Flatlander - Larry Niven [35]
Inspector Swan was a picture-poster cop, tri-racial and handsome as hell in an orange uniform that seemed tailored to him, so well did he fit it. He had the gun open in front of him and was probing at the electronic guts of it with a pair of tweezers. He said, “You don’t have any idea why he was shooting at you?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re an ARM. What do you work on these days?”
“Organlegging, mostly. Tracking down gangs that have gone into hiding.” I was massaging Taffy’s neck and shoulders, trying to calm her down. She was still shivering. The muscles under my hands were very tight.
Swan frowned. “Such an easy answer. But he couldn’t be part of an organlegging gang, could he? Not with that gun.”
“True.” I ran my thumbs around the curve of Taffy’s shoulder blades. She reached around and squeezed my hand.
The gun. I hadn’t really expected Swan to see the implications. It was an unmodified hunting laser, right off the rack.
Officially, nobody in the world makes guns to kill people. Under the Conventions, not even armies use them, and the United Nations Police use mercy weapons with the intent that the criminals concerned should be unharmed for trial and, later, for the organ banks. The only killing weapons made are for killing animals. They are supposed to be, well, sportsmanlike.
A continuous-firing X-ray laser would be easy enough to make. It would chop down anything living, no matter how fast it fled, no matter what it hid behind. The beast wouldn’t even know it was being shot at until you waved the beam through its body: an invisible sword blade a mile long.
But that’s butchery. The prey should have a chance; it should at least know it’s being shot at. A standard hunting laser fires a pulse of visible light and won’t fire again for about a second. It’s no better than a rifle, except in that you don’t have to allow for windage, the range is close enough to infinite, you can’t run out of bullets, it doesn’t mess up the meat, and there’s no recoil. That’s what makes it sportsmanlike.
Against me it had been just sportsmanlike enough. He was dead. I wasn’t.
“Not that it’s so censored easy to modify a hunting laser,” Swan said. “It takes some basic electronics. I could do it myself—”
“So could I. Why not? We’ve both had police training.”
“The point is, I don’t know anyone who couldn’t find someone to modify a hunting laser, give it a faster pulse or even a continuous beam. Your friend must have been afraid to bring anyone else into it. He must have had a very personal grudge against you. You’re sure you don’t recognize him?”
“I never saw him before. Not with that face.”
“And he’s dead,” Swan said.
“That doesn’t really prove anything. Some people have allergic reactions to police anesthetics.”
“You used a standard ARM weapon?”
“Yah. I didn’t even fire both barrels. I couldn’t have put a lot of needles in him. But there are allergic reactions.”
“Especially if you take something to bring them on.” Swan put the gun down and stood up. “Now, I’m just a city cop, and I don’t know that much about ARM business. But I’ve heard that organleggers sometimes take something so they won’t just go to sleep when an ARM anesthetic hits them.”
“Yah. Organleggers don’t like becoming spare parts themselves. I do have a theory, Inspector.”
“Try me.”
“He’s a retired organlegger. A lot of them retired when the Freezer Bill passed. Their markets were gone, and they’d made their pile, some of them. They split up and became honest citizens. A respected citizen may keep a hunting laser on his wall, but it isn’t modified. He could modify it if he had to with a day’s notice.”
“Then said respected citizen spotted an old enemy.”
“Going into a restaurant, maybe. And he just had time to go home for his gun while we ate dinner.”
“Sounds reasonable. How do we check it?”
“If you’ll do a rejection spectrum on his brain tissue and send everything you’ve got to ARM Headquarters,