Flatlander - Larry Niven [46]
He said the same thing I’d said two nights ago. “Nope. Not with that face.”
“Well, it was worth a try. Let’s go to my office. It’s more comfortable.”
He smiled. “Good.”
He dawdled in the corridors. He looked into open offices, smiled at anyone who looked up, asked me mostly intelligent questions in a low voice. He was enjoying himself: a tourist in ARM Headquarters. But he trailed back when I tried to take the middle of the corridor, so that we wound up walking on opposite sides. Finally I asked him about it.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, “It was that pencil trick.”
“What about it?”
He sighed, as one who despairs of ever finding the right words does. “I don’t like to be touched. I mean, I get along with girls all right, but generally I don’t like to be touched.”
“I didn’t—”
“But you could have. And without my knowing. I couldn’t see it, I might not even feel it. It just bothered the censored hell out of me, you reaching out of a phone screen like that! A phone call isn’t supposed to be that, that personal.” He stopped suddenly, looking down the corridor. “Isn’t that Lucas Garner?”
“Yah.”
“Lucas Garner!” He was awed and delighted. “He runs it all, doesn’t he? How old is he now?”
“In his hundred and eighties.” I thought of introducing him, but Luke’s chair slid off in a different direction.
My office is just big enough for me, my desk, two chairs, and an array of spigots in the wall. I poured him tea and me coffee. I said, “I went to visit your sister.”
“Charlotte? How is she?”
“I doubt she’s changed since the last time you saw her. She doesn’t notice anything around her … except for one incident, when she turned around and stared at me.”
“Why? What did you do? What did you say?” he demanded.
Well, here it came. “I was telling her doctor that the same gang that kidnapped her once might want her again.”
Strange things happened around his mouth. Bewilderment, fear, disbelief. “What the bleep made you say that?”
“It’s a possibility. You’re both corpsicle heirs. Tiller the Killer could have been watching you when he spotted me watching you. He couldn’t have that.”
“No, I suppose not …” He was trying to take it lightly, and he failed. “Do you seriously think they might want me—us—again?”
“It’s a possibility,” I repeated. “If Tiller was inside the restaurant, he could have spotted me by my floating cigarette. It’s more distinctive than my face. Don’t look so worried. We’ve got a tracer on you; we could track him anywhere he took you.”
“In me?” He didn’t like that much better—too personal?—but he didn’t make an issue of it.
“Holden, I keep wondering what they could have done to your sister—”
He interrupted coldly. “I stopped wondering that long ago.”
“—that they didn’t do to you. It’s more than curiosity. If the doctors knew what was done to her, if they knew what it is in her memory—”
“Dammit! Don’t you think I want to help her? She’s my sister!”
“All right.” What was I playing psychiatrist for, anyway? Or was it detective I was playing? He didn’t know anything. He was at the eye of several storms at once, and he must be getting sick and tired of it. I ought to send him home.
He spoke first. I could barely hear him. “You know what they did to me? A nerve block at the neck. A little widget taped to the back of my neck with surgical skin. I couldn’t feel anything below the neck, and I couldn’t move. They put that on me, dumped me on a bed, and left me. For nine days. Every so often they’d turn me on again and let me drink and eat something and go to the bathroom.”
“Did anyone tell you they’d break you up for stuff if they didn’t get the ransom?”
He thought about it. “N-no. I could pretty well guess it. They never said anything to me at all. They treated me like I was dead. They examined me for, oh, it felt like hours, poking and prodding me with their hands and their instruments, rolling me around like dead meat. I couldn’t feel any of it, but I could see it