Flatlander - Larry Niven [151]
The puffing continued.
“If you checked out an early experimental Shreveshield, we can track that. They were handy before you retired, but now you’d have to go through someone and get some men to load it, too.”
Puffing. Regular exercise: a man on a track or the same man pulling a heavy cart across a bumpy craterscape. He was going to bluff it out.
“Retiring took you out of the system, Shreve. You weren’t on top of things when Helios Power One started sending waldo tugs into Del Rey, and when Lawman Bauer-Stanson asked your Ms. Kotani if she could borrow your new prototype, you didn’t know it for hours.”
He said, “Where is she?”
Hecate spoke. “We’ve already dissected it, Mr. Shreve.”
The puffing became much faster.
I said, “Shreve, I know you’re not afraid of the organ banks. The hospitals wouldn’t take anything you’ve got. Come in and tell your story.”
“No. But I’ll—tell you a story, Ubersleuth. Lawman.
“It’s about two brilliant experimenters. One didn’t have any money sense, so the other had to keep track of expenses when he’d rather have been working on the project. We were in love, but we were in love with an idea, too.”
His breathing had become easier. “We developed the theory together. I understood the theory, but the prototypes kept burning out and blowing up. And every time something happened, Valerie knew exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. Warble the power source. More precision in the circuitry. I couldn’t keep up. All I knew was that we were running out of money.
“Then one day we had it. It worked. She swore it worked. We already had all the instruments we needed. I spent our last few marks on videotape. Camera. Stacks of batteries. The—we called it the Maxival Shield—it ate power like there was no tomorrow.
“We went out to Del Rey Crater. Valerie’s idea. Test the device and film the tests. Anyone who saw Valerie dance around in Del Rey Crater would throw funding at us with both hands.”
“Gil, he’s taking off.”
Too fast. I suddenly realized why his breathing had eased. He’d left his Mark Twenty-odd sitting in the dust. Maybe it had quit working; maybe he had stopped caring.
I asked, “Shreve, what went wrong?”
“She went out into Del Rey with the prototype. Just walking, turning to cross in front of the camera, then some gymnastics, staying within the shield effect, and all with that glow around her and her face shining in the bubble helmet. She was beautiful. Then she looked at the instruments and started screaming. I could see it on my own dials; the field was just gradually dying out.
“She was screaming, ‘Oh, my God, the shield’s breaking down!’ And she started running. ‘I think I can get to the rim. Call Copernicus General Hospital.’”
“Running with the shield? Wasn’t it too heavy?”
“How did you know that?”
Hecate said, “Gil, he’s just cruising along the crater rim. Hovering.”
I nodded to her. I told Shreve, “That was our biggest problem. What were you erasing when you sprayed rocket flame across the crater? I figure your shield generator was big. You had it on some sort of cart that Rhine could pull. She pulled a superconducting cable. She left her power source with you.”
“That’s right, and then she ran away and left it. If a hospital got her, every cop on the moon would want to look into our alleged radiation shield. The doctors would have to know exactly what she was exposed to. We didn’t have a tenthmark left. Nobody would believe we had anything, what with Valerie glowing in the dark, and if anyone did, he could get the designs on the four o’clock news.”
“So you pulled it back.”
“Hand over hand. Was I supposed to leave it sitting out on the moon? But she saw me doing it. She—I don’t know what she was thinking—she ran away, toward the center of the crater. I’d already had more radiation than I wanted, but those tracks … not just the footprints but—”
“The tracks of the