Flatlander - Larry Niven [139]
“Gil?”
“Her oxygen flow is twisted right over, all the way up.”
No comment.
I said, “Bet on a leak. Even money, a leak got her before the radiation did.”
“But what the hell was she doing there?”
“Funny how that thought occurred to both of us. Hecate, shall I collect the body?”
“I sure don’t want it in my cargo hold. Gil, we don’t want it on the Mark Twenty-nine. If you let me start up the waldo tugs, I can guide one to the body and move it that way.”
“Start ’em up.”
I rolled past the dead woman. I stayed wide of the line of footprints leading north-northeast, but that was what I was following.
… Bounding across a crater that was the most radioactive spot in the solar system, barring the sun itself and maybe Mercury. Frightened out of her mind? Even if there was no leak, it was a sane decision, giving herself maximum oxygen pressure, nothing left for later as she ran for the crater rim like a damned soul escaping hell. But what was she doing in the crater?
I stopped. “Hecate?”
“Here. I’ve started the waldo tugs. Shall I send you one?”
“Yah. Hecate, do you see what I see? The footprints?”
“They just stop.”
“In the middle of Del Rey Crater?”
“Well, what do you see?”
“They start here in the middle, already running. They get halfway to the rim. The way my rad sensor is losing its lunch, I’d say she made a good run of it.”
I trundled back to where I’d left the corpse. There was a signal laser in the service pack on my back. I spent a few minutes cutting an outline in the rock around the corpse.
“Hecate, how fast are those tugs?”
“Not exactly built for speed. It’s more important that they don’t turn over, but they’ll do twenty-five K on the flat. Gil, you’ll have your tug in ten minutes. How’s your shield holding?”
I looked at the rad counters. Hell raged around me, but almost nothing was getting inside the shield. “Whatever got through, I probably brought it in on my boots. From outside Del Rey at that. I’d still like to leave.”
“Gil, give me a camera view of the boots.”
I wheeled into place and leaned far over the corpse’s boots. Without Hecate’s mention, I might never have noticed them. They were white. No decoration, no custom touches. Big boots with thick soles for lunar heat and cold, heavy treads for lunar dust. Built for the moon. But of course they would be even if they’d come straight from somewhere on Earth.
“Now the face. The sooner we find out who she was, the better.”
“She’s lying on her face.”
“Don’t touch her,” Hecate said. “Wait for the tug.”
I spent some of my waiting time easing a rope line under the body. Then I just waited.
A pair of arms on tractor treads was bumping toward me. It crossed crater after crater like it was bobbing on waves. It was making me queasy—if that wasn’t the radiation—but the counters were quiet. I watched, and it came.
“I’ll turn her over first,” Hecate told me. Metal arms a little bigger than mine reached out. I lifted the rope. The arms went under and over the pressure suit and rotated.
“Hold that,” I said.
“Holding.”
Three centimeters from her faceplate I still couldn’t see through. Maybe the camera could in one frequency or another. I said, “She’s likely still got fingerprints, and we’ll get her DNA, but not retina prints.”
“Yah.” The cargo tug backed and began moving away. “Get a view of where it was lying,” Hecate said, but I already was. “Can you get closer? Okay, Gil, move out. You don’t have to wait for the tug.”
I passed another waldo tug as it was latching on to a canister. A third crawled over the crater rim ahead of me. I followed it over the rim and out.
I said, “I suppose nobody will disturb the scene of the crime? If there’s a crime.”
“We’ve got cameras on the waldo tugs. I’ll set up a watch.”
I