Flatlander - Larry Niven [117]
“Nope. It was just one of those things.”
“Lust at first sight. I think it’s his legs I like best. Belt men have their muscles mainly in the arms and shoulders.”
“So you only love me for my legs, huh?”
“And your mind. Didn’t I mention your mind?”
We had reached the elevators. I started to step in, then told them I’d left something in my room, which was true enough.
Now the hall was empty. I called the door open, Laura joined me, and we went down to breakfast. We weren’t even holding hands. But our hands brushed sometimes, and Laura kept suppressing a smile, and I wondered just how much we were hiding. For that matter, I’d seen Reinecke’s oddly sardonic smile as the elevator doors closed.
At breakfast I told Laura I wanted to check out a puffer.
She didn’t like it. “Isn’t there a committee meeting?”
“I’ll skip a day. Hell, this is committee business. If the courts have convicted an innocent person—”
She shrugged angrily. “If she didn’t try to murder Penzler, then she was doing something else!”
The idea percolated through to me that as a man newly in love, I was supposed to forget old loves entirely. Laura didn’t want to hear that I still hoped to save Naomi Mitchison.
I sidestepped again. “I left a case half-solved once,” I said, and I told her how Raymond Sinclair’s surrealistic death scene was linked to two organleggers found with their faces burned down to the bone. I had nearly reached the morgue in the same condition.
Maybe she bought it. She did help me check out a puffer.
The puffers were racked along one wall of the mirror works. Today there were several gaps. The only difference between the orange city police puffers and the rentals was that the rentals came in all colors.
I chose a police puffer. It was a low-slung motorcycle with a wide padded bucket seat and a cargo framework behind. There were three tanks. The motor had no intake. An exhaust pipe forked to left and right just under the seat. The shock absorbers were huge, and the tires were great fat soft tubes.
Laura showed me how to get it going and tried to tell me how to run it, how to maneuver, how to steer, where not to steer. “I could cross a dust pool,” she told me, “like a bat out of hell, and if you slow down you’ll turn over, and if the wheel hits a submerged rock you’ll be under the dust trying to figure out which way is up. You stay away from dust pools. Don’t hit any rocks. If you fall, get your arms over your helmet.”
“I’ll stick to the road,” I said. “That’s safe, isn’t it?”
“I guess so.” She was reluctant to admit that anything was safe.
“Why are there three tanks?”
“Oxygen, hydrogen, water vapor. We don’t throw away water, Gil. The exhaust is just a safety valve, and of course it powers the side jets. You shouldn’t have to use them, but do it if you think you’re falling over.”
I climbed on. I could barely feel the vibration. “It isn’t puffing,” I noticed.
“It’s not supposed to. If it starts puffing steam, something’s wrong. That’s why they’re called puffers. If it happens, slow way down and check your air, because you may have to walk home.” She insisted on showing me how to bleed oxygen from the puffer tank into my backpack.
“Have you got all that?”
“Yup.”
“Keep it slow till you learn how to steer. This is the moon. You’ll have to lean farther than you think.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t get off till 2000. Will you be back by then?”
“I’m bound to.”
We clinked helmets in lieu of a kiss, and I went.
From the city’s east face, the mirror works, the trade road hooked around and aimed straight west. I bounced along at a fair rate for an off-road vehicle. I marked the tilted rock far off to my left and a road that wound uphill to my right, up to the air and water plant. I had seen it from a height, miniaturized in the projection room: mirrors mounted around the rim of a fair-sized recent crater, focusing their light down onto a pressure vessel filled with red-hot lunar rock. Pipes to lead hydrogen in, water vapor out. I was tempted to go up and look at the real thing. Maybe on the way back