Flatlander - Larry Niven [39]
Except that the legitimate transplants released by the Freezer Law were running out. And a peculiar thing was happening. People had started to disappear from stalled vehicles, singles apartment houses, crowded city slidewalks.
Earth wanted the organleggers back.
No, that wasn’t fair. Put it this way: Enough citizens wanted to extend their own lives at any cost …
If Anubis was alive, he might well be thinking of going back into business.
The point was that he would need backing. Loren had taken over his medical facilities when Anubis had retired. Eventually we’d located those and destroyed them. Anubis would have to start over.
Let the second Freezer Bill pass, and Leviticus Hale would be spare parts. Charlotte and Holden Chambers would inherit … how much?
I got that via a call to the local NBA news department. In 134 years Leviticus Hale’s original 320,000 dollars had become seventy-five million UN marks.
* * *
I spent the rest of the morning on routine. They call it legwork, though it’s mostly done by phone and computer keyboard. The word covers some unbelievable long shots.
We were investigating every member of every Citizen’s Committee to Oppose the second Freezer Bill in the world. The suggestion had come down from old man Garner. He thought we might find that a coalition of organleggers had pooled advertising money to keep the corpsicles off the market. The results that morning didn’t look promising.
I half hoped it wouldn’t work out. Suppose those committees did turn out to be backed by organleggers? It would make prime time news anywhere in the world. The second Freezer Bill would pass like that. But it had to be checked. There had been opposition to the first Freezer Bill, too, when the gangs had more money.
Money. We spent a good deal of computer time looking for unexplained money. The average criminal tends to think that once he’s got the money, the game is over.
We hadn’t caught a sniff of Loren or Anubis that way.
Where had Anubis spent his money? Maybe he’d just hidden it away somewhere, or maybe Loren had killed him for it. And Tiller had shot at me because he didn’t like my face. Legwork is gambling, time against results.
It developed that Holden Chambers’s environs were free of eavesdropping devices. I called him about noon.
There appeared within my phone screen a red-faced, white-haired man of great dignity. He asked to whom I wished to speak. I told him and displayed my ARM ident. He nodded and put me on hold.
Moments later I faced a weak-chinned young man who smiled distractedly at me and said, “Sorry about that. I’ve been getting considerable static from the news lately. Zero acts as a kind of, ah, buffer.”
Past his shoulder I could see a table with things on it: a tape viewer, a double handful of tape spools, a tape recorder the size of a man’s palm, two pens, and a stack of paper, all neatly arranged. I said, “Sorry to interrupt your studying.”
“That’s all right. It’s tough getting back to it after Year’s End. Maybe you remember. Haven’t I seen you—? Oh. The floating cigarette.”
“That’s right.”
“How did you do that?”
“I’ve got an imaginary arm.” And it’s a great conversational device, an icebreaker of wondrous potency. I was a marvel, a talking sea serpent, the way the kid was looking at me. “I lost an arm once, mining rocks in the Belt. A sliver of asteroidal rock sheared it off clean to the shoulder.”
He looked awed.
“I got it replaced, of course. But for a year I was a one-armed man. Well, here was a whole section of my brain developed to control a right arm, and no right arm. Psychokinesis is easy enough to develop when you live in a low-gravity environment.” I paused just less than long enough for him to form a question. “Somebody tried to kill me outside Midgard last night. That’s why I called.”
I hadn’t expected him to burst into a fit of the giggles. “Sorry,” he got out. “It sounds like you lead an active life!”
“Yah. It didn’t seem that funny at the time. I don’t suppose you noticed anything unusual last night?”
“Just the usual shootings and muggings, and there was