Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  She studied the map. “On foot for four hours. Well, what was she doing for four hours?”

  “It’s like this,” I said. “If Naomi wasn’t out there shooting at Chris Penzler, then someone else was. We’d both like to find him, right? Because we’re cops. But you’re a cop, so I can’t tell you what I think Naomi was doing.”

  She sat down stiffly on the edge of the bed. “Say she met someone. Maybe a man who works at the air works. Married. Would she protect him?”

  I had to laugh. Naomi? With her life? “No. Anyway, what kind of assignation is that? As soon as they take off their clothes, poof! Explosive decompression. Laura, how do I go about relaxing you?”

  She smiled flickeringly. “Talk to me. This is unusual for “You can change your mind at any second. Just say the word. The word is halogens.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Then you have to list them.”

  A short silence which I had to break. “If she wasn’t out there, it makes her useless as a witness, doesn’t it? What she swore she didn’t see doesn’t count. And Chris said there could have been an army out there hiding in the shadows. He wasn’t even sure he saw a human being.”

  She turned to look at me. “That leaves your testimony.”

  In my mind I flexed my imaginary hand, remembering the feel of miniature moonscape. “There wasn’t anyone out there by the time I looked. Laura, what about mirrors? The laser could have been somewhere else, and the killer, too.”

  “But there wasn’t any mirror, either.”

  “I wasn’t looking for one.”

  “We’d have found it.”

  It was impossible. I scowled at the map. I wanted to ignore the facts and just start toting up suspects according to motive. What stopped me was my first suspect: any lunie angry enough about our meddling in lunar affairs and clever enough to have worked some kind of trickery.

  Laura picked up her case and went into the water closet.

  I was having trouble keeping my priorities straight. First: I hadn’t touched a woman in several days. Second: I didn’t want Laura hurt, damaged or embarrassed. Third: my own part in the conference could be endangered. Fourth: I wanted Laura Drury in my bed, and that was part lust, part spirit of adventure. How to reconcile all that? Hold it down to talk for now? Let her list her own priorities on her own time?

  She came out wearing a garment the likes of which I’d never seen before. It was sexy and strange: floor length, shoulderless, and not quite opaque. The thin, cream-colored fabric hugged her body by static electricity. It could almost have been a dress, but it looked too fragile—there was a lot of lace—and much too thin to hold heat.

  “What is it?”

  She laughed. “It’s a nightgown!” Quite suddenly she came into my arms. I found myself standing fully upright and nuzzling her throat. The garment was nicely tactile: silky smooth over warm skin. I felt her goose bumps through it.

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’s to sleep in. For now, I guess it’s to take off.”

  “Carefully? Or do I rip it off?”

  “Jesus! Carefully, Gil; it’s expensive.”

  Lunie customs. Sooner or later they’d get me. A sensible man wouldn’t have invited a lunie to his room. I knew it and didn’t care.

  9. THE TRADING POST

  It was amazing how good we felt on a couple of hours’ sleep. Laura was glowing. She kept picking me up in her arms, Rhett Butler style. She’d jump when I goosed her, then steady herself with a hand on my head and let me lift her one-handed. I played tricks with my imaginary arm.

  We went formal and cautious when it came time to leave. I left first. Desiree Porter and Tom Reinecke were coming down the hall. They hailed me and swept me up and tried to pump me for news on the conference.

  I sidestepped. “What have you two been doing all this time, just waiting for one of us to crack?”

  Tom said, “There was Penzler. There was the trial. We’ve been interviewing lunies, too. You know, a lot of them aren’t going to be happy no matter what you do.”

  “And we screw a lot,” Desiree said.

  “That I kind of assumed. Hey, did you two know each other before you got here?”

  “Nope. It was just one of those things.”

  “Lust at first sight. I think it’s his legs I like best. Belt men have their muscles mainly in the arms and shoulders.”

  “So you only love me for my legs, huh?”

  “And your mind. Didn’t I mention your mind?”

  We had reached the elevators. I started to step in, then told them I’d left something in my room, which was true enough.

  Now the hall was empty. I called the door open, Laura joined me, and we went down to breakfast. We weren’t even holding hands. But our hands brushed sometimes, and Laura kept suppressing a smile, and I wondered just how much we were hiding. For that matter, I’d seen Reinecke’s oddly sardonic smile as the elevator doors closed.

  At breakfast I told Laura I wanted to check out a puffer.

  She didn’t like it. “Isn’t there a committee meeting?”

  “I’ll skip a day. Hell, this is committee business. If the courts have convicted an innocent person—”

  She shrugged angrily. “If she didn’t try to murder Penzler, then she was doing something else!”

  The idea percolated through to me that as a man newly in love, I was supposed to forget old loves entirely. Laura didn’t want to hear that I still hoped to save Naomi Mitchison.

  I sidestepped again. “I left a case half-solved once,” I said, and I told her how Raymond Sinclair’s surrealistic death scene was linked to two organleggers found with their faces burned down to the bone. I had nearly reached the morgue in the same condition.

  Maybe she bought it. She did help me check out a puffer.

  The puffers were racked along one wall of the mirror works. Today there were several gaps. The only difference between the orange city police puffers and the rentals was that the rentals came in all colors.

  I chose a police puffer. It was a low-slung motorcycle with a wide padded bucket seat and a cargo framework behind. There were three tanks. The motor had no intake. An exhaust pipe forked to left and right just under the seat. The shock absorbers were huge, and the tires were great fat soft tubes.

  Laura showed me how to get it going and tried to tell me how to run it, how to maneuver, how to steer, where not to steer. “I could cross a dust pool,” she told me, “like a bat out of hell, and if you slow down you’ll turn over, and if the wheel hits a submerged rock you’ll be under the dust trying to figure out which way is up. You stay away from dust pools. Don’t hit any rocks. If you fall, get your arms over your helmet.”

  “I’ll stick to the road,” I said. “That’s safe, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.” She was reluctant to admit that anything was safe.

  “Why are there three tanks?”

  “Oxygen, hydrogen, water vapor. We don’t throw away water, Gil. The exhaust is just a safety valve, and of course it powers the side jets. You shouldn’t have to use them, but do it if you think you’re falling over.”

  I climbed on. I could barely feel the vibration. “It isn’t puffing,” I noticed.

  “It’s not supposed to. If it starts puffing steam, something’s wrong. That’s why they’re called puffers. If it happens, slow way down and check your air, because you may have to walk home.” She insisted on showing me how to bleed oxygen from the puffer tank into my backpack.

  “Have you got all that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Keep it slow till you learn how to steer. This is the moon. You’ll have to lean farther than you think.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t get off till 2000. Will you be back by then?”

  “I’m bound to.”

  We clinked helmets in lieu of a kiss, and I went.

  From the city’s east face, the mirror works, the trade road hooked around and aimed straight west. I bounced along at a fair
rate for an off-road vehicle. I marked the tilted rock far off to my left and a road that wound uphill to my right, up to the air and water plant. I had seen it from a height, miniaturized in the projection room: mirrors mounted around the rim of a fair-sized recent crater, focusing their light down onto a pressure vessel filled with red-hot lunar rock. Pipes to lead hydrogen in, water vapor out. I was tempted to go up and look at the real thing. Maybe on the way back …

  To my left was the land Naomi had tried to lead us through and the peak Naomi had tried to climb. I kept going.

  The road twisted like an injured snake. A broad road led left toward the strip mines that had made Hovestraydt City rich. When they had played out, the city had turned to mirror making.

  Naomi wasn’t a native. To meet someone out here, she would need some obvious landmark. The same would hold if someone had simply left a puffer parked somewhere for her. The mines? She couldn’t get lost, witnesses were unlikely, and the tailings might fool radar for a small vehicle.

  She’d led us a merry chase the day after the attack on Chris Penzler. Alan Watson must have given her what she needed when he showed her the projection room. And she’d danced her way right into the organ banks. To hide what?

  Or else the jury was right.

  Presently I was bouncing downhill, beyond the region I’d searched with my imaginary hand, beyond anywhere Naomi could have reached on foot. Far ahead was a line of silver: the mass driver built to supply ore for the L-5 project of the 2040s. The company had gone bankrupt, and the mass driver was half-built and long obsolete.

  I kept checking my watch.

  There was the trading post ahead. Unused to picking out details in moonscape, my eyes had been missing it for some time. I found the shapes of two spacecraft first, then the outline of the spaceport, then the crescent of stone and glass buildings around it. The road became a circle between the buildings and the spaceport. I had made the run in just thirty-five minutes.

  * * *

  The trading post was strange by anyone’s standards.

  There was no dome. Oblong buildings were individually pressurized; sometimes they were linked by tunnels. In Selene’s Bar and Grill, where I stopped for lunch, I found racks for fishbowl helmets but none for pressure suits. The customers kept their credit coins in outside pockets.

  Selene’s Bar and Grill, Mare Serenitatis Spa (with a pool and sauna), the Man in the Moon Hotel (he was shown yawning), Aphrodite’s: all the place names were moon-related. Half the people I saw were lunies. Aphrodite’s rented sexual favors. The waitress at Selene’s told me it catered specifically to lunies. I was a little shocked.

  The administration building was all the way around the circle. It was big enough to get lost in. The police, licensing, and port administration were scattered through the building. I finally found the goldskin offices.

  “ARM business,” I told the only clerk in sight.

  He was watching a fold-up 3D screen propped in front of him. He didn’t look up. “Yah?”

  “Last Wednesday someone shot a Belt delegate to the conference on—”

  Now he looked up. “We heard about that. Didn’t they solve that one? I heard—”

  “Look, there’s a possibility that our suspect was here at the time. That would mean she wasn’t shooting at Penzler. We never found the weapon, either. That adds up to a would-be killer with a message laser still hunting a Belt delegate.”

  “See your point. What do you need?”

  “Were there any crimes committed here between 2230 Tuesday and 0130 Wednesday?” Naomi would have had to walk to where someone had left a puffer for her, then drive here. At least half an hour coming and half an hour back. Later I’d have to pace it off on foot.

  He set aside his fold-up screen and tapped at a computer keyboard. The screen lit. “Mmm … we had a fight at Aphrodite’s about that time. A lunie dead, two Belters and a lunie under arrest, all male. But you’re looking for something premeditated.”

  “Right.”

  “Zip.”

  “Futz. How about disappearances?”

  He summoned up the missing persons records. Nobody had been reported missing since Wednesday. It seemed that Naomi had not been committing a crime of violence.

  “How well do you keep track of your puffers?”

  “They’re licensed. Generally the residents own their own.” He was typing as he spoke. The screen filled. “These are rentals.”

  “Chili Bird?” The name rang a bell.

  “Two puffers charged to the Chili Bird account for two days. Well, that’s reasonable. Antsie had passengers.”

  “Tell me more.”

  He scowled—I was inventing work for him, and he would have preferred not to—but he typed, and more data appeared. “Antsie de Campo, owner and pilot of Chili Bird out of Vesta. Arrived April 10. Left April 13. Passengers, Dr. Raymond Forward and a four-year-old girl, Ruth Hancock Cowles. Cargo … he had a light load. Monopoles. He took off with some chicken and turkey embryos; maybe that’s why the doctor was along.”

  April 13 was the day after the attempt on Penzler. “Where are they now?”

  “Headed for Confinement Asteroid. Probably because of the little girl.” He typed. “I remember her now. She was a doll. Interested in everything. She loved low gravity; she was bouncing around—” The screen responded. “Chili Bird’s almost to Confinement now. Is this any use to you?”

  “I hope so. Where can I send a message to Chili Bird?”

  He told me how to find Interplanetary Voice on a peak outside the city circle.

  There would have been several minutes’ lightspeed delay in conversation. I sent a straight ‘gram.

  TO: DR RAYMOND FORWARD

  NAOMI MITCHISON TRIED AND CONVICTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER COMMITTED HOVESTRAYDT CITY 0130 WEDNESDAY APRIL 13. EXECUTION PENDING. IF YOU KNOW OF HER MOVEMENTS DURING RELEVANT TIME, CALL ME HOVESTRAYDT CITY.

  GILBERT HAMILTON, ARM

  I didn’t stop on the way home. I couldn’t guess where someone might have left a puffer for Naomi. Maybe I had already wasted time I couldn’t afford. I felt time’s hot breath on the back of my neck, an unreasonable conviction that Naomi didn’t have months but only hours.

  McCavity hailed me in the hall. “Hello, Gil. The offer’s still open,” he said.

  “Offer?”

  “Someone to get drunk with.”

  “Oh. I may need it yet. Let me buy you a drink now. I haven’t seen a bar—”

  “There aren’t any. We tend to keep our own supplies and drink in our rooms. Come on, I’ve got a good stock.”

  McCavity’s quarters were near the bottom level of the city. He didn’t have any kind of bartending device; the drinks were going to be simple. He offered me something he called earthshine poured over ice, and I took it.

  Smooth.

  “Distilling is dirt cheap here,” Harry said. “Heat, cold, partial vacuum, they’re all just outside the wall. Do you like it?”

  “Yeah. It tastes like a good bourbon.”

  “I got a call from Taffy. She reached Marxgrad okay. She says she left you a message, too.”

  “Good.”

  “I gather you got together okay?”

  “Yes, thank God. I was a basket case. She reassembled me.” I sipped again. “I wish I had the time to get drunk in good company. It might be just what I need. Harry, do you know of a Belt doctor, a Raymond Forward?”

  McCavity scratched his head. “Rings a bell. Yeah, he’s got some lunie clients. Specialist in fertility problems.”

  Futz. Naomi didn’t suffer from infertility. “He was on the moon for a few days. Maybe he had a lunie client.”

  “There’d be records. We don’t have restrictions on fertility except the natural ones.”

  “Okay, I can check that out.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  “He was here at the right time, and he came in with a light cargo. Maybe there were ulterior motives.”

  “Right time for what?
”

  “Naomi. Maybe I’m going at this wrong end around. I should be looking for whoever shot at Chris Penzler. But if Naomi wasn’t where she said she was … well, it’s one handle on a puzzle. I can track that down. She could have been meeting someone. Maybe Antsie de Campo, maybe Forward. Could there be two Raymond Forwards?”

  “Both Belt doctors? Well, it’s possible.” He sipped at his own drink. “Was Naomi infertile?”

  “She was fertile. She’d also sworn never to have another kid.”

  “Then that’s out.”

  “By another man.”

  “What?”

  “She swore she’d never have children by another man. This Forward, he solves infertility problems?”

  “Right. You’ve got something, don’t you?”

  “Cloning?”

  “If all else fails, he can grow a clone for a patient. It’s hellishly expensive.”

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “I’ll call for you. What number?”

  I told him.

  Artemus Boone stood frowning in the doorway of his office. “I was just closing up. I can meet you tomorrow at 1000. Unless it’s urgent?”

  “It feels urgent,” I told the phone image. “Do you still regard Naomi Mitchison as your client?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I need to discuss her case confidentially.”

  He sighed. “Come to my office. I’ll wait.”

  I turned to Harry McCavity. “Thanks for the drink. I’ll be pleased to get drunk with you when this is all over, but just now—”

  He waved that off. “Will I ever know what this was all about?”

  “There’s more than one kind of crime,” I said cryptically, and left.

  Artemus Boone sat behind his ancient, lovingly maintained computer terminal and propped his beard on his folded hands. “Now, what’s this all about, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “I want a legal opinion on a hypothetical situation.”

  “Go on.”

  “A flatlander woman hires a Belt doctor to take a clone from her and grow it to term. The operation takes place on the moon. The woman returns to Earth. The child is raised in the asteroids. Four years later they meet again, on the moon. The woman is still on the moon when it all becomes public knowledge.”