at the time was two good arms.”

  “Pity. Now you have three. Did it occur to you that using psi powers against men was a form of cheating?”

  “What?”

  “Remember Raphael Haine?” Loren’s voice had become uneven. He was angry and was holding it down with difficulty.

  “Sure. Small-time organlegger in Australia.”

  “Raphael Haine was a friend of mine. I know he had you tied up at one point. Tell me, Mr. Hamilton: if your imaginary hand is as weak as you say, how did you untie the ropes?”

  “I didn’t. I couldn’t have. Haine used handcuffs. I picked his pocket for the key … with my imaginary hand, of course.”

  “You used psi powers against him. You had no right!”

  Magic. Anyone who’s not psychic himself feels the same way, just a little. A touch of dread, a touch of envy. Loren thought he could handle ARMs; he’d killed at least one of us. But to send warlocks against him was grossly unfair.

  That was why he’d let me wake up. Loren wanted to gloat. How many men have captured a warlock?

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I said. “I didn’t volunteer to play your silly game or Haine’s, either. My rules make you a wholesale murderer.”

  Loren got to his feet (what time was it?), and I suddenly realized my time was up. He was in a white rage. His silky blond hair seemed to stand on end.

  I looked into the tiny needle hole in the hypo gun. There was nothing I could do. The reach of my TK was the reach of my fingers. I felt all the things I would never feel: the quart of Trastine in my blood to keep the water from freezing in my cells, the cold bath of half-frozen alcohol, the scalpels and the tiny, accurate surgical lasers. Most of all, the scalpels.

  And my knowledge would die when they threw away my brain. I knew what Loren looked like. I knew about Monica Apartments and who knew how many others of the same kind? I knew where to go to find all the loveliness in Death Valley, and someday I was going to go. What time was it? What time?

  Loren had raised the hypo gun and was sighting down the stiff length of his arm. Obviously he thought he was at target practice. “It really is a pity,” he said, and there was only the slightest tremor in his voice. “You should have stayed a spaceman.”

  What was he waiting for? “I can’t cringe unless you loosen these bandages,” I snapped, and I jabbed what was left of my cigarette at him for emphasis. It jerked out of my grip, and I reached and caught it and—

  And stuck it in my left eye.

  At another time I’d have examined the idea a little more closely. But I’d still have done it. Loren already thought of me as his property. As live skin and healthy kidneys and lengths of artery, as parts in Loren’s organ banks, I was property worth a million UN marks. And I was destroying my eye! Organleggers are always hurting for eyes; anyone who wears glasses could use a new pair, and the organleggers themselves are constantly wanting to change retina prints.

  What I hadn’t anticipated was the pain. I’d read somewhere that there are no sensor
y nerves in the eyeball. Then it was my lids that hurt. Terribly!

  But I had to hold on only for a moment.

  Loren swore and came for me at a dead run. He knew how terribly weak my imaginary arm was. What could I do with it? He didn’t know; he’d never known, though it stared him in the face. He ran at me and slapped at the cigarette, a full swing that half knocked my head off my neck and sent the now-dead butt ricocheting off a wall. Panting, snarling, speechless with rage, he stood—within reach.

  My eye closed like a small tormented fist.

  I reached past Loren’s gun, through his chest wall, and found his heart. And squeezed.

  His eyes became very round, his mouth gaped wide, his larynx bobbed convulsively. There was time to fire the gun. Instead he clawed at his chest with a half-paralyzed arm. Twice he raked his fingernails across his chest, gaping upward for air that wouldn’t come. He thought he was having a heart attack. Then his rolling eyes found my face.

  My face. I was a one-eyed carnivore, snarling with the will to murder. I would have his life if I had to tear the heart out of his chest! How could he help but know?

  He knew!

  He fired at the floor and fell.

  I was sweating and shaking with reaction and disgust. The scars! He was all scars; I’d felt them going in. His heart was a transplant. And the rest of him—he’d looked about thirty from a distance, but this close it was impossible to tell. Parts were younger, parts older. How much of Loren was Loren? What parts had he taken from others? And none of the parts quite matched.

  He must have been chronically ill, I thought And the Board wouldn’t give him the transplants he needed. And one day he’d seen the answer to all his problems …

  Loren wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. I remembered the way his heart had jumped and wriggled in my imaginary hand and then suddenly given up.

  He was lying on his left arm, hiding his watch. I was all alone in an empty room, and I still didn’t know what time it was.

  I never found out. It was hours before Miller finally dared to interrupt his boss. He stuck his round, blank face around the doorjamb, saw Loren sprawled at my feet, and darted back with a squeak. A minute later a hypo gun came around the jamb, followed by a watery blue eye. I felt the sting in my cheek.