Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  Boone stared as if I’d sprouted horns. “Damnation!”

  “Sure. Now, the United Nations Fertility Laws would have our hypothetical flatlander woman sterilized if she had an illegal baby. They’d sterilize the baby, too. But this particular woman still has one birthright, so she could have a baby with no problem. But what about a clone?”

  Boone shook his head. He was still thunderstruck. “I don’t know. My field is lunar law.”

  “Would the UN try to extradite the woman? Would the moon let them get away with it? Would they try to extradite the baby, too? Or are they both safe because the crime took place off Earth?”

  “Again, I don’t know. I’d want to research this. In some legal respects the moon is part of the United Nations. Damnation! Why didn’t she discuss this with me?”

  “She could have been scared to. She never mentioned any such situation?”

  He smiled like a man in pain. “Never. Damnation. I’m nearly certain that the baby could not be extradited. If only she’d asked! Hamilton, is our hypothetical baby still on the moon?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He stood up abruptly. “I’ll be able to give you a better answer tomorrow. Call me.”

  I reached my room expecting to spend some time on the phone. Getting Budrys to tell me what went on at the conference could take up to an hour. I wanted to check Dr. For-ward’s credentials and recent movements. And Taffy’s message was waiting … I dropped onto the bed and polled my shoes off and said, “Chiron, messages.”

  And Laura Drury’s image, in full pressure suit, said, “Gil, you’ll have to have dinner without me. I’m going out with a search party. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Chris Penzler’s turned up missing.”

  10. THE TILTED ROCK

  I wasted a few seconds cursing. The urgency I’d felt hadn’t been for Naomi Mitchison. Naomi was feeling no impatience. Death had been hunting Chris Penzler.

  I called Laura’s room and got no answer. I called the police and got Jefferson.

  “He left about sixteen-twenty this afternoon,” the freckled lunie told me. “He checked out a puffer.”

  I said, “Idiot.”

  “Right. How well do you know him? Could he think he’s playing detective?”

  “Why not? Somebody wants him dead, and it bothers him. He’s not likely to be out there playing tourist.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” Jefferson said. “I sent a search party west, to the area where Penzler testified he saw something. Laura Drury’s with them, in case you were wondering.” A trace of disapproval in his voice. What the futz? “But they haven’t found him, and they’ve been out over an hour.”

  “Set the area up in the projection room and search that.”

  “We have got to have another Watchbird satellite,” Jefferson said. “There used to be three. The replacement keeps getting proxmired in the budget hearings. Hamilton, we’ve been waiting for the Watchbird One to rise. Why don’t you meet me down in the projection room?”

  “Good.”

  Tom Reinecke and Desiree Porter were waiting outside the projection room. They’d heard Chris Penzler was missing. Jefferson wanted to tell them to go to hell until I said, “We can use some extra eyes.”

  Yet again we waded out into the hologram, knee-deep in miniature moonscape. Jefferson and Reinecke and I fanned out into the choppy lands west of the rim wall and the city. Porter searched the crater itself because nobody else had. Partly to honor her theory, I stopped at the tilted rock.

  Jefferson and Tom Reinecke kept going. They glanced back at me, then resumed their search by eye alone, three to four hundred yards from the west wall of the city.

  I looked around. The tilted rock was small enough to heft in both arms, except that it wouldn’t have moved, of course. I saw tiny orange suits with bubble helmets scattered over the rocks to my west. I called, “What kind of suit would Chris be wearing?”

  “Blue, skintight, with a gold and bronze griffin on the chest,” Jefferson called back.

  There were annoying blank spots in the landscape where the Watchbird’s cameras weren’t reaching. I tried to feel around in them, but my talent wasn’t up to that. I felt nothing.

  I found no blue skintight suits, vertical or horizontal. Where Reinecke and Jefferson were searching, bright orange puffers were parked in a ring on flat ground. None in my area.

  There was a deep dust pool twenty yards south of the tilted rock. The surface looked roiled. I ran my imaginary hand beneath the surface and flinched violently. Then I made myself touch it again.

  I called, “I’ve found the puffer. It’s under the dust.”

  One and all, they abandoned their own search. Desiree reached me first. They watched (for what?) while I let go of the puffer and searched further. I found it almost at once. I said, “God.”

  Desiree said, “What? Penzler?”

  I closed my hand around it. It felt light and dry, like a dead lizard left in the sun. “Somebody. A suit with somebody inside.” I made my imaginary fingertips follow the contours of the thing, though there was nothing I wanted less in the world. “God. His hand is gone.”

  My hand stopped sending. My talent had quit. Imaginary hand, hell; it’s my mind, my unprotected mind, that feels out the textures of what I touch. I can take only so much of that.

  “We’ll have to check this out,” Jefferson said.

  “Use your belt phone. Send the search party that way. Tell them, we’ll join them as soon as we can.”

  It took almost an hour. I was twitchy with impatience. When we finally set forth, our team included Jefferson, both newstapers, dredging machinery, and a couple of orange-clad operators.

  The Earth was a broad crescent, not quite half-full. The sun was well up the sky, leaving fewer shadows, but they were impenetrably black. Our headlamps didn’t help. Our bubble helmets had darkened, and our eyes had adjusted to lunar day.

  The dozen cops on the original search team were already waiting at the dust pool. Laura Drury bounced up to me. “Do you really think he’s down there?”

  “I felt him,” I said.

  She grimaced. “Sorry. Well, we found this. It was just under the dust, just at the edge.” She held an elastic strap with a buckle, the kind that locks when you pull it tight. “We use them on puffers to hold small stuff on the frame behind the seat. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  “Maybe the killer dumped the body in the dust,” Laura speculated, “and then found the strap. He just stuck it under the dust with his hand.”

  That would mean he was in a hurry, I thought. It would also mean the strap was evidence of something. Otherwise he’d have just kept it.

  Jefferson called Laura, and she waved and went.

  I noticed Alan Watson by his height. While the cops were getting the equipment ready, Alan and I adjusted our radios for privacy.

  “I’ve got news,” I said. “Maybe good, maybe bad.”

  “About Naomi?”

  “Right. She wasn’t here when someone shot Penzler in his bath. She wasn’t anywhere near here. She was at the Belt Trading Post.”

  “Then she’s innocent! But why wouldn’t she say so?”

  “She thought she was committing an organ bank crime.”

  Alan’s face twisted. “That isn’t a whole lot of help.”

  The dredge moved into the dust, sinking. The dust was deep. I’d felt it.

  “It could help,” I said. “We have to prove that someone else tried to shoot Chris without showing what Naomi was actually doing. Then we could get her revived.”

  “By God, we could! If that’s Penzler down there, then the original assassin got him.”

  “Maybe not. His methods seem to have turned crude. We’d still want to show how he could fire a laser at Chris Penzler’s window from out here and then get back into the city, or wherever he did go, and why I didn’t find him in the projection room. And after all, that might not even be Penzler’s body.
All I know is there’s someone down there.”

  “Um.”

  “What I’d rather do is show that what Naomi was doing wasn’t an organ bank crime. She should’ve discussed it with her lawyer. What I think she—”

  The dredge came out of the dust, and I dropped the conversation and loped over.

  The corpse wore a blue skintight suit. The right hand had been sliced off cleanly four inches above the wrist. The face seemed shrunken, but I would have recognized him even without the torso painting, the Bonnie Dalzell griffin clutching Earth in its claw.

  I opened my radio band and announced, “It’s Chris Penzler.”

  Jefferson examined the severed forearm. “Clean cut. Message laser on high,” he said. “The beam must have sliced right through. If there was rock behind him, we’ll find the marks.” He set some of the cops to searching.

  We didn’t bother to look for bootprints. The search party had left too many. But they hadn’t left puffer tracks. We found a set of puffer tracks and followed them backward from the pool until they disappeared on bare rock.

  Someone behind us announced that he had found the hand. Jefferson went back. I didn’t. Those tracks could lead from the general direction of the tilted boulder.

  Six nights ago Chris Penzler had glimpsed someone through his picture window. Only for an instant …and afterward he couldn’t decide which side of this particular boulder he’d been looking past. Maybe he’d come out to see.

  The flat side of the rock was in deep shadow. I stepped close to the rock, out of the sun, and waited for my darkened helmet to clear again and my eyes to adjust. Then I played my headlamp over the rock.

  My yell brought them running. They clustered around me to look at Chris Penzler’s dying message: big, malformed letters scrawled across the rock, black in the light of the headlamps.

  NAKF

  “He must have written it in his own blood,” Jefferson said. “In shadow, so the killer wouldn’t notice. He must have been jetting blood from the severed artery. But … that isn’t a name, is it?”

  Desiree said, “It isn’t anything. I think.”

  “The strap!” Laura cried in the joyful tones that go with the Eureka! sensation. “The strap; he must have used it for a tourniquet! He must have known he was dying—maybe he had to hide from the killer—” Her voice dropped. “It’s awful isn’t it?”

  “Take a scraping of that blood,” Jefferson ordered. “At least we’ll find out if it was Penzler’s. He must have had something in mind.”

  I got back to my room around midnight. I set it up on my phone screen:

  NAKF

  So here’s Chris Penzler out there on the meteor-torn moon, looking for clues. Maybe he remembers something. Maybe he finds something. Maybe not.

  But a killer finds him.

  A lunie citizen would be more likely to know it when Chris Penzler checked out a puffer. Assume he followed immediately … on foot, unless he was an idiot. I’d ask the computer if someone had checked out a puffer right after Chris did. Some killers are idiots.

  If Chris had recognized his killer, he’d have written a name. I’d get the computer to search the city directory. Offhand I didn’t know anyone on the moon whose name started with NAKF. Or with—I started filling in letters. Written in haste in jetting blood, and possibly in darkness, a K could be a ruined R, F could be E, N could be M or W …

  NARF NAKE NARE MAKF MAKE MARE WAKF WAKE WARE

  No names sprang to mind. And Chris wasn’t a lunie; here on the moon I knew everyone he did.

  NAKF NAOMI

  It was a bad fit. And Naomi had one hell of an alibi. I should be able to persuade the lunar law to disgorge her on the strength of Penzler’s murder. If there were indeed two killers after Chris’s blood—Naomi the clumsy one, somebody else the skillful or lucky or more straightforward one—Naomi could be returned to the holding tank.

  I called, “Chiron, phone. Get me Alan Watson.” And my nasty suspicious mind gave me:

  NAKF ALAN WATSON WATS

  Alan was out on the moon at the time, in the search party, looking for Chris Penzler himself. So maybe he found him. How much would Alan do for Naomi? Would he murder a stranger who had done her harm if it would buy her life?

  Alan’s long black-browed face appeared On the phone screen he was easier to take; his height didn’t show. “Hello, Gil.”

  An N could be a W with the first vertical botched, but an F could not be a botched S, I decided. I said, “I wondered if we can get Naomi out of Copernicus now.”

  “I’ve already filed with the court. All we can do now is wait I expect they’ll revive her, but it would help if we could tell them where she actually was. Gil, where was she?”

  “I should know that within a few hours.” I didn’t add that I might not tell him then.

  Assume Chris didn’t recognize his killer. He couldn’t give us a name if all he saw was a pressure suit Short, medium, or lunie? Inflated or skintight? Chris hadn’t bothered to tell us. Could he have had something more specific in mind? Like a torso painting?

  Lunch was a long time in the past. I had seen corpses uglier than Chris Penzler’s. Maybe I could have done something to save his life … but I still had no idea what it might be. I phoned down for a chicken and onion sandwich.

  Then I put the display back on the phone screen and stared at it.

  He must have known he was dying. He’d have kept it short. Unless I was overlooking some significance to NAKF, he had still run out of time or blood.

  Try NAKE, then. SNAKE? But if I made the F an unfinished E, then he wasn’t writing backward. And why should he? So try

  NAKF NAKED

  For a torso painting? That wouldn’t help much. Naked ladies were very popular as torso paintings … in the Belt, at least.

  Try something else. Picture a vindictive, dedicated killer tracking Chris across the moon, bare-assed but for his trusty laser … taking his vengeance just before internal pressure rips him apart in a gust of cold scarlet fog … no? Then how about a vehicle with a transparent bubble cockpit? Park it in shadow with the cockpit lights on, and Chris would see only the killer. But I didn’t know of any such vehicle. A custom job? And it would have shown on radar if it flew, would have left tracks if it didn’t.

  I tried some other words.

  My door announcer said, “Gil, are you there? It’s Laura.”

  “Chiron, door open.”

  She’d showered away the sweat secretions that accumulate on your skin when you’re in a pressure suit. I hadn’t. Suddenly I felt grimy. She said, “We’ve made a little progress. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “What have you got?”

  She sat down on the bed beside me, comfortably close. “Nobody checked out a puffer after Penzler did. Not till the search party went out. That puts our killer on foot. It would slow him down.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he can get a puffer without leaving a computer record. Wouldn’t he have to do that to get at the lasers?”

  “Um.”

  “Or if he was a cop with the search party, that would get him the puffer and the laser, too.”

  She scowled.

  “Skip it. What have you got on the body?”

  “Harry McCavity’s doing an autopsy outside the mirror works. The condition of the body … well, it’s freeze-dried. Harry got positively nasty when I wanted a time of death. And the tanks bled empty within half an hour, and his watch didn’t conveniently stop, either.”

  “Laura, can I ask you some questions about lunar customs?”

  She looked down at me. “Go ahead.”

  “I already know that people here are supposed to share a bed only when they’re married to each other. What I want to know is, if two unmarried people did share a bed, would they be expected to share a bed only with each other?”

  Her voice turned brittle, and she sat very straight on the bed. “What started you on this?”

  “I’ve been getting some funny vibrations.” I didn’
t name Jefferson.

  “Yes. Well. I haven’t been bragging about the short, strong fellow I managed to entrap, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t know how anyone would know about us.”

  “Maybe lunies tend to know each other better than flatlanders do. Smaller population. Smaller cities. And there is such a thing as telepathy.” And Laura had been smiling and sparkling as we had left her apartment that morning. Someone might have noticed.

  “What is it you want to know? Should you resume your relationship with Dr. Grimes? Did you think you needed my permission?”

  “I think there are five lunies I don’t want to offend,” I said. “You and four committee delegates from four lunar cities. If you and I are now supposed to be monogamous, I want to know it. I came to the moon largely because Taffy was here. Should I now stop seeing Taffy in private? Or at all? Come on, give me some help. If the committee is too busy fighting to make decisions, everybody loses.”

  She screwed her eyes almost shut. “This is all new to me. Let me think.” Pause. “I want you for myself. Is that immoral?”

  “Depends on where you are. Silly but true. I am flattered.”

  “All right. Stop seeing her in public.” By now she was on her feet and pacing like a tiger. “Even in the halls. In private, make sure it’s private. No phone calls. No room service breakfast for two.”

  “Taffy’s gone to Marxgrad.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got her own career to pursue. Now she’s pursued it to the back of the moon. But I had to know these things for future reference, Laura. Are you angry?”

  She looked at me. She turned to the door. I said, “Remember, I’m likely to believe anything you tell me. Call me ignorant. Are you angry? Shall we avoid each other from now on?”

  She turned back. “I’m angry. I made the same mistake anyone else would have. I want you back in my bed as soon as I get over this!” She swung around to the door and back again. Hesitated. Finally she dropped back on the bed just behind my shoulder.