Flatlander - Larry Niven [48]
Polls indicated that the Chinese sectors would vote against the bill. NBA newscasters spoke of ancestor worship and reminded the public that six ex-chairmen resided in Chinese freezer vaults, alongside myriad lesser ex-officials. Immortality was a respected tradition in China.
The committees to oppose reminded the world’s voting public that some of the wealthiest of the frozen dead had heirs in the Belt. Were Earth’s resources to be spread indiscriminately among the asteroidal rocks? I started to hate both sides. Fortunately, the UN cut that line off fast by threatening an injunction. Earth needed Belt resources too heavily.
Our own results began to come in.
Mortimer Lincoln, alias Anthony Tiller, had not been at Midgard the night he had tried to kill me. He’d eaten alone in his apartment, a meal sent from the communal kitchen. Which meant that he himself could not have been watching Chambers.
We found no sign of anyone lurking behind Holden Chambers or behind any of the other corpsicle heirs, publicized or not, with one general exception. Newsmen. The media were unabashedly and constantly interested in the corpsicle heirs, priority based on the money they stood to inherit. We faced a depressing hypothesis: the potential kidnappers were spending all their time watching the boob cube, letting the media do their tracking for them. But perhaps the connection was closer.
We started investigating newscast stations.
In mid-February I pulled Holden Chambers in and had him examined for an outlaw tracer. It was a move of desperation. Organleggers don’t use such tools. They specialize in medicine. Our own tracer was still working, and it was the only tracer in him. Chambers was icily angry. We had interrupted his studying for a midterm exam.
We managed to search three of the top dozen when they had medical checkups. Nothing.
Our investigations of the newscast stations turned up very little. Clark and Nash was running a good many onetime spots through NBA. Other advertising firms had similar lines of possible influence over other stations, broadcasting companies, and cassette newszines. But we were looking for newsmen who had popped up from nowhere, with backgrounds forged or nonexistent. Ex-organleggers in new jobs. We didn’t find any.
I called Menninger’s one empty afternoon. Charlotte Chambers was still catatonic. “I’ve got Lowndes of New York working with me,” Hartman told me. “He has precisely your voice and good qualifications, too. Charlotte hasn’t responded yet. We’ve been wondering: could it have been the way you were talking?”
“You mean the accent? It’s Kansas with an overlay of west coast and Belter.”
“No, Lowndes has that, too. I mean organlegger slang.”
“I use it. Bad habit.”
“That could be it.” He made a face. “But we can’t act on it. It might just scare her completely into herself.”
“That’s where she is now. I’d risk it.”
“You’re not a psychiatrist,” he said.
I hung up and brooded. Negatives, all negatives.
I didn’t hear the hissing sound until it was almost on me. I looked up then, and it was Luke Garner’s ground-effect travel chair sliding accurately through the door. He watched me a moment, then said, “What are you looking so grim about?”
“Nothing. All the nothing we’ve been getting instead of results.”
“Uh huh.” He let the chair settle. “It’s beginning to look like Tiller the Killer wasn’t on assignment.”
“That would blow the whole thing, wouldn’t it? I did a lot of extrapolating from two beams of green light. One ex-organlegger tries to make holes in one ARM agent, and now we’ve committed tens of thousands of man-hours and seventy or eighty computer-hours on the strength of it.