Flatlander - Larry Niven [136]
We were dressed alike in skintight pressure suits under leaded armor, borrowed, that didn’t fit well. I felt my belly band squeeze tight as vacuum enclosed us. Bauer-Stanson tapped again, and the roof lifted up and sideways.
We moved back into the cargo bay and positioned ourselves at either end of a device built along the lines of a lunar two-wheeled puffer. We lifted it out of the bay and dropped it over the side.
The Mark Twenty-nine’s wheels were toroidal birdcages as tall as my shoulders with little motors on the wheel hubs. In lunar gravity wheels don’t have to be sturdy, but a vehicle needs a wide stance because weight won’t hold it stable. The thing stood upright even without the kickstands. Low-slung between the wheels, a bulky plastic case and a heavy lock hid the works of Shreve Development’s experimental radiation shield, power source, sensor devices, and other secrets, too, no doubt. A bucket seat was bolted to the case, with cameras and more sensing devices behind that.
Bauer-Stanson scrambled after it. She pulled it several feet from the lemmy and turned on the shield.
I’d done spot repairs on the Shreveshield in my own ship, years ago when I was a Belt miner. The little version is a flat plate, twelve feet by twelve feet, with rounded corners and a small secured housing at one corner. Fractal scrollwork covers it in frilly curves of superconductor, growing microscopically fine around the edges. You can bend it, but not far. In my old ship it wrapped around the D-T tank, and the shield effect enclosed everything but the motor. In a police lemmy it wraps the tank twice around.
No Shreveshield could have been fitted into the Mark Twenty-nine puffer.
But a halo had formed around it, very like the nearly imperceptible violet glow around the lemmy itself. I’d never seen that glow before. The rad shield normally doesn’t have to fight that hard.
Lawman Bauer-Stanson stood within the glow. She waved me over.
I crossed the space between one shield and the other in two bounces. Vacuum and hard bright stars and alien landscapes and falling don’t scare me, but radiation is something else.
I asked, “Lawman, why did we only bring one of these puffers?”
“Ubersleuth Hamilton, there is only one.” She sighed. “May I call you Gil?”
I’d been getting tired of this myself. “Sure. Hecate?”
“He-ca-tee,” she said. Three syllables. “Gil, Shreve Development makes active radiation shields. They only make the two kinds, and they’re both for spacecraft.”
“We use them on Earth, too. Some of the old fusion plants are hotter’ hell. The Shreveshield was big news when I was, oh, eight years old. They used it to make a documentary on South-Central Los Angeles, but what got my attention was the spacecraft.”
“Tell me about it. Thirty years ago a solar storm would have us marooned, huddling underground. We couldn’t launch ships even as far as Earth.”
The big shields had come first, I remembered. They were used to protect cities. There was a Shreveshield on the first tremendous slowboat launched toward Alpha Centauri. The little shields, eight years later, were small enough for three-man ships, and that was enough for me. I lofted out to mine the Belt.
“I hope they got rich,” I said.
“Yah. When nobody gets rich, they call that a recession,” Hecate said. “They spend some of the money on research. They’d like to build a little man-sized shield. They don’t talk about the mistakes, but the Mark Twenty-nine is what they’ve got now.”
“You must be persuasive as hell.”
“Yonnie Kotani’s my cousin’s wife. She let us borrow it. Gil, whatever we learn about this is confidential. You are not to open that lock, ARM or no. Puffer,” she said in fine disgust.
“Sorry.”
“Yah. Well, this version works all the time, Yonnie said. It’s still too expensive to market.”
“Hecate, is it just conceivable,” I wondered, “that Shreve would like me to test their Mark Twenty-nine active shield for them?”
She shook her head; the pepper and salt crest swirled inside the helmet. Amused. “Not you. A dead flatlander celebrity riding their Mark