Flatlander - Larry Niven [2]
Just now the items extruded were the overstuffed reading armchair, two small side tables, a footstool, and the kitchen alcove. Owen Jennison sat grinning in the armchair. Naturally he grinned. Little more than dried skin covered the natural grin of his skull.
“It’s a small room,” Ordaz said, “but not too small. Millions of people live this way. In any case, a Belter would hardly be a claustrophobe.”
“No. Owen flew a singleship before he joined us. Three months at a stretch in a cabin so small, you couldn’t stand up with the air lock closed. Not claustrophobia, but—” I swept my arm about the room. “What do you see that’s his?”
Small as it was, the closet was nearly empty. A set of street clothes, a paper shirt, a pair of shoes, a small brown overnight case. All new. The few items in the bathroom medicine chest had been equally new and equally anonymous.
Ordaz said, “Well?”
“Belters are transients. They don’t own much, but what they do own, they guard. Small possessions, relics, souvenirs. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have had something.”
“His space suit?”
“You think that’s unlikely? It’s not. The inside of his pressure suit is a Belter’s home. Sometimes it’s the only home he’s got. He spends a fortune decorating it. If he loses his suit, he’s not a Belter anymore.
“No, I don’t insist he’d have brought his suit. But he’d have had something. His phial of Marsdust. The bit of nickel-iron they took out of his chest. Or, if he left all his souvenirs home, he’d have picked up things on Earth. But in this room—there’s nothing.”
“Perhaps,” Ordaz suggested delicately, “he didn’t notice his surroundings.”
And somehow that brought it all home.
Owen Jennison sat grinning in a water-stained silk dressing gown. His space-darkened face lightened abruptly beneath his chin, giving way to normal suntan. His blond hair, too long, had been cut Earth style; no trace remained of the Belter strip cut he’d worn all his life. A month’s growth of untended beard covered half his face. A small black cylinder protruded from the top of his head. An electric cord trailed from the top of the cylinder and ran to a wall socket.
The cylinder was a droud, a current addict’s transformer.
I stepped closer to the corpse and bent to look. The droud was a standard make, but it had been altered. Your standard current addict’s droud will pass only a trickle of current into the brain. Owen must have been getting ten times the usual charge, easily enough to damage his brain in a month’s time.
I reached out and touched the droud with my imaginary hand.
Ordaz was standing quietly beside me, letting me make my examination without interruption. Naturally he had no way of knowing about my restricted psi powers.
With my imaginary fingertips I touched the droud in Owen’s head, then ran them down to a tiny hole in his scalp and farther.
It was a standard surgical job. Owen could have had it done anywhere. A hole in his scalp, invisible under the hair, nearly impossible to find even if you knew what you were looking for. Even your best friends wouldn’t know unless they caught you with the droud plugged in. But the tiny hole marked a bigger plug set in the bone of the skull. I touched the ecstasy plug with my imaginary fingertips, then ran them down the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen’s brain, down into the pleasure center.
No, the extra current hadn’t killed him. What had killed Owen was his lack of willpower. He had been unwilling to get up.
He had starved to death sitting in that chair. There were plastic squeezebottles all around his feet and a couple still on the end tables. All empty. They must have been full a month ago. Owen hadn’t died of thirst. He had died of starvation, and his death had been planned.
Owen my crewmate. Why hadn’t he come to me? I’m half