Flatlander - Larry Niven [144]
She mulled it over. “Suppose his man gets here and the Mark Twenty-nine hasn’t arrived yet?”
I liked it. “Somebody might get upset.”
“I’ll fix it. Next?”
I stretched. “It’ll be a while before we have anything to look at. Let’s see if there’s a commissary.”
“You scout out dinner,” she said. “I’ll make their widget vanish, and then I want to check on the corpse.”
There was no commissary and no restaurant, either. There was a coin-operated dispenser wall in the lounge. I glanced into the greenhouse: dead of night.
So we bought handmeals from the dispenser and took them into the greenhouse.
An artificial full Earth glowed overhead. The stars weren’t flaming, but something about them … ah. They were color-coded, beep red for Mars, brighter red for Aldebaran, violet for Sirius …
Lunies try to turn their greenhouses into gardens, and there are always individual touches. There were fruits and vegetables to be picked as dark surprises from a hill sculpted into a shadowy sitting Buddha.
Hecate reported, “The body is en route. John Ling got us two waldo tugs. The second one is keeping the first in view. That way there’s a camera watching the corpse at all times.” She stopped to spit cherry seeds. “Good man. And Nunnally Sterne says he’s set aside one of the handling rooms for an autopsy. We’ll do it through leaded glass, with waldos.”
I was carving a pear the size of a melon, partly by feel. “What do you think we’ll find?”
“What am I offered?”
“Well, radiation, of course, or a leak. No gunshot or stab wounds or concussions—I’d have found that.”
“Psi powers are notoriously undependable,” she said.
I didn’t take offense, because of course she was right. I said, “I can generally count on mine. They’ve saved my life more than once. They’re just limited.”
“Tell me.”
So I told her a story, and we ate the pear and the handmeals, and a quiet descended.
Taffy and I aren’t exactly lockstepped. But Taffy and I and Harry McCavity, her lunie surgeon, and Laura Drury, my lunie cop, are lockstepped, and Taffy and I are affianced to become pregnant someday. I used to like a complicated love life, but I’ve started to lose that. So the dark and quiet companionship began to feel ominous, and I said, just to be saying something, “She could have been poisoned.”
Hecate laughed.
I persisted. “What if you murder someone, then freeze-dry her, then toss her three kilometers in lunar gravity? You don’t expect anyone’ll find her, not in Del Rey, but if someone did—”
“Tossed how? A little portable mass driver on the rim?”
“Damn.”
“Would you have found bruising?”
“Maybe.”
“And then she made the footprints?”
Double damn. “If we had specs on our mass driver, we’d know how accurate it was. Maybe the footprints were already there and the killer just fired the body at where they ended. Then again, there aren’t any portable mass drivers.”
Hecate was laughing. “All right, who made the footprints?”
“Your turn.”
“She walked in,” Hecate said. “Trick was to erase any footprints that led in from the rim.”
“Blast from an oxygen tank?”
“A lemmy doesn’t carry that much oxygen. A serious spacecraft would. A spacecraft could just spray the whole area with the rocket motor, but … Gil, a ship could just land in the crater, push her out, and take off. You said so yourself.”
I nodded. “That’s starting to look like it. Besides, why would anyone walk into Del Rey Crater?”
“What if the killer persuaded her she was wearing a rad-shielded suit?”
Riiight. Still too many possibilities. “What if there was something valuable hidden in there? A bank heist. A dime disk with ARM secret weapons on it.”
“A secret map of the vaults under the Face on Mars.”
“Down comes a lemmy to pick it up. Back goes a lemmy with the copilot left behind.”
“How long ago? If it was forty or fifty years, say, your lemmy wouldn’t even have a Shreveshield. It’d be a suicide mission.