Flatlander - Larry Niven [24]
ARMs and organleggers play a funny kind of game. The organleggers have to turn their donors in alive, so they’re always armed with hypo guns, firing slivers of crystalline anesthetic that melt instantly in the blood. We use the same weapon for somewhat the same reason: a criminal has to be saved for trial and then for the government hospitals. So no ARM ever expects to kill a man.
There was a day I learned the truth. A small-time organlegger named Raphael Haine was trying to reach a call button in his own home. If he’d reached it, all kinds of hell would have broken loose, Haine’s men would have hypoed me, and I would have regained consciousness a piece at a time in Haine’s organ-storage tanks. So I strangled him.
The report was in the computer, but only three human beings knew about it. One was my immediate superior, Lucas Garner. The other was Julie. So far he was the only man I’d ever killed.
And Graham was Bera’s first killing.
“We got him at the airport,” Bera said. “He was wearing a hat. I wish I’d noticed that; we might have moved faster. We started to close in on him with hypo guns. He turned and saw us. He reached under his hat, and then he fell.”
“Killed himself?”
“Uh huh.”
“How?”
“Look at his head.”
I edged closer to the table, trying to stay out of the doctor’s way. The doctor was going through the routine of trying to pull information from a dead brain by induction. It wasn’t going well.
There was a flat oblong box on top of Graham’s head. Black plastic, about half the size of a pack of cards. I touched it and knew at once that it was attached to Graham’s skull.
“A droud. Not a standard type. Too big.”
“Uh huh.”
Liquid helium ran up my nerves. “There’s a battery in it.”
“Right.”
“I often wonder what the vintners buy, et cetera. A cordless droud. Man, that’s what I want for Christmas.”
Bera twitched all over. “Don’t say that.”
“Did you know he was a current addict?”
“No. We were afraid to bug his home. He might have found it and been tipped. Take another look at that thing.”
The shape was wrong, I thought. The black plastic case had been half melted.
“Heat,” I mused. “Oh!”
“Uh huh. He blew the whole battery at once. Sent the whole killing charge right through his brain, right through the pleasure center of his brain. And Jesus, Gil, the thing I keep wondering is, What did it feel like? Gil, what could it possibly have felt like?”
I thumped him across the shoulders in lieu of giving him an intelligent answer. He’d be a long time wondering.
Here was the man who had put the wire in Owen’s head. Had his death been momentary hell or all the delights of paradise in one singing jolt? Hell, I hoped, but I didn’t believe it.
At least Kenneth Graham wasn’t somewhere else in the world, getting a new face and new retinas and new fingertips from Loren’s illicit organ banks.
“Nothing,” the doctor said. “His brain’s too badly burned. There’s just nothing there that isn’t too scrambled to make sense.”
“Keep trying,” Bera said.
I left quietly. Maybe later I’d buy Bera a drink. He seemed to need it. Bera was one of those with empathy. I knew that he could almost feel that awful surge of ecstasy and defeat as Kenneth Graham left the world behind.
The holos from Monica Apartments had arrived hours ago. Miller had picked not only the tenants who had occupied the eighteenth floor during the past six weeks but tenants from the nineteenth and seventeenth floors, too. It seemed an embarrassment of riches. I toyed with the idea of someone from the nineteenth floor dropping over his balcony to the eighteenth every day for five weeks. But 1809 hadn’t had an outside wall, let alone a window, not to mention a balcony.
Had Miller played with the same idea? Nonsense. He didn’t even know the problem. He’d just overkilled with the holos to show how cooperative he was.
None of the tenants during the period in question matched known or suspected Loren men.
I said a few appropriate words and went for coffee. Then I remembered the twenty-three possible Loren men in Owen’s briefcase.