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Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com
Copyright ©1975 by Larry Niven
First published in Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg, 1975
ISBN 1-59062-135-2
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* * *
The ARM Building had been abnormally quiet for some months now.
We'd needed the rest—at first. But these last few mornings the silence had had an edgy quality. We waved at each other on our paths to our respective desks, but our heads were elsewhere. Some of us had a restless look. Others were visibly, determinedly busy.
Nobody wanted to join a mother hunt.
This past year we'd managed to cut deep into the organlegging activities in the West Coast area. Pats on the back all around, but the results were predictable: other activities were going to increase. Sooner or later the newspapers would start screaming about stricter enforcement of the Fertility Laws, and then we'd all be out hunting down illegitimate parents ... all of us who were not involved in something else.
It was high time I got involved in something else.
This morning I walked to my office through the usual edgy silence. I ran coffee, carried it to my desk, punched for messages at the computer terminal. A slender file slid from the slot. A hopeful sign. I picked it up one-handed so that I could sip coffee as I went through it and let it fall open in the middle.
Color holographs jumped out at me. I was looking down through a pair of windows over two morgue tables.
Stomach to brain: LURCH! What a hell of an hour to be looking at people with their faces burned off! Get eyes to look somewhere else and don't try to swallow that coffee. Why don't you change jobs?
They were hideous. Two of them, a man and a woman. Something had burned their faces away down to the skulls and beyond: bones and teeth charred, brain tissue cooked.
I swallowed and kept looking. I'd seen the dead before. These had just hit me at the wrong time.
Not a laser weapon, I thought ... though that was chancy. There are thousands of jobs for lasers and thousands of varieties to do the jobs. Not a hand laser, anyway. The pencil-thin beam of a hand laser would have chewed channels in the flesh. This had been a wide, steady beam of some kind.
I flipped back to the beginning and skimmed.
Details: They'd been found on the Wilshire slidewalk in West Los Angeles around 4:30 A.M. People don't use the slidewalks that late. They're afraid of organleggers. The bodies could have traveled up to a couple of miles before anyone saw them.
Preliminary autopsy: They'd been dead three or four days. No signs of drugs or poisons or puncture marks. Apparently the burns had been the only cause of death.
It must have been quick, then: a single flash of energy. Otherwise they'd have tried to dodge, and there'd be burns elsewhere. There were none. Just the faces and char marks around the collars.
There was a memo from Bates, the coroner. From the look of them, they might have been killed by some new weapon. So he'd sent the file over to us. Could we find anything in the ARM files that would fire a blast of heat or light a foot across?
I sat back and stared into the holos and thought about it.
A light weapon with a beam a foot across? They make lasers in that size, but as war weapons, used from orbit. One of those would have vaporized the heads, not charred them.
There were other possibilities. Death by torture, with the heads held in clamps in the blast from a commercial attitude jet. Or some kind of weird industrial accident: a flash explosion that had caught them both looking over a desk or something. Or even a laser beam reflected from a convex mirror.
Forget about its being an accident. The way the bodies were abandoned reeked of guilt, of something to be covered up. Maybe Bates was right. A new illegal weapon.
And I could be deeply involved in searching for it when the mother hunt started.
* * * *
The ARM has three basic functions. We hunt organleggers. We monitor world technology: new developments that might create new weapons or that might affect the world economy or the balance of power among nations. And we enforce the Fertility Laws.
Come, let us be honest with ourselves. Of the three, protecting the Fertility Laws is probably the most important.
Organleggers don't aggravate the population problem.
Monitoring of technology is necessary enough, but it may have happened too late. There are enough fusion power plants and fusion rocket motors and fusion crematoriums and fusion seawater distilleries around to let any madman or group thereof blow up the Earth or any selected part of it.
But if a lot of people in one region started having illegal babies, the rest of the world would scream. Some nations might even get mad enough to abandon population control. Then what? We've got eighteen billion on Earth now. We couldn't handle more.
So the mother hunts are necessary. But I hate them. It's no fun hunting down some poor sick woman so desperate to have children that she'll go through hell to avoid her six-month contraceptive shots. I'll get out of it if I can.
I did some obvious things. I sent a note to Bates at the coroner's office. Send all further details on the autopsies and let me know if the corpses are identified. Retinal prints and brain-wave patterns were obviously out, but they might get something on gene patterns and fingerprints.
I spent some time wondering where two bodies had been kept for three to four days, and why, before being abandoned in a way that could have been used three days earlier. But that was a problem for the LAPD detectives. Our concern was with the weapon.
So I started writing a search pattern for the computer: Find me a widget that will fire a beam of a given description. From the pattern of penetration into skin and bone and brain tissue, there was probably a way to express the frequency of the light as a function of the duration of the blast, but I didn't fool with that. I'd pay for my laziness later, when the computer handed me a foot-thick list of light-emitting machinery and I had to wade through it.
I had punched in the instructions and was relaxing with more coffee and a cigarette when Ordaz called.
Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz was a slender, dark-skinned man with straight black hair and soft black eyes. The first time I saw him in a phone screen, he had been telling me of a good friend's murder. Two years later I still flinched when I saw him.
“Hello, Julio. Business or pleasure?”
“Business, Gil. It is to be regretted.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Both. There is murder involved, but there is also a machine ... Look, can you see it behind me?” Ordaz stepped out of the field of view, then reached invisibly to turn the phone camera.
I looked into somebody's living room. There was a wide circle of discoloration in the green indoor grass rug. In the center of the circle, a machine and a man's body.
Was Julio putting me on? The body was old, half-mummified. The machine was big and cryptic in shape, and it glowed with a subdued, eerie blue light.
Ordaz sounded serious enough. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No. That's some machine.” Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. “Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?”
Ordaz came back o
n. He was smiling, barely. “I'm afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it.”
“Where are you now?”
“In Raymond Sinclair's apartment on the top floor of the Rodewald Building in Santa Monica.”
“I'll come myself,” I said. My tongue suddenly felt thick.
“Please land on the roof. We are holding the elevator for examination.”
“Sure.” I hung up.
Raymond Sinclair!
I'd never met Raymond Sinclair. He was something of a recluse. But the ARM had dealt with him once in connection with one of his inventions, the FyreStop device. And everyone knew that he had lately been working on an interstellar drive. It was only a rumor, of course ... but if someone had killed the brain that held that secret...
I went.
* * * *
The Rodewald Building was forty stories of triangular prism with a row of triangular balconies going up each side. The balconies stopped at the thirty-eighth floor.
The roof was a garden. There were rosebushes in bloom along one edge, full-grown elms nestled in ivy along another, and a miniature forest of bonsai trees along the third. The landing pad and carport were in the center. A squad car floated down ahead of my taxi, then slid under the carport to give me room to land.
A cop in a vivid orange uniform came out to watch me come down. He was carrying a deep-sea fishing pole, still in its kit.
He said, “May I see some ID, please?”
I had my ARM ident in my hand. He checked it in the console in the squad car, then handed it back. “The inspector's waiting downstairs,” he said.
“What's the pole for?”
He smiled suddenly, almost secretively. “You'll see.”
We left the garden smells via a flight of concrete stairs. They led down into a small room half-full of gardening tools and a heavy door with a spy-eye in it. Ordaz opened the door for us. He shook my hand briskly, glanced at the cop. “You found something? Good.”
The cop said, “There's a sporting goods store six blocks from here. The manager let me borrow it. He made sure I knew the name of the store.”
“Yes, there will certainly be publicity on this matter. Come, Gil.” Ordaz took my arm. “You should examine this before we turn it off.”
No garden smells here, but there was something—a whiff of something long dead—that the air-conditioning hadn't quite cleared away. Ordaz walked me into the living room.
It looked like somebody's idea of a practical joke.
The indoor grass covered Sinclair's living room floor, wall to wall. In a perfect fourteen-foot circle between the sofa and the fireplace, the rug was brown and dead. Elsewhere it was green and thriving.
A man's mummy, dressed in stained slacks and turtleneck, lay on its back in the center of the circle. At a guess it had been about six months dead. It wore a big wristwatch with extra dials on the face and a fine-mesh platinum band, loose now around a wrist of bones and brown skin. The back of the skull had been smashed open, possibly by the classic blunt instrument lying next to it.
If the fireplace was false—it almost had to be; nobody burns wood—the fireplace instruments were genuine nineteenth- or twentieth-century antiques. The rack was missing a poker. A poker lay inside the circle, in the dead grass next to the disintegrating mummy.
The glowing device sat just in the center of the magic circle.
I stepped forward, and a man's voice spoke sharply. “Don't go inside that circle of rug. It's more dangerous than it looks.”
It was a man I knew: Officer-One Valpredo, a tall man with a small, straight mouth and a long, narrow Italian face.
“Looks dangerous enough to me,” I said.
“It is. I reached in there myself,” Valpredo told me, “right after we got here. I thought I could flip the switch off. My whole arm went numb. Instantly. No feeling all. I yanked it away fast, but for a minute or so after that my whole arm was dead meat. I thought I'd lost it. Then it was all pins and needles, like I'd slept on it.”
The cop who had brought me in had almost finished assembling the deep-sea fishing pole.
Ordaz waved into the circle. “Well? Have you ever seen anything like this?”
I shook my head, studying the violet-glowing machine. “Whatever it is, it's brand-new. Sinclair's really done it this time.”
An uneven line of solenoids was attached to a plastic frame with homemade joins. Blistered spots on the plastic showed where other objects had been attached and later removed. A breadboard bore masses of heavy wiring. There were six big batteries hooked in parallel and a strange, heavy piece of sculpture in what we later discovered was pure silver, with wiring attached at three curving points. The silver was tarnished almost black, and there were old file marks at the edges.
Near the center of the arrangement, just in front of the silver sculpture, were two concentric solenoids embedded in a block of clear plastic. They glowed blue shading to violet. So did the batteries. A less perceptible violet glow radiated from everywhere on the machine, more intensely in the interior parts.
That glow bothered me more than anything else. It was too theatrical. It was like something a special effects man might add to a cheap late-night thriller to suggest a mad scientist's laboratory.
I moved around to get a closer look at the dead man's watch.
“Keep your head out of the field!” Valpredo said sharply. I nodded. I squatted on my heels outside the borderline of dead grass.
The dead man's watch was going like crazy. The minute hand was circling the dial every seven seconds or so. I couldn't find the second hand at all.
I backed away from the arc of dead grass and stood up. Interstellar drive, hell. This blue-glowing monstrosity looked more like a time machine gone wrong.
I studied the single-throw switch welded to the plastic frame next to the batteries. A length of nylon line dangled from the horizontal handle. It looked like someone had tugged the switch on from outside the field by using the line, but he'd have had to hang from the ceiling to tug it off that way.
“I see why you couldn't send it over to ARM Headquarters. You can't even touch it. You stick your arm or your head in there for a second, and that's ten minutes without a blood supply.”
Ordaz said, “Exactly.”
“It looks like you could reach in there with a stick and flip that switch off.”
“Perhaps. We are about to try that.” He waved at the man with the fishing pole. “There was nothing in this room long enough to reach the switch. We had to send—”
“Wait a minute. There's a problem.”
He looked at me. So did the cop with the fishing pole.
“That switch could be a self-destruct. Sinclair was supposed to be a secretive bastard. Or the field might hold considerable potential energy. Something might go blooey.”
Ordaz sighed. “We must risk it. Gil, we have measured the rotation of the dead man's wristwatch. One hour per seven seconds. Fingerprints, footprints, laundry marks, residual body odor, stray eyelashes, all disappearing at an hour per seven seconds.” He gestured, and the cop moved in and began trying to hook the switch.
“Already we may never know just when he was killed,” Ordaz said.
The tip of the pole wobbled in large circles, steadied beneath the switch, made contact. I held my breath. The pole bowed. The switch snapped up, and suddenly the violet glow was gone. Valpredo reached into the field, warily, as if the air might be red hot. Nothing happened, and he relaxed.
Then Ordaz began giving orders, and quite a lot happened. Two men in lab coats drew a chalk outline around the mummy and the poker. They moved the mummy onto a stretcher, put the poker in a plastic bag, and put it next to the mummy.
I said, “Have you identified that?”
“I'm afraid so,” Ordaz said. “Raymond Sinclair had his own autodoc—”
“Did he? Those things are expensive.”
“Yes. Raymond Sinclair was a wealthy man. He owned the top two fl
oors of this building and the roof. According to records in his ’doc, he had a new set of bud teeth implanted two months ago.” Ordaz pointed to the mummy, to the skinned-back dry lips and the buds of new teeth that were just coming in.
Right. That was Sinclair.
That brain had made miracles, and someone had smashed it with a wrought-iron rod. The interstellar drive ... that glowing Goldberg device? Or had it been still inside his head?
I said, “We'll have to get whoever did it. We'll have to. Even so...” Even so. No more miracles.
“We may have her already,” Julio said.
I looked at him.
“There is a girl in the autodoc. We think she is Dr. Sinclair's great-niece, Janice Sinclair.”
* * * *
It was a standard drugstore autodoc, a thing like a giant coffin with walls a foot thick and a headboard covered with dials and red and green lights. The girl's face was calm, her breathing shallow. Sleeping Beauty. Her arms were in the guts of the ’doc, hidden by bulky rubbery sleeves.
She was lovely enough to stop my breath. Soft brown hair showing around the electrode cap; small, perfect nose and mouth; smooth pale blue skin shot with silver threads...
That last was an evening dye job. Without it the impact of her would have been much lessened. The blue shade varied slightly to emphasize the shape of her body and the curve of her cheekbones. The silver lines varied, too, being denser in certain areas, guiding the eye in certain directions: to the tips of her breasts or across the slight swell of abdominal muscle to a lovely oval navel.
She'd paid high for that dye job. But she would be beautiful without it.
Some of the headboard lights were red. I punched for a readout and was jolted. The ’doc had been forced to amputate her right arm. Gangrene.
She was in for a hell of a shock when she woke up.
“All right,” I said. “She's lost her arm. That doesn't make her a killer.”
Ordaz asked, “If she were homely, would it help?”
I laughed. “You question my dispassionate judgment? Men have died for less!” Even so, I thought he could be right. There was good reason to think that the killer was now missing an arm.