Flatlander - Larry Niven [45]
“I don’t follow you.”
At this moment Garner looked like something that was ready to pounce. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a federation of organleggers was backing the second Freezer Bill? The idea would be to kidnap all of the top corpsicle heirs just before the Bill passes. Most people worth kidnapping can afford to protect themselves. Guards, house alarms, wrist alarms. A corpsicle heir can’t do that yet.”
Garner leaned forward in his chair, doing the work with his arms. “If we could prove this and give it some publicity, wouldn’t it shoot hell out of the second Freezer Law?”
There was a memo on my desk when I got back. The data package on Holden Chambers was in the computer memory, waiting for me. I remembered that Holden himself would be here this afternoon unless the arm trick had scared him off.
I punched for the package and read it through, trying to decide just how sane the kid was. Most of the information had come from the college medical center. They’d been worried about him, too.
The kidnapping had interrupted his freshman year at Washburn. His grades had dropped sharply afterward, then sloped back to marginally passing. In September he’d changed his major from architecture to biochemistry. He’d made the switch easily. His grades had been average or better during these last two years.
He lived alone in one of those tiny apartments whose furnishings are all memory plastic, extruded as needed. Technology was cheaper than elbow room. The apartment house did have some communal facilities—sauna, pool, cleaning robots, party room, room-service kitchen, clothing dispensary … I wondered why he didn’t get a roommate. It would have saved him money, for one thing. But his sex life had always been somewhat passive, and he’d never been gregarious, according to the file. He’d just about pulled the hole in after him for some months after the kidnapping. As if he’d lost all faith in humanity.
If he’d been off the beam then, he seemed to have recovered. Even his sex life had improved. That information had not come from the college medical center but from records from the communal kitchen (breakfast for two, late-night room service) and some recent recorded phone messages. All quite public; there was no reason for me to be feeling like a peeping Tom. The publicity on the corpsicle heirs may have done him some good, started girls chasing him for a change. A few had spent the night, but he didn’t seem to be seeing anyone steadily.
I had wondered how he could afford a servant. The answer made me feel stupid. The secretary named Zero turned out to be a computer construct, an answering service.
Chambers was not penniless. After the ransom had been paid, the trust fund had contained about twenty thousand marks. Charlotte’s care had eaten into that. The trustees were giving Holden enough to pay his tuition and still live comfortably. There would be some left when he graduated, but it would be earmarked for Charlotte.
I turned off the screen and thought about it. He’d had a jolt. He’d recovered. Some do, some don’t. He’d been in perfect health, which has a lot to do with surviving emotional shock. If he was your friend today, you would avoid certain subjects in his presence.
And he’d thrown himself backward in blind terror when a pencil rose from his desk and started to pinwheel. How normal was that? I just didn’t know. I was too used to my imaginary arm.
Holden himself appeared at about fourteen hundred.
Anthony Tiller was in a cold box. His face had been hideously contorted during his last minutes, but it showed none of that now. He was as expressionless as any dead man. The frozen sleepers at the Vault of Eternity had looked like that. Superficially, most of them had been in worse shape than he was.
Holden Chambers studied him with interest. “So that’s what an organlegger looks like.”
“An organlegger looks like anything he wants to.”
He grimaced at that. He bent close to study the dead man’s face. He circled the cold box with his hands