Flatlander - Larry Niven [147]
“Do it.”
She stared at me.
“I was just a kid when the Shreveshield came out. I wanted one just big enough for me. Why can’t I have it?”
She laughed, trailed off. “Well. It doesn’t scale up. You need a bigger template to retain the hysteresis effect that traps the neutrons. Otherwise the shield effect just fades out on you. That’s what the—” She caught herself.
“Right,” I said.
Hecate Bauer-Stanson flicked off her privacy. “It’s down,” she said. “You can collect it any time. Shall I give you some men to load it?”
“I’d be most grateful,” Randall said to Hecate. She didn’t have to tell Sanchez to see to it, because he was already leaving. To me she said, “We had to reconfigure the circuitry pattern. It’s not the same fractal on the Mark Twenty-nine; it’s not even related. Well, thank you both,” and she was gone, too.
* * *
“Gil, you’ve got a message light.”
Hecate watched over my shoulder as I played the message from the Los Angeles ARM. Split field, a computer composite of the dead woman’s suit manifested next to Luke Garner in a travel chair.
Luke at 188 was paraplegic, had been for years, but he looked healthier than Maxim Shreve. Happier, too. He spoke rituals of courtesy, then, “We think your suit was customized from one of the pressure suits that came up with the first moon colony. Thing is, those suits were returned to NASA for study. Your deader really did get it from Earth. It’s ninety to a hundred years old.
“So right now you’re probably wondering, ‘Why didn’t she just buy a new pressure suit?’ And the answer might be these.” Luke’s cursor highlighted points on the old suit. “Medical sensors. Those early suits didn’t just keep an astronaut alive. NASA wanted to know what was happening to them. If they died, maybe the next one wouldn’t.
“In the early space program the medical probes were invasive. You wince just reading about it. These later suits weren’t so bad, but your deader may have upgraded them anyway. What she wanted was the medical ports on the suit. There are suits like that still being made, of course, but they’re expensive and the sale would be remembered. Take your choice; she was secretive or cheap.
“Let me know, will you? And remember, criminals don’t like locked rooms. They’re usually accidents.”
I watched the empty space where Luke had been. “Hecate, didn’t Shreve say that Shreve Development labs have pressure suits with medical ports? We might’ve guessed that—”
“I bet they’re a lot less than a hundred years old, Gil. You want to see them anyway? I’ll arrange that.”
Four off-duty technicians had been watching our antics. Now they seemed to be losing interest. I didn’t blame them. I got up and paced for a bit, wondering if there was anything more I could do.
Hecate said, “I’ve got your overhead view, Gil.”
“Put it on.”
A camera was panning slowly across a shrinking moonscape tinted with violet from the fusion drive of a rising Belt trading ship. Del Rey Crater slid into view, shrinking. Little craters all the same size. Bits of silver in the little craters. Three bronze bugs … four crawling around near the southern rim. We watched until Del Rey was sliding off the edge of the field, shrunk too small to show detail.
Then Hecate replayed it, slowing it, slower yet. “See it?”
It’s amazing what you can see from orbit.
Waldo tugs had made random tracks all across the south-em quarter of Del Rey, like the tunnels in an ant farm. Down there they had obscured the flow lines. But from up here …
Something on the southern rim had sandblasted Del Rey Crater from the rim as far as the battered central peak.
Down there would be surfaces clean of dust, sharp