Flatlander - Larry Niven [101]
“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 that. “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.”
Taffy 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 offense, my dear, but Naomi isn’t beautiful by lunie standards. She’s stocky.”
“What,” Taffy wondered, “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.
The city hall complex was four stories deep, with the mayor’s office on the ground level. A room on the second level was reserved for the conference.
I got there at 0800. Eight-foot-tall Bertha Carmody was in animated discussion with a small, birdlike Belt woman in late middle age. They broke off long enough to introduce the stranger: Hildegarde Quitting, Fourth Speaker for the Belt Government.
Chris Penzler was in a bulky armchair equipped with safety straps and a ground-effect skirt. Soft foam covered his chest. He seemed to be brooding on his wrongs.
I said hello anyway. He looked up. “You’ll find coffee and rolls on the side table,” he said, and tried to wave in the right direction. “Ow!”
“Hurts?”
“Yah.”
I got coffee in a small-mouthed bottle with a foam plastic sleeve. Other delegates trickled in until we were all present.
A lunie I hadn’t met, Charles Ward of Copernicus, moved to elect a chairman, then nominated Bertha Carmody of Tycho Dome. With four lunies out of ten delegates, the chairman was bound to be a lunie, so I voted for Bertha. So did everybody else. The lunies seemed surprised at their easy victory. But Bertha was a good choice; she had the loudest voice among us.
We spent the morning covering old ground.
Belt and moon and United Nations each had its own ax to grind. Officially the moon was a satellite of Earth and was subject to United Nations law, in which even minor crimes carried the death penalty: laws designed not only to punish the guilty but also to supply transplant organs to the innocent voting public.
The ethical gap between Earth and Belt was as vast as the physical gap. On Earth the hospitals had been supplied by criminals for well over a hundred years. When Luke Garner was young the death penalty had been revived for murder, kidnapping, treason, and the like. As medical techniques had improved and spread to the have-not nations, demands on the public organ banks had grown. The death penalty was imposed for armed robbery, rape, burglary. A plea of insanity became worthless. Eventually felons died for income tax evasion or driving while high on funny chemicals.
Belt hospitals kept organ banks, but there were major differences. The Belt used fewer transplants. Belters tend to let evolution take care of the careless ones; they are not egalitarians. Space accidents don’t tend to leave medical cases, anyway. The Belt didn’t perform its own executions. Up to twenty years ago their practice had been to ship convicts to Earth and buy the organs back. In theory, their law would not be affected by the flatlanders’ greed for life.
The moon’s shallower