Flatlander - Larry Niven [47]
“Sure. I’m sorry. We don’t learn tact in this business. We learn to ask questions. Any questions.”
And yet, and yet, the look on her face.
I asked him one more question as I was escorting him out. Almost offhandedly. “What do you think of the second Freezer Bill?”
“I don’t have a UN vote yet.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He faced me belligerently. “Look, there’s a lot of money involved. A lot of money. It would pay for Charlotte the rest of her life. It would fix my face. But Hale, Leviticus Hale—” He pronounced the name accurately, and with no flicker of a smile. “He’s a relative, isn’t he? My great-to-the-third-grandfather. They could bring him back someday; it’s possible. So what do I do? If I had a vote, I’d have to decide. But I’m not twenty-five yet, so I don’t have to worry about it.”
“Interviews.”
“I don’t give interviews. You just got the same answer everyone else gets. It’s on tape, on file with Zero. Goodbye, Mr. Hamilton.”
Other ARM departments had thinned our ranks during the lull following the first Freezer Law. Over the next couple of weeks they began to trickle back. We needed operatives to implant tracers in unsuspecting victims and afterward to monitor their welfare. We needed an augmented staff to follow their tracer blips on the screens downstairs.
We were sorely tempted to tell all the corpsicle heirs what was happening and have them check in with us at regular intervals, say, every fifteen minutes. It would have made things much easier. It might also have influenced their votes, altered the quality of the interviews they gave out.
But we didn’t want to alert our quarry, the still hypothetical coalition of organleggers now monitoring the same corpsicle heirs we were interested in. And the backlash vote would be ferocious if we were wrong. And we weren’t supposed to be interested in politics.
We operated without the knowledge of the corpsicle heirs. There were two thousand of them in all parts of the world, almost three hundred in the western United States, with an expected legacy of fifty thousand UN marks or more—a limit we set for our own convenience, because it was about all we could handle.
One thing helped the manpower situation. We had reached another lull. Missing persons complaints had dropped to near zero all over the world.
“We should have been expecting that,” Bera commented. “For the last year or so most of their customers must have stopped going to organleggers. They’re waiting to see if the second Freezer Bill will go through. Now all the gangs are stuck with full organ banks and no customers. If they learned anything from last time, they’ll pull in their horns and wait it out. Of course I’m only guessing.” But it looked likely enough. At any rate, we had the men we needed.
We monitored the top dozen corpsicle heirs twenty-four hours a day. The rest we checked at random intervals. The tracers could only tell us where they were, not who they were with or whether they wanted to be there. We had to keep checking to see if anyone had disappeared.
We sat back to await results.
* * *
The Security Council passed the second Freezer Bill on February 3, 2125. Now it would go to the world vote in late March. The voting public numbered ten billion, of whom perhaps sixty percent would bother to phone in their votes.
I took to watching the boob cube again.
NBA Broadcasting continued its coverage of the corpsicle heirs and its editorials in favor of the bill. Proponents took every opportunity to point out that many corpsicle heirs still remained to be discovered. (And YOU might be one.) Taffy and I watched a parade in New York in favor of the bill: banners and placards (SAVE THE LIVING, NOT THE DEAD … IT’S YOUR LIFE AT STAKE … CORPSICLES KEEP BEER COLD) and one censored big mob of chanting people. The transportation costs must have been formidable.
The various committees