Flatlander - Larry Niven [1]
Inside, a lobby done in anonymous modern. Lots of metal and plastic showing, lightweight comfortable chairs without arms, big ashtrays, plenty of indirect lighting, a low ceiling, no wasted space. The whole room might have been stamped out with a die. It wasn’t supposed to look small, but it did, and that warned you what the rooms would be like. You’d pay your rent by the cubic centimeter.
I found the manager’s office and the manager, a soft-looking man with watery blue eyes. His conservative paper suit, dark red, seemed chosen to render him invisible, as did the style of his brown hair, worn long and combed straight back without a part. “Nothing like this has ever happened here,” he confided as he led me to the elevator banks. “Nothing. It would have been bad enough without his being a Belter, but now—” He cringed at the thought. “Newsmen. They’ll smother us.”
The elevator was coffin-sized, but with the handrails on the inside. It went up fast and smooth. I stepped out into a long, narrow hallway.
What would Owen have been doing in a place like this? Machinery lived here, not people.
Maybe it wasn’t Owen. Ordaz had been reluctant to commit himself. Besides, there’s no law against picking pockets. You couldn’t enforce such a law on this crowded planet. Everyone on Earth was a pickpocket.
Sure. Someone had died carrying Owen’s wallet.
I walked down the hallway to 1809.
It was Owen who sat grinning in the armchair. I took one good look at him, enough to be sure, and then I looked away and didn’t look back. But the rest of it was even more unbelievable.
No Belter could have taken that apartment. I was born in Kansas, but even I felt the awful anonymous chill. It would have driven Owen bats.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Did you know him well, Mr. Hamilton?”
“About as well as two men can know each other. He and I spent three years mining rocks in the main asteroid belt. You don’t keep secrets under those conditions.”
“Yet you didn’t know he was on Earth.”
“That’s what I can’t understand. Why the blazes didn’t he phone me if he was in trouble?”
“You’re an ARM,” said Ordaz. “An operative in the United Nations Police.”
He had a point. Owen was as honorable as any man I knew, but honor isn’t the same in the Belt. Belters think flatlanders are all crooks. They don’t understand that to a flatlander, picking pockets is a game of skill. Yet a Belter sees smuggling as the same kind of game, with no dishonesty involved. He balances the thirty percent tariff against possible confiscation of his cargo, and if the odds are right, he gambles.
Owen could have been doing something that would look honest to him but not to me.
“He could have been in something sticky,” I admitted. “But I can’t see him killing himself over it. And … not here. He wouldn’t have come here.”
Room 1809 was a living room and a bathroom and a closet. I’d glanced into the bathroom, knowing what I would find. It was the size of a comfortable shower stall. An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic, to become a washroom, a shower stall, a toilet, a dressing room, a steam cabinet. Luxurious in everything but size as long as you pushed the right buttons.
The living room was more of the same. A king bed was invisible behind a wall. The kitchen alcove, with basin and oven and grill and toaster, would fold into another wall; the sofa, chairs, and tables would vanish into the floor. One tenant and three guests would make a crowded cocktail party, a cozy dinner gathering, a closed poker game. Card table, dinner table, coffee table were all there, surrounded by the appropriate chairs, but only one set at a time would emerge from the floor. There was no refrigerator, no freezer, no bar. If a tenant needed food or drink, he phoned down and the supermarket on the third floor would send it up.
The tenant of such an apartment