Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “Owen ran a good many cargoes past the goldskins in his day. He got caught a few times, but he’s still way ahead of the government. He’s on the records as a successful smuggler. If a big organlegger wanted to expand his market, he might very well send a feeler out to a Belter with a successful smuggling record.”

  “You never mentioned that Mr. Jennison was a smuggler.”

  “What for? All Belters are smugglers if they think they can get away with it. To a Belter, smuggling isn’t immoral. But an organlegger wouldn’t know that. He’d think Owen was already a criminal.”

  “Do you think your friend—” Ordaz hesitated delicately.

  “No, Owen wouldn’t turn organlegger. But he might, he just might try to turn one in. The rewards for information leading to the capture and conviction of, et cetera, are substantial. If someone contacted Owen, Owen might very well have tried to trace the contact by himself.

  “Now, the gang we’re after covers half the west coast of this continent. That’s big. It’s the Loren gang, the one Graham may be working for. Suppose Owen had a chance to meet Loren himself?”

  “You think he might take it, do you?”

  “I think he did. I think he let his hair grow out so he’d look like an Earthman to convince Loren he wanted to look inconspicuous. I think he collected as much information as he could, then tried to get out with a whole skin. But he didn’t make it.

  “Did you find his application for a nudist license?”

  “No. I saw your point there,” said Ordaz. He leaned back, ignoring the food in front of him. “Mr. Jennison’s tan was uniform except for the characteristic darkening of the face. I presume he was a practicing nudist in the Belt.”

  “Yah. We don’t need licenses there. He’d have been one here, too, unless he was hiding something. Remember that scar. He never missed a chance to show it off.”

  “Could he really have thought to pass for a—” Ordaz hesitated. “—flatlander?”

  “With that Belter tan? No! He was overdoing it a little with the haircut. Maybe he thought Loren would underestimate him. But he wasn’t advertising his presence, or he wouldn’t have left his most personal possessions home.”

  “So he was dealing with organleggers, and they found him out before he could reach you. Yes, Mr. Hamilton, this is well thought out. But it won’t work.”

  “Why not? I’m not trying to prove it’s murder. Not yet. I’m just trying to show you that murder is at least as likely as suicide.”

  “But it’s not, Mr. Hamilton.”

  I looked the question.

  “Consider the details of the hypothetical murder. Owen Jennison is drugged, no doubt, and taken to the office of Kenneth Graham. There, an ecstasy plug is attached. A standard droud is fitted and is then amateurishly altered with soldering tools. Already we see, on the part of the killer, a minute attention to details. We see it again in Kenneth Graham’s forged papers of permission to operate. They were impeccable.

  “Owen Jennison is then taken back to his apartment. It would be his own, would it not? There would be little point in moving him to another. The cord from his droud is shortened, again in amateurish fashion. Mr. Jennison is tied up—”

  “I wondered if you’d see that.”

  “But why should he not be tied up? He is tied up and allowed to waken. Perhaps the arrangement is explained to him, perhaps not. That would be up to the killer. The killer then plugs Mr. Jennison into a wall. A current trickles through his brain, and Owen Jennison knows pure pleasure for the first time in his life.

  “He is left tied up for, let us say, three hours. In the first few minutes he would be a hopeless addict, I think—”

  “You must have known more current addicts than I have.”

  “Even I would not want to be pinned down. Your normal current addict is an addict after a few minutes. But then, your normal current addict asked to be made an addict, knowing what it would do to his life. Current addiction is symptomatic of despair. Your friend might have been able to fight free of a few minutes’ exposure.”

  “So they kept him tied up for three hours. Then they cut the ropes.” I felt sickened. Ordaz’s ugly, ugly pictures matched mine in every detail.

  “No more than three hours, by our hypothesis. They would not dare stay longer than a few hours. They would cut the ropes and leave Owen Jennison to starve to death. In the space of a month the evidence of his drugging would vanish, as would any abrasions left by ropes, lumps on his head, mercy needle punctures, and the like. A carefully detailed, well-thought-out plan, don’t you agree?”

  I told myself that Ordaz was not being ghoulish. He was just doing his job. Still, it was difficult to answer objectively.

  “It fits our picture of Loren. He’s been very careful with us. He’d love carefully detailed, well-thought-out plans.”

  Ordaz leaned forward. “But don’t you see? A carefully detailed plan is all wrong. There is a crucial flaw in it. Suppose Mr. Jennison pulls out the droud?”

  “Could he do that? Would he?”

  “Could he? Certainly. A simple tug of the fingers. The current wouldn’t interfere with motor coordination. Would he?” Ordaz pulled meditatively at his beer. “I know a good deal about current addiction, but I don’t know what it feels like, Mr. Hamilton. Your normal addict pulls his droud out as often as he inserts it, but your friend was getting ten times normal current. He might have pulled the droud out a dozen times, and instantly plugged it back each time. Yet Belters are supposed to be strong-willed men, very individualistic. Who knows whether, even after a week of addiction, your friend might not have pulled the droud loose, coiled the cord, slipped it in his pocket, and walked away scot-free?

  “There is the additional risk that someone might walk in on him—an automachinery serviceman, for instance. Or someone might notice that he had not bought any food in a month. A suicide would take that risk. Suicides routinely leave themselves a chance to change their minds. But a murderer?

  “No. Even if the chance were one in a thousand, the man who created such a detailed plan would never have taken such a chance.”

  The sun burned hotly down on our shoulders. Ordaz suddenly remembered his lunch and began to eat.

  I watched the world ride by beyond the hedge. Pedestrians stood in little conversational bunches; others peered into shop windows on the pedestrian strip or glanced over the hedge to watch us eat. There were the few who pushed through the crowd with set expressions, impatient with the ten-mile-per-hour speed of the slidewalk.

  “Maybe they were watching him. Maybe the room was bugged.”

  “We searched the room thoroughly,” Ordaz said. “If there had been observational equipment, we would have found it.”

  “It could have been removed.”

  Ordaz shrugged.

  I remembered the spy-eyes in Monica Apartments. Someone would have had to physically enter the room to carry a bug out. He could ruin it with the right signal, maybe, but it would surely leave traces.

  And Owen had had an inside room. No spy-eyes.

  “There’s one thing you’ve left out,” I said presently.

  “And what would that be?”

  “My name in Owen’s wallet, listed as next of kin. He was directing my attention to the thing I was working on. The Loren gang.”

  “That is possible.”

  “You can’t have it both ways.”

  Ordaz lowered his fork. “I can have it both ways, Mr. Hamilton. But you won’t like it.”

  “I’m sure I won’t.”

  “Let us incorporate your assumption. Mr. Jennison was contacted by an agent of Loren, the organlegger, who intended to sell transplant material to Belters. He accepted. The promise of riches was too much for him.

  “A month later something made him realize what a terrible thing he had done. He decided to die. He went to an ecstasy peddler and had a wire put in his head. Later, before he plugged in the droud, he made one attempt to atone for his crime. He listed you as his next of
kin so that you might guess why he had died and perhaps so that you could use that knowledge against Loren.”

  Ordaz looked at me across the table. “I see that you will never agree. I cannot help that. I can only read the evidence.”

  “Me, too. But I knew Owen. He’d never have worked for an organlegger, he’d never have killed himself, and if he had, he’d never have done it that way.”

  Ordaz didn’t answer.

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “In the apartment? None.”

  “None but Owen’s?”

  “Even his were found only on the chairs and end tables. I curse the man who invented the cleaning robot. Every smooth surface in that apartment was cleaned exactly forty-four times during Mr. Jennison’s tenancy.” Ordaz went back to his chili.

  “Then try this. Assume for the moment that I’m right. Assume Owen was after Loren, and Loren got him. Owen knew he was doing something dangerous. He wouldn’t have wanted me to get onto Loren before he was ready. He wanted the reward for himself. But he might have left me something, just in case.

  “Something in a locker somewhere, an airport or spaceport locker. Evidence. Not under his own name, or mine, either, because I’m a known ARM. But—”

  “Some name you both know.”

  “Right. Like Homer Chandrasekhar. Or—got it. Cubes Forsythe. Owen would have thought that was apt. Cubes is dead.”

  “We will look. You must understand that it will not prove your case.”

  “Sure. Anything you find, Owen could have arranged in a fit of conscience. Screw that. Let me know what you get,” I said, and stood up and left.

  I rode the slidewalk, not caring where it was taking me. It would give me a chance to cool off.

  Could Ordaz be right? Could he?

  But the more I dug into Owen’s death, the worse it made Owen look.

  Therefore, Ordaz was wrong.

  Owen work for an organlegger? He’d rather have been a donor.

  Owen getting his kicks from a wall socket? He never even watched tridee!

  Owen kill himself? No. If so, not that way.

  But even if I could have swallowed all that …

  Owen Jennison letting me know he’s worked with organleggers? Me, Gil the Arm Hamilton? Let me know that?

  The slidewalk rolled along, past restaurants and shopping centers and churches and banks. Ten stories below, the hum of cars and scooters drifted faintly up from the vehicular level. The sky was a narrow, vivid slash of blue between black shadows of skyscraper.

  Let me know that? Never.

  But Ordaz’s strangely inconsistent murderer was no better.

  I thought of something even Ordaz had missed. Why would Loren dispose of Owen so elaborately? Owen need only disappear into the organ banks, never to bother Loren again.

  The shops were thinning out now, and so were the crowds. The slidewalk narrowed, entered a residential area, and not a very good one. I’d let it carry me a long way. I looked around, trying to decide where I was.

  And I was four blocks from Graham’s place.

  My subconscious had done me a dirty. I wanted to look at Kenneth Graham face to face. The temptation to go on was nearly irresistible, but I fought it off and changed direction at the next disk.

  A slidewalk intersection is a rotating disk, its rim tangent to four slidewalks and moving with the same speed. From the center you ride up an escalator and over the slidewalks to reach stationary walks along the buildings. I could have caught a cab at the center of the disk, but I still wanted to think, so I just rode halfway around the rim.

  I could have walked into Graham’s shop and gotten away with it. Maybe. I’d have looked hopeless and bored and hesitant, told Graham I wanted an ecstasy plug, worried loudly about what my wife and friends would say, then changed my mind at the last moment. He’d have let me walk out, knowing I’d be missed. Maybe.

  But Loren had to know more about the ARMs than we knew about him. Some time or other, had Graham been shown a holo of yours truly? Let a known ARM walk into his shop, and Graham would panic. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  Then, dammit, what could I do?

  Ordaz’s inconsistent killer. If we assumed Owen was murdered, we couldn’t get away from the other assumptions. The care, the nitpicking detail—and then Owen left alone to pull out the plug and walk away, or to be discovered by a persistent salesman or a burglar, or—

  No. Ordaz’s hypothetical killer, and mine, would have watched Owen like a hawk. For a month.

  That did it. I stepped off at the next disk and got a taxi.

  The taxi dropped me on the roof of Monica Apartments. I took an elevator to the lobby.

  If the manager was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it as he gestured me into his office. The office seemed much roomier than the lobby had, possibly because there were things to break the anonymous modern decor: paintings on the wall, a small black worm track in the rug that must have been caused by a visitor’s cigarette, a holo of Miller and his wife on the wide, nearly empty desk. He waited until I was settled, then leaned forward expectantly.

  “I’m here on ARM business,” I said, and passed him my ident.

  He passed it back without checking it. “I presume it’s the same business,” he said without cordiality.

  “Yah. I’m convinced Owen Jennison must have had visitors while he was here.”

  The manager smiled. “That’s ridic—impossible.”

  “Nope, it’s not. Your holo cameras take pictures of visitors, but they don’t snap the tenants, do they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then Owen could have been visited by any tenant in the building.”

  The manager looked shocked. “No, certainly not. Really, I don’t see why you pursue this, Mr. Hamilton. If Mr. Jennison had been found in such a condition, it would have been reported!”

  “I don’t think so. Could he have been visited by any tenant in the building?”

  “No. No. The cameras would have taken a picture of anyone from another floor.”

  “How about someone from the same floor?”

  Reluctantly the manager bobbed his head. “Ye-es. As far as the holo cameras are concerned, that’s possible. But—”

  “Then I’d like to ask for pictures of any tenant who lived on the eighteenth floor during the last six weeks. Send them to the ARM Building, Central LA. Can do?”

  “Of course. You’ll have them within an hour.”

  “Good. Now, something else occurred to me. Suppose a man got out on the nineteenth floor and walked down to the eighteenth. He’d be holoed on the nineteenth but not on the eighteenth, right?”

  The manager smiled indulgently. “Mr. Hamilton, there are no stairs in this building.”

  “Just the elevators? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not at all. There is a separate self-contained emergency power source for each of the elevators. It’s common practice. After all, who would want to walk up eighty stories if the elevator failed?”

  “Okay, fine. One last point. Could someone tamper with the computer? Could someone make it decide not to take a certain picture, for instance?”

  “I … am not an expert on bow to tamper with computers, Mr. Hamilton. Why don’t you go straight to the company? Caulfield Brains, Inc.”

  “Okay. What’s your model?”

  “Just a moment.” He got up and leafed through a drawer in a filing cabinet. “EQ 144.”

  “Okay.”

  That was all I could do here, and I knew it … and still I didn’t have the will to get up. There ought to be something …

  Finally Miller cleared his throat. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said. “No. Can I get into 1809?”

  “I’ll see if we’ve rented it yet.”

  “The police are through with it?”

  “Certainly.” He went back to the filing cabinet. “No, it’s still available. I’ll take you up. How long will you be?”

  “I do
n’t know. No more than half an hour. No need to come up.”

  “Very well.” He handed me the key and waited for me to leave. I did.

  The merest flicker of blue light caught my eye as I left the elevator. I would have thought it was my optic nerve, not in the real world, if I hadn’t known about the holo cameras. Maybe it was. You don’t need laser light to make a holograph, but it does get you clearer pictures.

  Owen’s room was a box. Everything was retracted. There was nothing but the bare walls. I had never seen anything so desolate, unless it was some asteroidal rock too poor to mine, too badly placed to be worth a base.

  The control panel was just beside the door. I turned on the lights, then touched the master button. Lines appeared, outlined in red and green and blue. A great square on one wall for the bed, most of another wall for the kitchen, various outlines across the floor. Very handy. You wouldn’t want a guest to be standing on the table when you expanded it.

  I’d come here to get the feel of the place, to encourage a hunch, to see if I’d missed anything. Translation: I was playing. Playing, I reached through the control panel to find the circuits. The printed circuitry was too small and too detailed to tell me anything, but I ran imaginary fingertips along a few wires and found that they looped straight to their action points, no detours. No sensors to the outside. You’d have to be in the room to know what was expanded, what retracted.

  So a supposedly occupied room had had its bed retracted for six weeks. But you’d have to be in the room to know it.

  I pushed buttons to expand the kitchen nook and the reading chair. The wall slid out eight feet; the floor humped itself and took form. I sat down in the chair, and the kitchen nook blocked my view of the door.

  Nobody could have seen Owen from the hall.

  If only someone had noticed that Owen wasn’t ordering food. That might have saved him.

  I thought of something else, and it made me look around for the air conditioner. There was a grill at floor level. I felt behind it with my imaginary hand. Some of these apartment air-conditioning units go on when the CO2 level hits half a percent. This one was geared to temperature and manual control.

  With the other kind, our careful killer could have tapped the air-conditioner current to find out if Owen was still alive and present. As it was, 1809 had behaved like an empty room for six weeks.