Flatlander - Larry Niven [14]
So a few didn’t come out. Who’d notice?
I flipped quickly through the tape to find out who was in charge of watching Graham. Jackson Bera. I called down through the desk phone.
“Sure,” Bera said, “we’ve had a spy beam on him about three weeks now. It’s a waste of good salaried ARM agents. Maybe he’s clean. Maybe he’s been tipped somehow.”
“Then why not stop watching him?”
Bera looked disgusted. “Because we’ve only been watching for three weeks. How many donors do you think he needs a year? Read the reports. Gross profit on a single donor is over a million UN marks. Graham can afford to be careful who he picks.”
“Yah.”
“At that, he wasn’t careful enough. At least two of his customers disappeared last year. Customers with families. That’s what put us on to him.”
“So you could watch him for the next six months without a guarantee. He could be just waiting for the right guy to walk in.”
“Sure. He has to write up a report on every customer. That gives him the right to ask personal questions. If the guy has relatives, Graham lets him walk out. Most people do have relatives, you know. Then again,” Bera said disconsolately, “he could be clean. Sometimes a current addict disappears without help.”
“How come I didn’t see any holos of Graham at home? You can’t be watching just his shop.”
Jackson Bera scratched at his hair. Hair like black steel wool, worn long like a bushman’s mop. “Sure we’re watching his place, but we can’t get a spy beam in there. It’s an inside apartment. No windows. You know anything about spy beams?”
“Not much. I know they’ve been around awhile.”
“They’re as old as lasers. Oldest trick in the book is to put a mirror in the room you want to bug. Then you run a laser beam through a window, or even through heavy drapes, and bounce it off the mirror. When you pick it up, it’s been distorted by the vibrations in the glass. That gives you a perfect recording of anything that’s been said in that room. But for pictures you need something a little more sophisticated.”
“How sophisticated can we get?”
“We can put a spy beam in any room with a window. We can send one through some kinds of wall. Give us an optically flat surface, and we can send one around corners.”
“But you need an outside wall.”
“Yup.”
“What’s Graham doing now?”
“Just a sec.” Bera disappeared from view. “Someone just came in. Graham’s talking to him. Want the picture?”
“Sure. Leave it on. I’ll turn it off from here when I’m through with it.”
The picture of Bera went dark. A moment later I was looking into a doctor’s office. If I’d seen it cold, I’d have thought it was run by a podiatrist. There was the comfortable tilt-back chair with the headrest and the footrest; the cabinet next to it with instruments lying on top, on a clean white cloth; the desk over in one corner. Kenneth Graham was talking to a homely, washed-out-looking girl.
I listened to Graham’s would-be-fatherly reassurances and his glowing description of the magic of current addiction. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I turned the sound down. The girl took her place in the chair, and Graham placed something over her head.
The girl’s homely face turned suddenly beautiful.
Happiness is beautiful all by itself. A happy person is beautiful per se. Suddenly and totally, the girl was full of joy, and I realized that I hadn’t known everything about droud sales. Apparently Graham had an inductor to put the current where he wanted it, without wires. He could show a customer what current addiction felt like without first implanting the wires.
What a powerful argument that was!
Graham turned off the machine. It was as if he’d turned off the girl. She sat stunned for a moment, then reached frantically for her purse and started scrabbling inside.
I couldn’t take any more. I turned it off.
Small wonder if Graham had turned organlegger. He had to be totally without empathy just to sell his merchandise.
Even there, I thought, he’d had a head start.
So he was a little more callous than the rest of the world