Flatlander - Larry Niven [130]
The lunie cop guarding room 047 was a stranger. I had to nerve myself to turn my back on him. Paranoia …
Naomi ushered me in.
Boone was already there, seated at the breakfast table. I didn’t understand why he watched me so intently. I was concentrating on what I had to say, not on what I was seeing.
But it seemed to me that my eyes blurred when I looked at Naomi. She seemed distorted somehow.
She had recovered some of her self-possession, I thought. But she seemed clumsy, and she moved with care. I’d thought she was used to lunar gravity. She said, “Surprise.”
And then I saw.
“When you’re in the holding tanks, they’re not supposed to touch you except in emergencies,” she said. “Did you know that?”
I had trouble getting my breath. “I knew it. We’ve been discussing it in the conference. What do lunies consider an emergency?”
“Aye, there’s the rub,” Naomi said. “They apologized of course. They did the best they could. Seems a Brazilian planetologist waded into a dust pool near Copernicus. It’s a wonder she got out at all with her legs frozen solid. She managed to fall and rip her suit, too. Vacuum ruptured both eardrums and one lung and an eye, and the fall broke two ribs. Guess who happened to have the right rejection spectrum to help her out?”
Her legs weren’t bad, but they didn’t look quite right. Her face didn’t look quite right, either. And something about her body … maybe the way she carried herself …
“She’s famous, I gather, this Mary de Santa Rita Lisboa. All hell would break loose if she couldn’t get adequate medical treatment at Copernicus. Terrible publicity. For God’s sake, tell me how I look!”
“Just about the same,” I said. It was true. She seemed just faintly distorted. Surgery on her inner ears, twice, had changed the outline of her face. Her eyes weren’t quite the same color; how could I have missed that? Her torso seemed twisted. She’d cure that when she learned to walk again. After all, her legs were changed, too. They were too thin … not lunie legs, thank God; she’d have looked like a stork. They’d probably come off a Belter.
Somehow the doctors had found parts that matched, almost. That didn’t alter the fact that they had raided a holding tank!
“I’ll want you to testify before the committee,” I told her. “I’m going to raise hell.”
“Good,” she said venomously.
“Boone, did you explain the legal situation?”
Boone nodded. Naomi said, “I wish I’d known all of this before the trial. I don’t much like the thought of going through two more trials, you know. One to get me clear of this attempted murder charge, one to nail me for having a clone made.”
“Will you do it?”
“I suppose so.”
I was fighting the abstract horror of knowing that lunie hospitals had been raiding the holding tanks and a purely personal horror that it could happen to Naomi. Naomi was changed. She wasn’t unsightly, just… changed. Patchwork girl! This was not the woman whose untouchable beauty had sent me fleeing to the asteroid belt long ago.
“Reversing the judgment against you may be more difficult than you think,” Boone said. “No judge enjoys ruling that another judge was wrong. We—”
Which reminded me. “Boone? I’ve found the disappearing mirror.”
“What? How?”
“Water. You pour a big, flat pan full of water. You freeze it. You take it outside, into vacuum and shadow. Out on the moon it’ll stay at a hundred degrees below zero or less as long as you keep it in shadow. Now you use the mirror-making facilities to polish it optically flat and silver it. Would it work?”
Boone gaped. It made him look a lot less like Abe Lincoln. He said, “Yes, it’d work. My God, that’s why he was in such a hurry! He wanted to kill Penzler just before the sun touched the mirror!”
I smiled. The eureka sensation. “But Chris wouldn’t cooperate. He liked playing with the water.”
“When the sun touched the mirror, it would just disappear!”
“Almost,” I said. “When it evaporated, some of the water vapor wound up on the back of the tilted rock, in shadow. I found frost there. It’ll be gone by now, but we’ve got other evidence. Harry McCavity