Flatlander - Larry Niven [40]
“Sure, I see your point.”
“I left before you did. I know censored well I did. What happened?”
“Somebody shot at us with a hunting laser. He was probably just a nut. He was also part of the gang that kidnapped—” He looked stricken. “Yah, them. There’s probably no connection, but we wondered if you might have noticed anything. Like a familiar face.”
He shook his head. “They change faces, don’t they?”
“Usually. How did you leave?”
“Taxi. I live in Bakersfield, about twenty minutes from High Cliffs. Where did all this happen? I caught my taxi on the third shopping level.”
“That kills it. We were on the first.”
“I’m not really sorry. He might have shot at me, too.”
I’d been trying to decide whether to tell him that the kidnap gang might be interested in him again. Whether to scare the lights out of him on another long shot or leave him off guard for a possible kidnap attempt. He seemed stable enough, but you never knew.
I temporized. “Mister Chambers, we’d like you to try to identify the man who tried to kill me last night. He probably did change his face—”
“Yah.” He was uneasy. Many citizens would be if asked to look a dead man in the face. “But I suppose you’ve got to try it. I’ll stop in tomorrow afternoon, after class.”
So. Tomorrow we’d see what he was made of.
He asked, “Imaginary arm? I’ve never heard of a psi talking that way about his talent.”
“I wasn’t being cute,” I told him. “My limited imagination. I can feel things out with my fingertips, but not if they’re farther away than an arm can reach.”
“But most psis can reach farther. Why not try a hypnotist?”
“And lose the whole arm? I don’t want to risk that.”
He looked disappointed in me. “What can you do with an imaginary arm that you can’t do with a real one?”
“I can pick up hot things without burning myself.”
“Yah!” He hadn’t thought of that.
“And I can reach through walls. I can reach two ways through a phone screen. Fiddle with the works or—here, I’ll show you.”
It doesn’t always work. But I was getting a good picture. Chambers showed life-sized, in color and stereo, through four square feet of screen. It looked like I could reach right into it. So I did. I reached into the screen with my imaginary hand, picked a pencil off the table in front of him, and twirled it like a baton.
He threw himself backward out of his chair. He landed rolling. I saw his face, pale gray with terror, before he rolled away and out of view. A few seconds later the screen went blank. He must have turned the knob from offscreen.
If I’d touched his face, I could have understood it. But all I’d done was lift a pencil. What the hell?
My fault, I guessed. Some people see psi powers as supernatural, eerie, threatening. I shouldn’t have been showing off like that. But Holden hadn’t looked the type. Brash, a bit nervous, but fascinated rather than repulsed by the possibilities of an invisible, immaterial hand.
Then, terror.
I didn’t try to call him back. I dithered about putting a guard on him, decided not to. A guard might be noticed. But I ordered a tracer implanted in him.
Anubis might pick Chambers up at any time. He needn’t wait for the General Assembly to declare Leviticus Hale dead.
A tracer needle was a useful thing. It would be fired at Chambers from ambush. He’d probably never notice the sting, the hole would be only a pinprick, and it would tell us just where he was from then on.
I thought Charlotte Chambers could use a tracer, too, so I picked up a palm-size pressure implanter downstairs. I also traded the discharged barrel on my sidearm for a fresh one. The feel of the gun in my hand sent vivid green lines sizzling past my mind’s eye.
Last, I ordered a standard information package, C priority, on what Chambers had been doing for the last two years. It would probably arrive in a day or so.
The winter face