Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  I picked myself up and tried something safer. I took out my pen and dropped it. It fell normally: thirty-two feet per second per second, field time. Which scratched one theory as to how the killer had thought he would be leaving.

  I switched the machine off. “Something I’d like to try,” I told Bera. “Can you hang the machine in the air, say by a cable around the frame?”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “I want to try standing on the bottom of the field.”

  Bera looked dubious.

  It took us twenty minutes to set it up. Bera took no chances. He lifted the generator about five feet. Since the field seemed to center on that oddly shaped piece of silver, that put the bottom of the field just a foot in the air. We moved a stepladder into range, and I stood on the stepladder and turned on the generator.

  I stepped off.

  Walking down the side of the field was like walking in progressively stickier taffy. When I stood on the bottom, I could just reach the switch.

  My shoes were stuck solid. I could pull my feet out of them, but there was no place to stand except in my own shoes. A minute later my feet were stuck, too: I could pull one loose, but only by fixing the other ever more deeply in the interface. I sank deeper, and all sensation left the soles of my feet. It was scary, though I knew nothing terrible could happen to me. My feet wouldn’t die out there; they wouldn’t have time.

  But the interface was up to my ankles now, and I started to wonder what kind of velocity they were building up out there. I pushed the switch up. The lights flashed bright, and my feet slapped the floor hard.

  Bera said, “Well? Learn anything?”

  “Yah. I don’t want to try a real test: I might wreck the machine.”

  “What kind of real test—?”

  “Dropping it forty stories with the field on. Quit worrying; I’m not going to do it.”

  “Right. You aren’t”

  “You know, this time compression effect would work for more than just spacecraft After you’re on the colony world, you could raise full-grown cattle from frozen fertilized eggs in just a few minutes.”

  “Mmm … Yah.” The happy smile flashing white against darkness, the infinity look in Bera’s eyes … Bera liked playing with ideas. ‘Think of one of these mounted on a truck, say on Jinx. You could explore the shoreline regions without ever worrying about the Bandersnatchi attacking. They’d never move fast enough. You could drive across any alien world and catch the whole ecology laid out around you, none of it running from the truck. Predators in midleap, birds in midflight, couples in courtship.”

  “Or larger groups.”

  “I … think that habit is unique to humans.” He looked at me sideways. “You wouldn’t spy on people, would you? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “That five-hundred-to-one ratio. Is that constant?”

  He came back to here and now. “We don’t know. Our theory hasn’t caught up to the hardware it’s supposed to fit. I wish to hell we had Sinclair’s notes.”

  “You were supposed to send a programmer out there.”

  “He came back,” Bera said viciously. “Clayton Wolfe. Clay says the tapes in Sinclair’s computer were all wiped before he got there. I don’t know whether to believe him or not. Sinclair was a secretive bastard, wasn’t he?”

  “Yah. One false move on Clay’s part and the computer might have wiped everything. But he says different?”

  “He says the computer was blank, a newborn mind all ready to be taught. Gil, is that possible? Could whoever have killed Sinclair have wiped the tapes?”

  “Sure, why not? What he couldn’t have done is left afterward.” I told him a little about the problem “It’s even worse than that, because as Ordaz keeps pointing out, he thought he’d be leaving with the machine. I thought he might have been planning to roll the generator off the roof, step off with it, and float down. But that wouldn’t work. Not if it falls five hundred times as fast He’d have been killed.”

  “Losing the machine maybe saved his life.”

  “But how did he get out?”

  Bera laughed at my frustration. “Couldn’t his niece be the one?”

  “Sure, she could have killed her uncle for the money. But I can’t see how she’d have a motive to wipe the computer. Unless—”

  “Something?”

  “Maybe. Never mind.” Did Bera ever miss this kind of manhunting? But I wasn’t ready to discuss this yet; I didn’t know enough. “Tell me more about the machine. Can you vary that five-hundred-to-one ratio?”

  He shrugged. “We tried adding more batteries. We thought it might boost the field strength. We were wrong; it just expanded the boundary a little. And using one less battery turns it off completely. So the ratio seems to be constant, and there do seem to be quantum levels involved. We’ll know better when we build another machine.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, there are all kinds of good questions,” Bera said. “What happens when the fields of two generators intersect? They might just add, but maybe not. That quantum effect … And what happens if the generators are right next to each other, operating in each other’s accelerated time? The speed of light could drop to a few feet per second. Throw a punch and your hand gets shorter!”

  “That’d be kicky, all right.”

  “Dangerous, too. Man, we’d better try that one on the moon!”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “Look, with one machine going, infrared light comes out violet. If two machines were boosting each other’s performance, what kind of radiation would they put out? Anything from X rays to antimatter particles.”

  “An expensive way to build a bomb.”

  “Well, but it’s a bomb you can use over and over again.”

  I laughed. “We did find you an expert,” I said. “You may not need Sinclair’s tapes. Bernath Peterfi says he was working with Sinclair. He could be lying—more likely he was working for him, under contract—but at least he knows what the machine does.”

  Bera seemed relieved at that. He took down Peterfi’s address. I left him there in the laboratory, playing with his new toy.

  The file from the city morgue was sitting on my desk, open, waiting for me since this morning. Two dead ones looked up at me through sockets of blackened bone, but not accusingly. They had patience. They could wait.

  The computer had processed my search pattern. I braced myself with a cup of coffee, then started leafing through the thick stack of printout. When I knew what had burned away two human faces, I’d be close to knowing who. Find the tool, find the killer. And the tool must be unique or close to it.

  Lasers, lasers—more than half the machine’s suggestions seemed to be lasers. Incredible the way lasers seemed to breed and mutate throughout human industry. Laser radar. The laser guidance system on a tunneling machine. Some suggestions were obviously unworkable, and one was a lot too workable.

  A standard hunting laser fires in pulses. But it can be jiggered for a much longer pulse or even a continuous burst.

  Set a hunting laser for a long pulse and put a grid over the lens. The mesh has to be optically fine, on the order of angstroms. Now the beam will spread as it leaves the grid. A second of pulse will vaporize the grid, leaving no evidence. The grid would be no bigger than a contact lens; if you didn’t trust your aim, you could carry a pocketful of them.

  The grid-equipped laser would be less efficient, as a rifle with a silencer is less efficient But the grid would make the murder weapon impossible to identify.

  I thought about it and got cold chills. Assassination is already a recognized branch of politics. If this got out— But that was the trouble; someone seemed to have thought of it already. If not, someone would. Someone always did.

  I wrote up a memo for Lucas Garner. I couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to deal with this kind of sociological problem.

  Nothing else in the stack of printout caught my eye. Later I’d have to go through it in detail. For now I pushed
it aside and punched for messages.

  Bates, the coroner, had finished the autopsies on the two charred corpses. Nothing new. But records had identified the fingerprints. Two missing persons, disappeared six and eight months ago. Ah ha!

  I knew that pattern. I didn’t even look at the names; I just skipped on to the gene coding.

  Right. The fingerprints did not match the genes. All twenty fingertips must be transplants. And the man’s scalp was a transplant; his own hair had been blond.

  I leaned back in my chair, gazing fondly down at holograms of charred skulls.

  You evil sons of bitches. Organleggers, both of you. With all that raw material available, most organleggers change their fingerprints constantly—and their retina prints—but we’d never get prints from those charred eyeballs. So, weird weapon or no, they were ARM business. My business.

  And we still didn’t know what had killed them, or who.

  It could hardly have been a rival gang. For one thing, there was no competition. There must be plenty of business for every organlegger left alive after the ARM swept through them last year. For another, why had they been dumped on a city slidewalk? Rival organleggers would have taken them apart for their own organ banks. Waste not, want not.

  On that same philosophy, I had something to be deeply involved in when the mother hunt broke. Sinclair’s death wasn’t ARM business, and his time compression field wasn’t in my field. This was both.

  I wondered what end of the business the dead ones had been in. The file gave their estimated ages: forty for the man, forty-three for the woman, give or take three years each. Too old to be raiding the city street for donors. That takes youth and muscle. I billed them as doctors, culturing the transplants and doing the operations, or salespersons, charged with quietly letting prospective clients know where they could get an operation without waiting two years for the public organ banks to come up with material.

  So they’d tried to sell someone a new kidney and had been killed for their impudence. That would make the killer a hero.

  So why hide them for three days, then drag them out onto a city slidewalk in the dead of night?

  Because they’d been killed with a fearsome new weapon?

  I looked at the burned faces and thought: fearsome, right. Whatever did that had to be strictly a murder weapon. As the optical grid over a laser lens would be strictly a murder technique.

  So a secretive scientist and his deformed assistant, fearful of rousing the wrath of the villagers, had dithered over the bodies for three days, then disposed of them in that clumsy fashion because they panicked when the bodies started to smell. Maybe.

  But a prospective client needn’t have used his shiny new terror weapon. He had only to call the cops after they were gone. It read better if the killer was a prospective donor, he’d fight with anything he could get his hands on.

  I flipped back to full shots of the bodies. They looked to be in good condition. Not much flab. You don’t collect a donor by putting an armlock on him; you use a needle gun. But you still need muscle to pick up the body and move it to your car, and you have to do that damn quick. Hmmm …

  Someone knocked at my door.

  I shouted, “Come on in!”

  Drew Porter came in. He was big enough to fill the office, and he moved with a grace he must have learned on a board. “Mr. Hamilton? I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Sure. What about?”

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He looked grimly determined. “You’re an ARM,” he said. “You’re not actually investigating Uncle Ray’s murder. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Our concern is with the generator. Coffee?”

  “Yes, thanks. But you know all about the killing. I thought I’d like to talk to you, straighten out some of my own ideas.”

  “Go ahead.” I punched for two coffees.

  “Ordaz thinks Janice did it, doesn’t he?”

  “Probably. I’m not good at reading Ordaz’s mind. But it seems to narrow down to two distinct groups of possible killers: Janice and everyone else. Here’s your coffee.”

  “Janice didn’t do it.” He took the cup from me, gulped at it, set it down on my desk, and forgot about it.

  “Janice and X,” I said. “But X couldn’t have left. In fact, X couldn’t have left even if he’d had the machine he came for. And we still don’t know why he didn’t just take the elevator.”

  He scowled as he thought that through. “Say he had a way to leave,” he said. “He wanted to take the machine—he had to want that, because he tried to use the machine to set up an alibi. But even if he couldn’t take the machine he’d still use his alternative way out.”

  “Why?”

  “It’d leave Janice holding the bag if he knew Janice was coming home. If he didn’t know that, he’d be leaving the police with a locked room.”

  “Locked room mysteries are good clean fun, but I never heard of one happening in real life. In fiction they usually happen by accident.” I waved aside his protest. “Never mind. How did he get out?”

  Porter didn’t answer.

  “Would you care to look at the case against Janice Sinclair?”

  “She’s the only one who could have done it,” he said bitterly. “But she didn’t. She couldn’t kill anyone, not in that cold-blooded, prepackaged way, with an alibi all set up and a weird machine at the heart of it. Look, that machine is too complicated for Janice.”

  “No, she isn’t the type. But—no offense intended—you are.”

  He grinned at that. “Me? Well, maybe I am. But why would I want to?”

  “You’re in love with her. I think you’d do anything for her. Aside from that, you might enjoy setting up a perfect murder. And there’s the money.”

  “You’ve got a funny idea of a perfect murder.”

  “Say I was being tactful.”

  He laughed at that. “All right. Say I set up a murder for the love of Janice. Damn it, if she had that much hate in her, I wouldn’t love her! Why would she want to kill Uncle Ray?”

  I dithered about whether to drop that on him. Decided yes. “Do you know anything about Edward Sinclair’s ex emption?”

  “Yah, Janice told me something about …” He trailed off.

  “Just what did she tell you?”

  “I don’t have to say.”

  That was probably intelligent. “All right,” I said. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume it was Raymond Sinclair who worked out the math for the new ramrobot scoops, and Edward took the credit, with Raymond’s connivance. It was probably Raymond’s idea. How would that sit with Edward?”

  “I’d think he’d be grateful forever,” Porter said. “Janice says he is.”

  “Maybe. But people are funny, aren’t they? Being grateful for fifty years could get on a man’s nerves. It’s not a natural emotion.”

  “You’re so young to be so cynical,” Porter said pityingly.

  “I’m trying to think this out like a prosecution lawyer. If these brothers saw each other too often, Edward might get to feeling embarrassed around Raymond. He’d have a hard time relaxing with him. The rumors wouldn’t help … Oh, yes, there are rumors. I’ve been told that Edward couldn’t have worked out those equations because he doesn’t have the ability. If that kind of thing got back to Edward, how would he like it? He might even start avoiding his brother. Then Ray might remind brother Edward of just how much he owed him … and that’s the kiss of death.”

  “Janice says no.”

  “Janice could have picked up the hate from her father. Or she might have started worrying about what would happen if Uncle Ray changed his mind one day. It could happen any time if things were getting strained between the elder Sinclairs. So one day she shut his mouth—”

  Porter growled in his throat.

  “I’m just trying to show you what you’re up against. One more thing: the killer may have wiped the tapes in Sinclair’s computer.”

  “Oh?” Por
ter thought that over. “Yah. Janice could have done that just in case there were some notes in there, notes on Ed Sinclair’s ramscoop field equations. But look: X could have wiped those tapes, too. Stealing the generator doesn’t do him any good unless he wipes it out of Uncle Ray’s computer.”

  “Shall we get back to the case against X?”

  “With pleasure.” He dropped into a chair. Watching his face smooth out, I added, and with great relief.

  I said, “Let’s not call him X. Call him K for killer.” We already had an Ecks involved … and his family name probably had been X once upon a time. “We’ve been assuming K set up Sinclair’s time compression effect as an alibi.”

  Porter smiled. “It’s a lovely idea. Elegant, as a mathematician would say. Remember, I never saw the actual murder scene. Just chalk marks.”

  “It was—macabre. Like a piece of surrealism. A very bloody practical joke. K could have deliberately set it up that way if his mind is twisted enough.”

  “If he’s that twisted, he probably escaped by running himself down the garbage disposal.”

  “Pauline Urthiel thought he might be a psychotic. Someone who worked with Sinclair who thought he wasn’t getting enough credit.” Like Peterfi, I thought, or Pauline herself.

  “I like the alibi theory.”

  “It bothers me. Too many people knew about the machine. How did he expect to get away with it? Lawrence Ecks knew about it. Peterfi knew about it. Peterfi knew enough about the machine to rebuild it from scratch. Or so he says. You and Janice saw it in action.”

  “Say he’s crazy, then. Say he hated Uncle Ray enough to kill him and then set him up in a makeshift Dali painting. He’d still have to get out.” Porter was working his hands together. The muscles bulged and rippled in his arms. “If the elevator hadn’t been locked and on Uncle Ray’s floor, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “So?”

  “So. Janice came home, called the elevator up, and locked it. She does that without thinking. She had a bad shock last night This morning she didn’t remember.”