Flatlander - Larry Niven [150]
“Doesn’t it say?”
“I couldn’t find it.”
She slid into my spot and began diddling with the virtual keys. “The file’s been edited. Citizens don’t have to tell all their embarrassing secrets, Gil, but … he must be crazy. What if he needed medical help and it wasn’t in the records?”
“Crazy or guilty.”
“You think he’s hiding something?”
I said, “Call him.”
“Now, Gil. Maxim Shreve is one of the most powerful men on the moon, and I wasn’t thinking of changing careers.” She studied me, worried. “Are you just harassing the man in the hope he’ll tell us something?”
I said, “It seems pretty clear what happened, doesn’t it?”
“You’re thinking he killed her and took the money himself. Set down in Del Rey and pushed her out of the ship, still alive. But why not kill her first? Then there wouldn’t be any footprints or dying messages.”
“Nope, you’ve only got half of it.”
She flapped her arms in exasperation. “Go for it.”
“First: Mark Twenty-nine. You said Shreve Development has been trying to build a little shield ever since they got the big ones. I believe it. Twenty-nine is a big number. Maybe a small version is the first thing he tried. That’s what told him about the, what she said, hysteresis problem.
“Second: He didn’t act like a thief running away with the money. When he founded Shreve Inc., he acted like a man who wants to build something and almost knows how. I think he and Rhine spent all they had on experiments.
‘Third: Someone sprayed part of the crater from the rim, and I think that was Shreve. There’s no sign he was in the crater except for Rhine’s footprints, and we already know something was erased.
“Fourth: Why Del Rey Crater? Why walk around in the most radioactive crater on the moon?”
Hecate was looking blank. I said, “They were testing a prototype Shreveshield. That’s why she walked in. I even know what he was hiding when he sprayed the crater.”
She said, “I’ll call him. Your theory; you talk.”
Hecate looked around at me. “Mr. Shreve isn’t taking calls. It says he’s in physical therapy.”
I asked, “Where’s the Mark Twenty-nine now?”
“They took off almost an hour ago.” It took her only a few seconds. “En route to Copernicus. That’s the Shreve Inc. labs. ETA ten minutes.”
“Good enough. Luke Garner’s travel chair has a sender in it in case he needs a serious autodoc or even a doctor. What do you think? Would a lunie’s chair have one, too?”
It took her longer (I got her coffee and a handmeal) to work her way through the lunar medical network. Finally she sighed and looked up and said, “He’s in motion. Moving toward Del Rey Crater. I have a number for the phone in his chair, Gil.”
“Futz! Always I get it almost right.”
“Call him?”
“I’m inclined to wait for him to touch down.”
She studied me. “He’s going after the body?”
“Seems right. Any bets on what he might do with it?”
“It’s a big moon.” She turned back. “He’s crossing Del Rey. Slowing. Gil, he’s going down.”
“Phone him.”
His phone must have been buzzing during the landing. When he answered, it was by voice, no picture. “What?”
I said, “The thing about poetic justice is that it requires a poet. I’m Ubersleuth Gil Hamilton, with the ARM, Mr. Shreve. On the moon by coincidence.”
“I’m a lunie citizen, Hamilton.”
“Valerie Rhine was of Earth.”
“Hamilton, I’m supposed to run now. Let me set my headphones and get on the track.”
I laughed. “You do that. Shall I tell you a story?”
I heard irregular puffing, less like a sick man running on an exercise track in low gravity than like the same man climbing out of a spacecraft. No sound of fiddling with headphones: they’d be already in place inside his bubble helmet.
Fair’s fair. I said, “I’m perched on the rim of Del Rey Crater, safely protected by my Shreveshield, vidding you through a telescopic lens.”
Hecate covered her face, muffling laughter.
“I don’t have time for this,” Shreve said.
“Sure you do. With the radiation you’ll be facing in the next few minutes, you’re already dead.