Flatlander - Larry Niven [22]
“Good. I am as eager as you to see what Owen Jennison left us.”
I doubted that.
The port was something more than 230 miles away, an hour at taxi speeds. It would be a big fare. I typed out a new address on the destination board, then called in at headquarters. An ARM agent is fairly free; he doesn’t have to justify every little move. There was no question of getting permission to go. At worst they might disallow the fare on my expense account.
“Oh, and there’ll be a set of holos coming in from Monica Apartments,” I told the man. “Have the computer check them against known organleggers and associates of Loren.”
The taxi rose smoothly into the sky and headed east. I watched tridee and drank coffee until I ran out of coins for the dispenser.
If you go between November and May, when the climate is ideal, Death Valley can be a tourist’s paradise. There is the Devil’s Golf Course, with its fantastic ridges and pinnacles of salt; Zabriskie Point and its weird badlands topography; the old borax mining sites; and all kinds of strange, rare plants adapted to the heat and the death-dry climate. Yes, Death Valley has many points of interest, and someday I’m going to see them. So far all I’d seen was the spaceport. But the port was impressive in its own way.
The landing field used to be part of a sizable inland sea. It is now a sea of salt. Alternating red and blue concentric circles mark the field for ships dropping from space, and a century’s developments in chemical, fission, and fusion reaction motors have left blast pits striped like rainbows by esoteric, often radioactive salts. But mostly the field retains its ancient glare-white.
And out across the salt are ships of many sizes and many shapes. Vehicles and machinery dance attendance, and if you’re willing to wait, you may see a ship land. It’s worth the wait.
The port building, at the edge of the major salt flat, is a pastel green tower set in a wide patch of fluorescent orange concrete. No ship has ever landed on it—yet. The taxi dropped me at the entrance and moved away to join others of its kind. And I stood inhaling me dry, balmy air.
Four months of the year Death Valley’s climate is ideal. One August the Furnace Creek Ranch recorded 134° Fahrenheit shade temperature.
A man behind a desk told me that Ordaz had arrived before me. I found him and another officer in a labyrinth of pay lockers, each big enough to hold two or three suitcases. The locker Ordaz had opened held only a lightweight plastic briefcase.
“He may have taken other lockers,” he said.
“Probably not. Belters travel light. Have you tried to open it?”
“Not yet. It is a combination lock. I thought perhaps …”
“Maybe.” I squatted to look at it.
Funny: I felt no surprise at all. It was as if I’d known all along that Owen’s suitcase would be there. And why not? He was bound to try to protect himself somehow. Through me, because I was already involved in the UN side of organlegging. By leaving something in a spaceport locker, because Loren couldn’t find the right locker or get into it if he did, and because I would naturally connect Owen with spaceports. Under Cubes’s name, because I’d be looking for that and Loren wouldn’t.
Hindsight is wonderful.
The lock had five digits. “He must have meant me to open it. Let’s see …” I moved the tumblers to 42217. April 22, 2117, the day Cubes died, stapled suddenly to a plastic partition.
The lock clicked open.
Ordaz went instantly for the manila folder. More slowly, I picked up two glass phials. One was tightly sealed against Earth’s air and half-full of an incredibly fine dust. So fine was it that it slid about like oil inside the glass. The other phial held a blackened grain of nickel-iron, barely big enough to see.
* * *
Other things were in that case, but the prize was that folder. The story was in there … at least up to a point. Owen must have planned to add to it.
A message had been waiting for him in the Ceres mail dump when he returned from his last trip out. Owen must have laughed over parts of that message. Loren had taken the trouble