Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  Even now there weren’t enough transplants. A woman with kidney trouble might wait a year for a transplant: one healthy kidney to last the rest of her life. A thirty-five-year-old heart patient must live with a sound but forty-year-old heart. One lung, part of a liver, prosthetics that wore out too fast or weighed too much or did too little … there weren’t enough criminals. Not surprisingly, the death penalty was a deterrent. People stopped committing crimes rather than face the donor room of a hospital.

  For instant replacement of your ruined digestive system, for a young healthy heart, for a whole liver when you’d ruined yours with alcohol … you had to go to an organlegger.

  There are three aspects to the business of organlegging. One is the business of kidnap-murder. It’s risky. You can’t fill an organ bank by waiting for volunteers. Executing condemned criminals is a government monopoly. So you go out and get your donors: on a crowded city slidewalk, in an air terminal, stranded on a freeway by a car with a busted capacitor … anywhere.

  The selling end of the business is just as dangerous, because even a desperately sick man sometimes has a conscience. He’ll buy his transplant, then go straight to the ARMs, curing his sickness and his conscience by turning in the whole gang. Thus the sales end is somewhat anonymous, but as there are few repeat sales, that hardly matters.

  Third is the technical, medical aspect. Probably this is the safest part of the business. Your hospital is big, but you can put it anywhere. You wait for the donors, who arrive still alive; you ship out livers and glands and square feet of live skin, correctly labeled for rejection reactions.

  It’s not as easy as it sounds. You need doctors. Good ones.

  That was where Loren came in. He had a monopoly.

  Where did he get them? We were still trying to find out. Somehow, one man had discovered a foolproof way to recruit talented but dishonest doctors practically en masse. Was it really one man? All our sources said it was. And he had half the North American west coast in the palm of his hand.

  Loren. No holographs, no fingerprints or retina prints, not even a description. All we had was that one name and a few possible contacts.

  One of those was Kenneth Graham.

  The hologram was a good one. Probably it had been posed in a portrait shop. Kenneth Graham had a long Scottish face with a lantern jaw and a small, dour mouth. In the holo he was trying to smile and look dignified simultaneously. He only looked uncomfortable. His hair was sandy and close cut. Above his light gray eyes his eyebrows were so light as to be nearly invisible.

  My breakfast arrived. I dunked a doughnut and bit it and found out I was hungrier than I’d thought.

  A string of holos had been reproduced on the computer tape. I ran through the others fairly quickly, eating with one hand and flipping the key with the other. Some were fuzzy; they had been taken by spy beams through the windows of Graham’s shop. None of the prints were in any way incriminating. Not one showed Graham smiling.

  He had been selling electrical joy for twelve years now.

  A current addict has an advantage over his supplier. Electricity is cheap. With a drug, your supplier can always raise the price on you, but not with electricity. You see the ecstasy merchant once, when he sells you your operation and your droud, and never again. Nobody gets hooked by accident. There’s an honesty to current addiction. The customer always knows just what he’s getting into and what it will do for him—and to him.

  Still, you’d need a certain lack of empathy to make a living the way Kenneth Graham did. Else he’d have had to turn away his customers. Nobody becomes a current addict gradually. He decides all at once, and he buys the operation before he has ever tasted its joy. Each of Kenneth Graham’s customers had reached his shop after deciding to drop out of the human race.

  What a stream of the hopeless and the desperate must have passed through Graham’s shop! How could they help but haunt his dreams? And if Kenneth Graham slept well at night, then—

  Then small wonder if he had turned organlegger.

  He was in a good position for it. Despair is characteristic of the would-be current addict. The unknown, the unloved, the people nobody knew and nobody needed and nobody missed, these passed in a steady stream through Kenneth Graham’s shop.

  So a few didn’t come out. Who’d notice?

  I flipped quickly through the tape to find out who was in charge of watching Graham. Jackson Bera. I called down through the desk phone.

  “Sure,” Bera said, “we’ve had a spy beam on him about three weeks now. It’s a waste of good salaried ARM agents. Maybe he’s clean. Maybe he’s been tipped somehow.”

  “Then why not stop watching him?”

  Bera looked disgusted. “Because we’ve only been watching for three weeks. How many donors do you think he needs a year? Read the reports. Gross profit on a single donor is over a million UN marks. Graham can afford to be careful who he picks.”

  “Yah.”

  “At that, he wasn’t careful enough. At least two of his customers disappeared last year. Customers with families. That’s what put us on to him.”

  “So you could watch him for the next six months without a guarantee. He could be just waiting for the right guy to walk in.”

  “Sure. He has to write up a report on every customer. That gives him the right to ask personal questions. If the guy has relatives, Graham lets him walk out. Most people do have relatives, you know. Then again,” Bera said disconsolately, “he could be clean. Sometimes a current addict disappears without help.”

  “How come I didn’t see any holos of Graham at home? You can’t be watching just his shop.”

  Jackson Bera scratched at his hair. Hair like black steel wool, worn long like a bushman’s mop. “Sure we’re watching his place, but we can’t get a spy beam in there. It’s an inside apartment. No windows. You know anything about spy beams?”

  “Not much. I know they’ve been around awhile.”

  “They’re as old as lasers. Oldest trick in the book is to put a mirror in the room you want to bug. Then you run a laser beam through a window, or even through heavy drapes, and bounce it off the mirror. When you pick it up, it’s been distorted by the vibrations in the glass. That gives you a perfect recording of anything that’s been said in that room. But for pictures you need something a little more sophisticated.”

  “How sophisticated can we get?”

  “We can put a spy beam in any room with a window. We can send one through some kinds of wall. Give us an optically flat surface, and we can send one around corners.”

  “But you need an outside wall.”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s Graham doing now?”

  “Just a sec.” Bera disappeared from view. “Someone just came in. Graham’s talking to him. Want the picture?”

  “Sure. Leave it on. I’ll turn it off from here when I’m through with it.”

  The picture of Bera went dark. A moment later I was looking into a doctor’s office. If I’d seen it cold, I’d have thought it was run by a podiatrist. There was the comfortable tilt-back chair with the headrest and the footrest; the cabinet next to it with instruments lying on top, on a clean white cloth; the desk over in one corner. Kenneth Graham was talking to a homely, washed-out-looking girl.

  I listened to Graham’s would-be-fatherly reassurances and his glowing description of the magic of current addiction. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I turned the sound down. The girl took her place in the chair, and Graham placed something over her head.

  The girl’s homely face turned suddenly beautiful.

  Happiness is beautiful all by itself. A happy person is beautiful per se. Suddenly and totally, the girl was full of joy, and I realized that I hadn’t known everything about droud sales. Apparently Graham had an inductor to put the current where he wanted it, without wires. He could show a customer what current addiction felt like without first implanting the wires.

  What a powerful argument that was!

  Graham tu
rned off the machine. It was as if he’d turned off the girl. She sat stunned for a moment, then reached frantically for her purse and started scrabbling inside.

  I couldn’t take any more. I turned it off.

  Small wonder if Graham had turned organlegger. He had to be totally without empathy just to sell his merchandise.

  Even there, I thought, he’d had a head start.

  So he was a little more callous than the rest of the world’s billions. But not much. Every voter had a bit of the organlegger in him. In voting the death penalty for so many crimes, the lawmakers had only bent to pressure from the voters. There was a spreading lack of respect for life, the evil side of transplant technology. The good side was a longer life for everyone. One condemned criminal could save a dozen deserving lives. Who could complain about that?

  We hadn’t thought that way in the Belt. In the Belt survival was a virtue in itself, and life was a precious thing, spread so thin among the sterile rocks, hurtling in single units through all that killing emptiness between the worlds.

  So I’d had to come to Earth for my transplant.

  My request had been accepted two months after I had landed. So quickly? Later I’d learned that the banks always have a surplus of certain items. Few people lose their arms these days. I had also learned, a year after the transplant had taken, that I was using an arm taken from a captured organlegger’s storage bank.

  That had been a shock. I’d hoped my arm had come from a depraved murderer, someone who’d shot fourteen nurses from a rooftop. Not at all. Some faceless, nameless victim had had the bad luck to encounter a ghoul, and I had benefited thereby.

  Did I turn in my new arm in a fit of revulsion? No, surprising to say, I did not. But I had joined the ARMs, once the Amalgamation of Regional Militia, now the United Nations Police. Though I had stolen a dead man’s arm, I would hunt the kin of those who had killed him.

  The noble urgency of that resolve had been drowned in paperwork these last few years. Perhaps I was becoming callous, like the flatlanders—the other flatlanders around me, voting new death penalties year after year. Income-tax evasion. Operating a flying vehicle on manual controls over a city.

  Was Kenneth Graham so much worse than they?

  Sure he was. The bastard had put a wire in Owen Jennison’s head.

  I waited twenty minutes for Julie to come out. I could have sent her a memorandum, but there was plenty of time before noon and too little time to get anything accomplished, and … I wanted to talk to her.

  “Hi,” she said. “Thanks,” taking the coffee. “How went the ceremonial drunk? Oh, Isee. Mmmmm. Very good. Almost poetic.” Conversation with Julie has a way of taking shortcuts.

  Poetic, right. I remembered how inspiration had struck like lightning through a mild high glow. Owen’s floating cigarette lure. What better way to honor his memory than to use it to pick up a girl?

  “Right,” Julie agreed. “But there’s something you may have missed. What’s Taffy’s last name?”

  “I can’t remember. She wrote it down on—”

  “What does she do for a living?”

  “How should I know?”

  “What religion is she? Is she a pro or an anti? Where did she grow up?”

  “Dammit—”

  “Half an hour ago you were very complacently musing on how depersonalized all us flatlanders are except you. What’s Taffy, a person or a foldout?” Julie stood with her hands on her hips, looking up at me like a schoolteacher.

  How many people is Julie? Some of us have never seen this guardian aspect. She’s frightening, the guardian. If it ever appeared on a date, the man she was with would be struck impotent forever.

  It never does. When a reprimand is deserved, Julie delivers it in broad daylight. This serves to separate her functions, but it doesn’t make it easier to take.

  No use pretending it wasn’t her business, either.

  I’d come here to ask for Julie’s protection. Let me turn unlovable to Julie, even a little bit unlovable, and as far as Julie was concerned, I would have an unreadable mind. How, then, would she know when I was in trouble? How could she send help to rescue me from whatever? My private life was her business, her single, vastly important job.

  “I like Taffy,” I protested. “I didn’t care who she was when we met. Now I like her, and I think she likes me. What do you want from a first date?”

  “You know better. You can remember other dates when two of you talked all night on a couch just from the joy of learning about each other.” She mentioned three names, and I flushed. Julie knows the words that will turn you inside out in an instant. “Taffy is a person, not an episode, not a symbol of anything, not just a pleasant night. What’s your judgment of her?”

  I thought about it, standing there in the corridor. Funny: I’ve faced the guardian Julie on other occasions, and it has never occurred to me to just walk out of the unpleasant situation. Later I think of that. At the time I just stand there, facing the guardian/judge/teacher. I thought about Taffy …

  “She’s nice,” I said. “Not depersonalized. Squeamish, even. She wouldn’t make a good nurse. She’d want to help too much, and it would tear her apart when she couldn’t. I’d say she was one of the vulnerable ones.”

  “Go on.”

  “I want to see her again, but I won’t dare talk shop with her. In fact … I’d better not see her till this business of Owen is over. Loren might take an interest in her. Or … she might take an interest in me, and I might get hurt … have I missed anything?”

  “I think so. You owe her a phone call. If you won’t be dating her for a few days, call her and tell her so.”

  “Check.” I spun on my heel, spun back. “Finagle’s jest! I almost forgot. The reason I came here—”

  “I know; you want a time slot. Suppose I check on you at oh nine forty-five every morning?”

  “That’s a little early. When I get in deadly danger, it’s usually at night.”

  “I’m off at night. Oh nine forty-five is all I’ve got. I’m sorry, Gil, but it is. Shall I monitor you or not?”

  “Sold. Nine forty-five.”

  “Good. Let me know if you get real proof Owen was murdered. I’ll give you two slots. You’ll be in a little more concrete danger then.”

  “Good.”

  Taffy wasn’t home, of course, and I didn’t know where she worked or even what she did. Her phone offered to take a message. I gave my name and said I’d call back.

  And then I sat there sweating for five minutes.

  It was half an hour to noon. Here I was at my desk phone. I couldn’t decently see any way to argue myself out of sending a message to Homer Chandrasekhar.

  I didn’t want to talk to him, then or ever. He’d chewed me out but good last time I’d seen him. My free arm had cost me my Belter life, and it had cost me Homer’s respect. I didn’t want to talk to him even on a one-way message, and I most particularly didn’t want to have to tell him Owen was dead.

  But someone had to tell him.

  And maybe he could find out something.

  And I’d put it off nearly a full day.

  For five minutes I sweated, and then I called long distance and recorded a message and sent it off to Ceres. More accurately, I recorded six messages before I was satisfied. I don’t want to talk about it.

  I tried Taffy again; she might come home for lunch. Wrong.

  I hung up wondering if Julie had been fair. What had we bargained for, Taffy and I, beyond a pleasant night? And we’d had that and would have others, with luck.

  But Julie would find it hard not to be fair. If she thought Taffy was the vulnerable type, she’d taken her information from my own mind.

  Mixed feelings. You’re a kid, and your mother has just laid down the law. But it is a law, something you can count on … and she is paying attention to you … and she does care … when, for so many of those outside, nobody cares at all.

  “Naturally I thought of murder,” Ordaz said. “I alway
s consider murder. When my sainted mother passed away after three years of the most tender care by my sister Maria Angela, I actually considered searching for evidence of needle holes about the head.”

  “Find any?”

  Ordaz’s face froze. He put down his beer and started to get up.

  “Cool it,” I said hurriedly. “No offense intended.” He glared a moment, then sat down half-mollified.

  We’d picked an outdoor restaurant on the pedestrian level. On the other side of a hedge (a real live hedge, green and growing and everything) the shoppers were carried past in a steady one-way stream. Beyond them a slidewalk carried a similar stream in the opposite direction. I had the dizzy feeling that it was we who were moving.

  A waiter like a bell-bottomed chess pawn produced steaming dishes of chili from its torso, put them precisely in front of us, and slid away on a cushion of air.

  “Naturally I considered murder. Believe me. Mr. Hamilton, it does not hold up.”

  “I think I could make a pretty good case.”

  “You may try, of course. Better, I will start you on your way. First, we must assume that Kenneth Graham the happiness peddler did not sell a droud and plug to Owen Jennison. Rather, Owen Jennison was forced to undergo the operation. Graham’s records, including the written permission to operate, were forged. All this we must assume; is it not so?”

  “Right. And before you tell me Graham’s escutcheon is unblemished, let me tell you that it isn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s connected with an organlegging gang. That’s classified information. We’re watching him, and we don’t want him ripped.”

  “That is news.” Ordaz rubbed his jaw. “Organlegging. Well. What would Owen Jennison have to do with organlegging?”

  “Owen’s a Belter. The Belt’s always drastically short of transplant materials.”

  “Yes, they import quantities of medical supplies from Earth. Not only organs in storage but also drugs and prosthetics. So?”