Bera hit the door hard and branched right; I branched left. Those tiny apartments don’t have many places to hide. The water bed was gone, replaced by an L-shaped couch and coffee table. There was nothing behind the couch. I covered the bathroom while Bera kicked the door open.
Nobody here but us. Chambers lost his astonished look, smiled and clapped for us. I bowed.
“You must have been serious,” he said. “What kind of danger? Couldn’t it have waited for morning?”
“Yah, but I couldn’t have slept,” I said, coming toward him. “I’m going to owe you a big fat apology if this doesn’t work out.”
He backed away.
“Hold still. This will only take a second.” I advanced on him. Bera was behind him now. He hadn’t hurried. His long legs give him deceptive speed.
Chambers backed away, backed away, backed into Bera and squeaked in surprise. He dithered, then made a break for the bathroom.
Bera reached out, wrapped one arm around Chambers’ waist and pinned his arms with the other. Chambers struggled like a madman. I stepped wide around them, moved in sideways to avoid Chambers’ thrashing legs, reached out to touch his face with my imaginary hand.
He froze. Then he screamed.
“That’s what you were afraid of,” I told him. “You never dreamed I could reach through a phone screen to do this.” I reached into his head, felt smooth muscle and grainy bone and sinus cavities like bubbles. He tossed his head, but my hand went with it. I ran imaginary fingertips along the smooth inner surface of his skull. It was there. A ridge of scar, barely raised above the rest of the bone, too fine for X-rays. It ran in a closed curve from the base of his skull up through the temples to intersect his eye sockets.
“It’s him,” I said.
Bera screamed in his ear. “You pig!”
Anubis went limp.
“I can’t find a joining at the brain stem. They must have transplanted the spinal cord too: the whole central nervous system.” I found scars along the vertebrae. “That’s what they did, all right.”
Anubis spoke almost casually, as if he’d lost a chess game. “All right, that’s a gotcha. I concede. Let’s sit down.”
“Sure.” Bera threw him at the couch. He hit it, more or less. He adjusted himself, looking astonished at Bera’s bad behavior. What was the man so excited about?
Bera told him. “You pig. Coring him like that, making a vehicle out of the poor bastard. We never thought of a brain transplant.”
“It’s a wonder I thought of it myself. The stuff from one donor is worth over a million marks in surgery charges. Why should anyone use a whole donor for one transplant? But once I thought of it, it made all kinds of sense. The stuff wasn’t selling anyway.”
Funny: they both talked as if they’d known each other a long time. There aren’t many people an organlegger will regard as people, but an ARM is one of them. We’re organleggers too, in a sense.
Bera was holding a sonic on him. Anubis ignored it. He said, “The only problem was the money.”
“Then you thought of the corpsicle heirs,” I said.
“Yah. I went looking for a rich corpsicle with a young, healthy direct-line heir. Leviticus Hale seemed made for the part. He was the first one I noticed.”
“He’s pretty noticeable, isn’t he? A healthy middle-aged man sleeping there among all those battered accident cases. Only two heirs, both orphans, one kind of introverted, the other…What did you do to Charlotte?”
“Charlotte Chambers? We drove her mad. We had to. She was the only one who’d notice if Holden Chambers suddenly got too different.”
“What did you do to her?”
“We made a wirehead out of her.”
“The hell. Someone would have noticed the contact in her scalp.”
“No, no, no. We used one of those helmets you find in the ecstasy shops. It stimulates a current in the pleasure center of the brain, by induction, so a customer can try it out before the peddler actually drops the wire into his brain. We kept her in the helmet for nine days, on full. When we stopped the current, she just wasn’t interested in anything anymore.”
“How did you know it would work?”
“Oh, we tried it out on a few prospects. It worked fine. It didn’t hurt them after they were broken up.”
“Okay.” I went to the phone and dialed ARM Headquarters.
“It solved the money problem beautifully,” he ran on. “I plowed most of it into advertising charges. And there’s nothing suspicious about Leviticus Hale’s money. When the second Freezer Bill goes through—well, I guess not. Not now. Unless—”
“No,” Bera said for both of us.
I told the man on duty where we were, and to stop monitoring the tracers, and to call in the operatives watching corpsicle heirs. Then I hung up.
“I spent six months studying Chambers’ college courses. I didn’t want to blow his career. Six months! Answer me one,” said Anubis, curiously anxious. “Where did I go wrong? What gave me away?”
“You were beautiful,” I told him wearily. “You never went out of character. You should have been an actor. Would have been safer, too. We didn’t suspect anything until—” I looked at my watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”
“Censored dammit! You would say that. When I saw you looking at me in Midgard I thought that was it. That floating cigarette. You’d got Loren, now you were after me.”
I couldn’t help it. I roared. Anubis sat there, taking it. He was beginning to blush.
They were shouting something, something I couldn’t make out. Something with a beat. DAdadadaDAdadada…
There was just room for me and Jackson Bera and Luke Garner’s travel chair on the tiny balcony outside Garner’s office. Far below, the marchers flowed past the ARM building in half orderly procession. Teams of them carried huge banners. LET THEM STAY DEAD, one suggested, and another in small print: why not revive them a bit at a time? FOR YOUR FATHER’S SAKE, a third said with deadly logic.
They were roped off from the spectators, roped off into a column down the middle of Wilshire. The spectators were even thicker. It looked like all of Los Angeles had turned out to watch. Some of them carried placards too. THEY WANT TO LIVE TOO, and ARE YOU A FREEZER VAULT HEIR?
“What is it they’re shouting?” Bera wondered. “It’s not the marchers, it’s the spectators. They’re drowning out the marchers.”
DAdadadaDAdadadaDAdadada, it rippled up to us on stray wind currents.
“We could see it better inside, in the boob cube,” Garner said without moving. What held us was a metaphysical force, the knowledge that one is there, a witness.
Abruptly Garner asked, “How’s Charlotte Chambers?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Didn’t you call Menninger Institute this morning?”
“I mean I don’t know how to take it. They’ve done a wirehead operation on her. They’re giving her just enough current to keep her interested. It’s working, I mean she’s talking to people, but…”
“It’s got to be better than being catatonic,” Bera said.
“Does it? There’s no way to turn off a wirehead. She’ll have to go through life with a battery under her hat. When she comes back far enough into the real world, she’ll find a way to boost the current and bug right out again.”
“Think of her as walking wounded.” Bern shrugged, shifting an invisible weight on his shoulders. “There isn’t any good answer. She’s been hurt, man!”
“There’s more to it than that,” said Luke Garner. “We need to know if she can be cured. There are more wireheads every day. It’s a new vice. We need to learn how to control it. What the bleep is happening down there?”
The bystanders were surging against the ropes. Suddenly they were through in a dozen places, converging on the marchers. It was a swirling mob scene. They were still chanting, and suddenly I caught it.
ORganleggersORganleggersORganleggers…
“That’s
it!” Bera shouted in pleased surprise. “Anubis is getting too much publicity. It’s good versus evil!”
The rioters started to collapse in curved ribbon patterns. Copters overhead were spraying them with sonic stun cannon.
Bera said, “They’ll never pass the second Freezer Bill now.”
Never is a long time to Luke Garner. He said, “Not this time, anyway. We ought to start thinking about that. A lot of people have been applying for operations. There’s quite a waiting list. When the second Freezer Bill fails—”
I saw it. “They’ll start going to organleggers. We can keep track of them. Tracers.”
“That’s what I had in mind.”
Malibu Comics has bought Gil the ARM! By now you may already have seen an issue or three.
I’ve been asked why I don’t write more of Gil the ARM.
Because it’s hard work, that’s why! A science fiction detective story has to follow two sets of rules. My problem is that I don’t presently have a mystery for Gil to solve…a full mystery story, that is. I’ve made extensive notes in my idle moments.
Consider the “light-thief.” A laser-augmented light-sail craft has been launched toward a nearby star. Somebody in the asteroid belt civilization is stealing the light, diverting it for industrial purposes.
Other notes involve a clone set. Like other clone sets, they’ve developed quick communication in the form of body language. Thus, nobody can lie to his clones. If one of a clone has committed a crime, they must all know it.
Then there’s a story outline from a Ted Brown of Lancaster, California. He’s interested in a collaboration, or in giving it away. He has Taffy Grimes disappearing, kidnapped by an organ bank supplier running a lunar hospital; Taffy’s fingerprints found on a murder weapon on Earth (but she wasn’t wearing the hand); the lunie cop Laura pregnant by Gil [following events in THE PATCHWORK GIRL]. There’s nothing wrong with any of this [though I’d want to fiddle with Brown’s text].
The truth is, I’m not in ARM mode. If I wrote a Gil the ARM story, I’d probably write two or three while I was still living there.
• • •
• • •
From THE PATCHWORK GIRL
This was another illustrated novella. I don’t give up easy.
I loved working all the old standard tricks into THE PATCHWORK GIRL. Here you’ll find echoes from John Dickson Carr: mirror tricks, disappearing ice daggers, the locked room murder, the dying message…
I’d feel silly giving you a piece of a detective story. Then again, most detective novels are about something else too. I’ve chosen a glimpse of sociology in 2125 A.D.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
We’d chosen a table in a far corner of the dining level. Lunie diners tended to cluster around the Garden. We could barely see the Garden, and nobody was in eavesdropping distance.
“It isn’t just that we aren’t man and wife,” McCavity said, stabbing the air with splay-ended chopsticks. “We can’t even keep the same hours. We enjoy each other…don’t we?”
Taffy nodded happily.
“I need constant reassurance, my dear. Gil, we enjoy each other, but when we see each other it’s generally over an open patient. I’m glad for Taffy that you’re here. Isn’t this kind of thing supposed to be normal on Earth?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s normal where I’ve lived…California, Kansas, Australia…Over most of the Earth we tend to keep recreational sex separate from having children. There are the Fertility Laws, of course. The government doesn’t tell people how to use their birthrights, but we do check the baby’s tissue rejection spectrum to see which father has used up a birthright. Don’t get the idea that Earth is all one culture. The Arabs are back to harems, for God’s sake, and so were the Mormons, for a while.”
“Harems? What about the birthrights?”
“The harems are recreation, as far as the sheik is concerned, and of course he uses up his own birthrights. When they’re gone the ladies take sperm from some healthy genius with an unlimited birthright and the right skin color, and the sheik raises the children as the next generation of aristocrats.”
Harry ate while he thought. Then, “It sounds wonderful, by Allah! But for us, having children is a big thing. We tend to stay faithful. I’m the freak. And I know of a lunie who fathered a child for two good friends…but I could maybe get killed for naming them.”
I said, “Okay, we’re a ménage à at least trois. But you would like it noised abroad that Taffy and I are steady roommates.”
“It would be convenient”
“Would it be convenient for me? Harry, I gather lunies don’t like that sort of thing. There are four lunie delegates in the Conference. I can’t alienate them.”
Taffy was frowning. “Futz! I hadn’t thought of that.”
Harry said, “I did. Gil, it’ll help you. What the lunie citizen really wants to know is that you aren’t running around compromising the honor of lunie women.”
I looked at Taffy. She said, “I think he’s right. I can’t swear to it”
“Okay.”
We ate. It was mostly vegetables, fresh, with good variety. I had almost finished a side dish, beef with onions and green pepper over rice, before I wondered. Beef?
I looked up into Harry’s grin. “Imported,” he said, and laughed as my jaw dropped. “No, not from Earth! Can you imagine the delta-V? Imported from Tycho. They’ve got an underground bubble big enough to graze cattle. It costs like blazes, of course. We’re fairly wealthy here.”
Dessert was strawberry shortcake, with whipped cream from Tycho. The coffee was imported from Earth, but freeze-dried. I wondered if they saved anything that way, given that the water in coffee beans had to be imported anyway…then kicked myself. Lunies don’t import water. They import hydrogen. They run the hydrogen past heated oxygen-bearing rock to get water vapor.
So I sipped my coffee and asked, “May we talk business?”
“None of us are squeamish,” McCavity said.
“The wound, then. Would a layer of bathwater spread the beam that much?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s never happened before.”
“Your best guess, then.”
“Gil, it had to be enough, unless you’ve got another explanation.”
“Mmm…there was a case in Warsaw where a killer put a dot of oil over the aperture of a laser. The beam was supposed to spread a little, just enough that the police couldn’t identify the weapon. It would have worked fine if he hadn’t got drunk and bragged about it.”
McCavity shrugged his eyebrows. “Not here. Any damn fool would guess it was a message laser.”
“We know the beam spread. We’re speculating.”
Harry’s eyes went distant and dreamy. “Would the oil vaporize?”
“Sure. Instantly.”
“The beam would constrict in mid-burn. That would fit. The hole in Penzler’s chest looked like the beam changed width in the middle of the burn.”
“It constricted?”
“It constricted, or expanded, or there’s something we haven’t thought of.”
“Futz. Okay. Do you know Naomi Mitchison?”
“Vaguely.” Harry seemed to withdraw a little.
“Not intimately?”
“No.”
Taffy was looking at him. We waited.
“I grew up here,” Harry said abruptly. “I never make proposals to a woman unless I have reason to think they’ll be accepted. Okay, I must have read the signals wrong. She reacted like an insulted married lunie woman! So I apologized and went away, and we haven’t spoken since. You’re right, flatlanders aren’t all the same. A week ago I would have said we were friends. Now…no, I don’t know the lady.”
“Do you hate her?”
“What? No.”
Taffy said, “Maybe your killer doesn’t care if Penzler lives or dies. Maybe it’s Naomi he wants to hurt.”
I mulled t
hat “I don’t like it. First, how would he know he could make it stick? There might have been someone else out there. Second, it gives us a whole damn city full of suspects.” I noticed, or imagined, Harry’s uneasiness. “Not you, Harry. You sweated blood to save Chris. It would have been trivial to kill him while the ’doc was cutting him up.”
Harry grinned. “So what? It was already an organ bank crime for Naomi.”
“Yes, but he saw something. He might remember more.”
Tally asked, “Who else wouldn’t want to frame Naomi?”
“I’m really not taking the idea too seriously,” I said, “but…I guess I’d want to know who she insulted. Who made passes and got slapped down, and who took it badly.”
Harry said, “You won’t find many lunie suspects.”
“The men are too careful?”
“That, and—No offence, my dear, but Naomi isn’t beautiful by lunie standards. She’s stocky.”
“What,” wondered Tally, “does that make me?”
Harry grinned at her. “Stocky. I told you I was a freak”
She grinned back at that tall, narrow offshoot of human stock…and I found myself grinning too. They did get along. It was a pleasure to watch them.
We broke it up soon afterward. Taffy was on duty, and I needed my sleep.
• • •
• • •
Characters in time-travel stories often complain that English isn’t really built to handle time travel. The tenses get all fouled up. We in the trade call this problem Excedrin Headache number [square root sign] –3.14159…
“The Theory and Practice of Time Travel,” 1971
LEVIATHAN!
SVETZ
You can’t make time travel rational. Never mind reconciling time travel with physics; you can’t even make it internally consistent!
[I tried it, for a speech. Bjo Trimble did a cartoon while I spoke. It showed Niven at the podium explaining, “Therefore time travel is fantasy.” Niven is standing behind him, smirking, about to tap Niven on the shoulder.]