Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  INSIDE JOB

  I reached out to touch his face with my imaginary hand.

  He froze.

  “That’s what you were afraid of,” I told him. “You never dreamed I could reach through a phone screen to do this.” I reached into his head, felt smooth muscle and grainy bone and sinus cavities like bubbles. He tossed his head, but my hand went with it. I ran imaginary fingertips along the smooth inner surface of his skull.

  Then he screamed.

  By Larry Niven

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  The Known Space series:

  A GIFT FROM EARTH

  THE LONG ARM OF GIL HAMILTON

  NEUTRON STAR

  PROTECTOR

  RINGWORLD

  THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS

  THE RINGWORLD THRONE

  TALES OF KNOWN SPACE:

  THE UNIVERSE OF LARRY NIVEN

  WORLD OF PTAWS

  Other titles:

  ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

  CONVERGENT SERIES

  CRASHLANDER

  FLATLANDER

  THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE

  A HOLE IN SPACE

  THE INTEGRAL TREES

  LIMITS

  THE SMOKE RING

  A WORLD OUT OF TIME

  With Steven Barnes:

  THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME

  With David Gerrold:

  THE FLYING SORCERERS

  With Jerry Pournelle:

  FOOTFALL

  LUCIFER’S HAMMER

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  For Frederik Pohl

  and the memory of John W. Campbell.

  DEATH BY ECSTASY

  First came the routine request for a breach of privacy permit. A police officer took down the details and forwarded the request to a clerk, who saw that the tape reached the appropriate civic judge. The judge was reluctant, for privacy is a precious thing in a world of eighteen billion, but in the end he could find no reason to refuse. On November 2, 2123, he granted the permit.

  The tenant’s rent was two weeks in arrears. If the manager of Monica Apartments had asked for eviction, he would have been refused. But Owen Jennison did not answer his doorbell or his room phone. Nobody could recall seeing him in many weeks. Apparently the manager only wanted to know that he was all right.

  And so he was allowed to use his passkey, with an officer standing by.

  And so they found the tenant of 1809.

  And when they had looked in his wallet, they called me.

  I was at my desk at ARM Headquarters, making useless notes and wishing it were lunchtime.

  At this stage the Loren case was all correlate and wait. It involved an organlegging gang apparently run by a single man yet big enough to cover half the North American west coast. We had considerable data on the gang—methods of operation, centers of activity, a few former customers, even a tentative handful of names—but nothing that would give us an excuse to act. So it was a matter of shoving what we had into the computer, watching the few suspected associates of the gang lord Loren, and waiting for a break.

  The months of waiting were ruining my sense of involvement.

  My phone buzzed.

  I put the pen down and said, “Gil Hamilton.”

  A small dark face regarded me with soft black eyes. “I am Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz of the Los Angeles Police Department. Are you related to an Owen Jennison?”

  “Owen? No, we’re not related. Is he in trouble?”

  “You do know him, then.”

  “Sure I know him. Is he here, on Earth?”

  “It would seem so.” Ordaz had no accent, but the lack of colloquialisms in his speech made him sound vaguely foreign. “We will need positive identification, Mr. Hamilton. Mr. Jennison’s ident lists you as next of kin.”

  “That’s funny. I—back up a minute. Is Owen dead?”

  “Somebody is dead, Mr. Hamilton. He carried Mr. Jennison’s ident in his wallet.”

  “Okay. Now, Owen Jennison was a citizen of the Belt. This may have interworld complications. That makes it ARM’s business. Where’s the body?”

  “We found him in an apartment rented under his own name. Monica Apartments, Lower Los Angeles, room 1809.”

  “Good. Don’t move anything you haven’t moved already. I’ll be right over.”

  Monica Apartments was a nearly featureless concrete block, eighty stories tall, a thousand feet across the edges of its square base. Lines of small balconies gave the sides a sculptured look above a forty-foot inset ledge that would keep tenants from dropping objects on pedestrians. A hundred buildings just like it made Lower Los Angeles look lumpy from the air.

  Inside, a lobby done in anonymous modern. Lots of metal and plastic showing, lightweight comfortable chairs without arms, big ashtrays, plenty of indirect lighting, a low ceiling, no wasted space. The whole room might have been stamped out with a die. It wasn’t supposed to look small, but it did, and that warned you what the rooms would be like. You’d pay your rent by the cubic centimeter.

  I found the manager’s office and the manager, a soft-looking man with watery blue eyes. His conservative paper suit, dark red, seemed chosen to render him invisible, as did the style of his brown hair, worn long and combed straight back without a part. “Nothing like this has ever happened here,” he confided as he led me to the elevator banks. “Nothing. It would have been bad enough without his being a Belter, but now—” He cringed at the thought. “Newsmen. They’ll smother us.”

  The elevator was coffin-sized, but with the handrails on the inside. It went up fast and smooth. I stepped out into a long, narrow hallway.

  What would Owen have been doing in a place like this? Machinery lived here, not people.

  Maybe it wasn’t Owen. Ordaz had been reluctant to commit himself. Besides, there’s no law against picking pockets. You couldn’t enforce such a law on this crowded planet. Everyone on Earth was a pickpocket.

  Sure. Someone had died carrying Owen’s wallet.

  I walked down the hallway to 1809.

  It was Owen who sat grinning in the armchair. I took one good look at him, enough to be sure, and then I looked away and didn’t look back. But the rest of it was even more unbelievable.

  No Belter could have taken that apartment. I was born in Kansas, but even I felt the awful anonymous chill. It would have driven Owen bats.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Did you know him well, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “About as well as two men can know each other. He and I spent three years mining rocks in the main asteroid belt. You don’t keep secrets under those conditions.”

  “Yet you didn’t know he was on Earth.”

  “That’s what I can’t understand. Why the blazes didn’t he phone me if he was in trouble?”

  “You’re an ARM,” said Ordaz. “An operative in the United Nations Police.”

  He had a point. Owen was as honorable as any man I knew, but honor isn’t the same in the Belt. Belters think flatlanders are all crooks. They don’t understand that to a flatlander, picking pockets is a game of skill. Yet a Belter sees smuggling as the same kind of game, with no dishonesty involved. He balances the thirty percent tariff against possible confiscation of his cargo, and if the odds are right, he gambles.

  Owen could have been doing something that would look honest to him but not to me.

  “He could have been in something sticky,” I admitted. “But I can’t see him killing himself over it. And … not here. He wouldn’t have come here.”

  Room 1809 was a living room and a bathroom and a closet. I’d glanced into the bathroom,
knowing what I would find. It was the size of a comfortable shower stall. An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic, to become a washroom, a shower stall, a toilet, a dressing room, a steam cabinet. Luxurious in everything but size as long as you pushed the right buttons.

  The living room was more of the same. A king bed was invisible behind a wall. The kitchen alcove, with basin and oven and grill and toaster, would fold into another wall; the sofa, chairs, and tables would vanish into the floor. One tenant and three guests would make a crowded cocktail party, a cozy dinner gathering, a closed poker game. Card table, dinner table, coffee table were all there, surrounded by the appropriate chairs, but only one set at a time would emerge from the floor. There was no refrigerator, no freezer, no bar. If a tenant needed food or drink, he phoned down and the supermarket on the third floor would send it up.

  The tenant of such an apartment had his comfort. But he owned nothing. There was room for him; there was none for his possessions. This was one of the inner apartments. An age ago there would have been an air shaft, but air shafts took up expensive room. The tenant didn’t even have a window. He lived in a comfortable box.

  Just now the items extruded were the overstuffed reading armchair, two small side tables, a footstool, and the kitchen alcove. Owen Jennison sat grinning in the armchair. Naturally he grinned. Little more than dried skin covered the natural grin of his skull.

  “It’s a small room,” Ordaz said, “but not too small. Millions of people live this way. In any case, a Belter would hardly be a claustrophobe.”

  “No. Owen flew a singleship before he joined us. Three months at a stretch in a cabin so small, you couldn’t stand up with the air lock closed. Not claustrophobia, but—” I swept my arm about the room. “What do you see that’s his?”

  Small as it was, the closet was nearly empty. A set of street clothes, a paper shirt, a pair of shoes, a small brown overnight case. All new. The few items in the bathroom medicine chest had been equally new and equally anonymous.

  Ordaz said, “Well?”

  “Belters are transients. They don’t own much, but what they do own, they guard. Small possessions, relics, souvenirs. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have had something.”

  “His space suit?”

  “You think that’s unlikely? It’s not. The inside of his pressure suit is a Belter’s home. Sometimes it’s the only home he’s got. He spends a fortune decorating it. If he loses his suit, he’s not a Belter anymore.

  “No, I don’t insist he’d have brought his suit. But he’d have had something. His phial of Marsdust. The bit of nickel-iron they took out of his chest. Or, if he left all his souvenirs home, he’d have picked up things on Earth. But in this room—there’s nothing.”

  “Perhaps,” Ordaz suggested delicately, “he didn’t notice his surroundings.”

  And somehow that brought it all home.

  Owen Jennison sat grinning in a water-stained silk dressing gown. His space-darkened face lightened abruptly beneath his chin, giving way to normal suntan. His blond hair, too long, had been cut Earth style; no trace remained of the Belter strip cut he’d worn all his life. A month’s growth of untended beard covered half his face. A small black cylinder protruded from the top of his head. An electric cord trailed from the top of the cylinder and ran to a wall socket.

  The cylinder was a droud, a current addict’s transformer.

  I stepped closer to the corpse and bent to look. The droud was a standard make, but it had been altered. Your standard current addict’s droud will pass only a trickle of current into the brain. Owen must have been getting ten times the usual charge, easily enough to damage his brain in a month’s time.

  I reached out and touched the droud with my imaginary hand.

  Ordaz was standing quietly beside me, letting me make my examination without interruption. Naturally he had no way of knowing about my restricted psi powers.

  With my imaginary fingertips I touched the droud in Owen’s head, then ran them down to a tiny hole in his scalp and farther.

  It was a standard surgical job. Owen could have had it done anywhere. A hole in his scalp, invisible under the hair, nearly impossible to find even if you knew what you were looking for. Even your best friends wouldn’t know unless they caught you with the droud plugged in. But the tiny hole marked a bigger plug set in the bone of the skull. I touched the ecstasy plug with my imaginary fingertips, then ran them down the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen’s brain, down into the pleasure center.

  No, the extra current hadn’t killed him. What had killed Owen was his lack of willpower. He had been unwilling to get up.

  He had starved to death sitting in that chair. There were plastic squeezebottles all around his feet and a couple still on the end tables. All empty. They must have been full a month ago. Owen hadn’t died of thirst. He had died of starvation, and his death had been planned.

  Owen my crewmate. Why hadn’t he come to me? I’m half a Belter myself. Whatever his trouble, I’d have gotten him out somehow. A little smuggling—what of it? Why had he arranged to tell me only after it was over?

  The apartment was so clean, so clean. You had to bend close to smell the death; the air-conditioning whisked it all away.

  He’d been very methodical. The kitchen was open so that a catheter could lead from Owen to the sink. He’d given himself enough water to last out the month; he’d paid his rent a month in advance. He’d cut the droud cord by hand, and he’d cut it short, deliberately tethering himself to a wall socket beyond reach of the kitchen.

  A complex way to die, but rewarding in its way. A month of ecstasy, a month of the highest physical pleasure man can attain. I could imagine him giggling every time he remembered he was starving to death. With food only a few footsteps away … but he’d have to pull out the droud to reach it. Perhaps he had postponed the decision and postponed it again …

  Owen and I and Homer Chandrasekhar, we had lived for three years in a cramped shell surrounded by vacuum. What was there to know about Owen Jennison that I hadn’t known? Where was the weakness we didn’t share? If Owen had done this, so could I. And I was afraid.

  “Very neat,” I whispered. “Belter neat.”

  “Typically Belter, would you say?”

  “I would not. Belters don’t commit suicide. Certainly not this way. If a Belter had to go, he’d blow his ship’s drive and die like a star.”

  “Well,” Ordaz said. “Well.” He was uncomfortable. The facts spoke for themselves, yet he was reluctant to call me a liar. He fell back on formality.

  “Mr. Hamilton, do you identify this man as Owen Jennison?”

  “It’s him.” He’d always been a touch overweight, yet I’d recognized him the moment I saw him. “But let’s be sure.” I pulled the dirty dressing gown back from Owen’s shoulder. A nearly-perfect circle of scar tissue, eight inches across, spread over the left side of his chest. “See that?”

  “We noticed it, yes. An old burn?”

  “Owen’s the only man I know who could show you a meteor scar on his skin. It blasted him in the shoulder one day while he was outside the ship. Sprayed vaporized pressure-suit steel all over his skin. The doc pulled a tiny grain of nickel-iron from the center of the scar, just below the skin. Owen always carried that grain of nickel-iron. Always,” I said, looking at Ordaz.

  “We didn’t find it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry to put you through this, Mr. Hamilton. It was you who insisted we leave the body in situ.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Owen grinned at me from the reading chair. I felt the pain in my throat and in the pit of my stomach. Once I had lost my right arm. Losing Owen felt the same way.

  “I’d like to know more about this,” I said. “Will you let me know the details as soon as you get them?”

  “Of course. Through the ARM office?”

  “Yes.” This wasn’t ARM business, despite what I’d told Or
daz, but ARM prestige would help. “I want to know why Owen died. Maybe he just cracked up … culture shock or something. But if someone hounded him to death, I’ll have his blood.”

  “Surely the administration of justice is better left to—” Ordaz stopped, confused. Did I speak as an ARM or as a citizen?

  I left him wondering.

  The lobby held a scattering of tenants entering and leaving elevators or just sitting around. I stood outside the elevator for a moment, searching passing faces for the erosion of personality that must be there.

  Mass-produced comfort. Room to sleep and eat and watch tridee but no room to be anyone. Living here, one would own nothing. What kind of people would live like that? They should have looked all alike, moved in unison, like the string of images in a barber’s mirrors.

  Then I spotted wavy brown hair and a dark red paper suit. The manager? I had to get close before I was sure. His face was the face of a permanent stranger.

  He saw me coming and smiled without enthusiasm. “Oh, hello, Mr…. uh … Did you find …” He couldn’t think of the right question.

  “Yes,” I said, answering it anyway. “But I’d like to know some things. Owen Jennison lived here for six weeks, right?”

  “Six weeks and two days, before we opened his room.”

  “Did he ever have visitors?”

  The man’s eyebrows went up. We’d drifted in the direction of his office, and I was close enough to read the name on the door: JASPER MILLER, MANAGER. “Of course not,” he said. “Anyone would have noticed that something was wrong.”

  “You mean he took the room for the express purpose of dying? You saw him once and never again?”

  “I suppose he might … no, wait.” The manager thought deeply. “No. He registered on a Thursday. I noticed the Belter tan, of course. Then on Friday he went out. I happened to see him pass.”

  “Was that the day he got the droud? No, skip it; you wouldn’t know that. Was it the last time you saw him go out?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Then he could have had visitors late Thursday or early Friday.”

  The manager shook his head very positively.