Flatlander - Larry Niven [21]
“I don’t know. No more than half an hour. No need to come up.”
“Very well.” He handed me the key and waited for me to leave. I did.
The merest flicker of blue light caught my eye as I left the elevator. I would have thought it was my optic nerve, not in the real world, if I hadn’t known about the holo cameras. Maybe it was. You don’t need laser light to make a holograph, but it does get you clearer pictures.
Owen’s room was a box. Everything was retracted. There was nothing but the bare walls. I had never seen anything so desolate, unless it was some asteroidal rock too poor to mine, too badly placed to be worth a base.
The control panel was just beside the door. I turned on the lights, then touched the master button. Lines appeared, outlined in red and green and blue. A great square on one wall for the bed, most of another wall for the kitchen, various outlines across the floor. Very handy. You wouldn’t want a guest to be standing on the table when you expanded it.
I’d come here to get the feel of the place, to encourage a hunch, to see if I’d missed anything. Translation: I was playing. Playing, I reached through the control panel to find the circuits. The printed circuitry was too small and too detailed to tell me anything, but I ran imaginary fingertips along a few wires and found that they looped straight to their action points, no detours. No sensors to the outside. You’d have to be in the room to know what was expanded, what retracted.
So a supposedly occupied room had had its bed retracted for six weeks. But you’d have to be in the room to know it.
I pushed buttons to expand the kitchen nook and the reading chair. The wall slid out eight feet; the floor humped itself and took form. I sat down in the chair, and the kitchen nook blocked my view of the door.
Nobody could have seen Owen from the hall.
If only someone had noticed that Owen wasn’t ordering food. That might have saved him.
I thought of something else, and it made me look around for the air conditioner. There was a grill at floor level. I felt behind it with my imaginary hand. Some of these apartment air-conditioning units go on when the CO2 level hits half a percent. This one was geared to temperature and manual control.
With the other kind, our careful killer could have tapped the air-conditioner current to find out if Owen was still alive and present. As it was, 1809 had behaved like an empty room for six weeks.
I flopped back in the reading chair.
If my hypothetical killer had watched Owen, he’d done it with a bug. Unless he’d actually lived on this floor for the four or five weeks it took Owen to die, there was no other way.
Okay, think about a bug. Make it small enough and nobody could find it except the cleaning robot, which would send it straight to the incinerator. You’d have to make it big so the robot wouldn’t get it. No worry about Owen finding it! And then, when you knew Owen was dead, you’d use the self-destruct.
But if you burned it to slag, you’d leave a burn hole somewhere. Ordaz would have found it. So. An asbestos pad? You’d want the self-destruct to leave something that the cleaning robot would sweep up.
And if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. It was too chancy. Nobody knows what a cleaning robot will decide is garbage. They’re made stupid because it’s cheaper. So they’re programmed to leave large objects alone.
There had to be someone on this floor either to watch Owen himself or to pick up the bug that did the watching. I was betting everything I had on a human watcher.
I’d come here mainly to give my intuition a chance. It wasn’t working. Owen had spent six weeks in this chair, and for at least the last week he’d been dead. Yet I couldn’t feel it with him. It was just a chair with two end tables. He had left nothing in the room, not even a restless ghost.
The call caught me halfway back to headquarters.
“You were right,” Ordaz told me over the wristphone. “We have found a locker at Death Valley Port registered to Cubes Forsythe. I am on my way there now. Will you join me?”
“I’ll meet you