Flatlander - Larry Niven [121]
Jefferson and Tom Reinecke kept going. They glanced back at me, then resumed their search by eye alone, three to four hundred yards from the west wall of the city.
I looked around. The tilted rock was small enough to heft in both arms, except that it wouldn’t have moved, of course. I saw tiny orange suits with bubble helmets scattered over the rocks to my west. I called, “What kind of suit would Chris be wearing?”
“Blue, skintight, with a gold and bronze griffin on the chest,” Jefferson called back.
There were annoying blank spots in the landscape where the Watchbird’s cameras weren’t reaching. I tried to feel around in them, but my talent wasn’t up to that. I felt nothing.
I found no blue skintight suits, vertical or horizontal. Where Reinecke and Jefferson were searching, bright orange puffers were parked in a ring on flat ground. None in my area.
There was a deep dust pool twenty yards south of the tilted rock. The surface looked roiled. I ran my imaginary hand beneath the surface and flinched violently. Then I made myself touch it again.
I called, “I’ve found the puffer. It’s under the dust.”
One and all, they abandoned their own search. Desiree reached me first. They watched (for what?) while I let go of the puffer and searched further. I found it almost at once. I said, “God.”
Desiree said, “What? Penzler?”
I closed my hand around it. It felt light and dry, like a dead lizard left in the sun. “Somebody. A suit with somebody inside.” I made my imaginary fingertips follow the contours of the thing, though there was nothing I wanted less in the world. “God. His hand is gone.”
My hand stopped sending. My talent had quit. Imaginary hand, hell; it’s my mind, my unprotected mind, that feels out the textures of what I touch. I can take only so much of that.
“We’ll have to check this out,” Jefferson said.
“Use your belt phone. Send the search party that way. Tell them, we’ll join them as soon as we can.”
It took almost an hour. I was twitchy with impatience. When we finally set forth, our team included Jefferson, both newstapers, dredging machinery, and a couple of orange-clad operators.
The Earth was a broad crescent, not quite half-full. The sun was well up the sky, leaving fewer shadows, but they were impenetrably black. Our headlamps didn’t help. Our bubble helmets had darkened, and our eyes had adjusted to lunar day.
The dozen cops on the original search team were already waiting at the dust pool. Laura Drury bounced up to me. “Do you really think he’s down there?”
“I felt him,” I said.
She grimaced. “Sorry. Well, we found this. It was just under the dust, just at the edge.” She held an elastic strap with a buckle, the kind that locks when you pull it tight. “We use them on puffers to hold small stuff on the frame behind the seat. Does it mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
“Maybe the killer dumped the body in the dust,” Laura speculated, “and then found the strap. He just stuck it under the dust with his hand.”
That would mean he was in a hurry, I thought. It would also mean the strap was evidence of something. Otherwise he’d have just kept it.
Jefferson called Laura, and she waved and went.
I noticed Alan Watson by his height. While the cops were getting the equipment ready, Alan and I adjusted our radios for privacy.
“I’ve got news,” I said. “Maybe good, maybe bad.”
“About Naomi?”
“Right. She wasn’t here when someone shot Penzler in his bath. She wasn’t anywhere near here. She was at the Belt Trading Post.”
“Then she’s innocent! But why wouldn’t she say so?”
“She thought she was committing an organ bank crime.”
Alan’s face twisted. “That isn’t a whole lot of help.”
The dredge moved into the dust, sinking. The dust was deep. I’d felt it.
“It could help,” I said. “We have to prove that someone else tried to shoot Chris without showing what Naomi was actually