Flatlander - Larry Niven [53]
“It’s a wonder I thought of it myself. The stuff from one donor is worth over a million marks in surgery charges. Why should anyone use a whole donor for one transplant? But once I thought of it, it made all kinds of sense. The stuff wasn’t selling, anyway.”
Funny: they both talked as if they’d known each other a long time. There aren’t many people an organlegger will regard as people, but an ARM is one of them. We’re organleggers, too, in a sense.
Bera was holding a sonic on him. Anubis ignored it. He said, “The only problem was the money.”
“Then you thought of the corpsicle heirs,” I said.
“Yah. I went looking for a rich corpsicle with a young, healthy direct-line heir. Leviticus Hale seemed made for the part. He was the first one I noticed.”
“He’s pretty noticeable, isn’t he? A healthy middle-aged man sleeping there among all those battered accident cases. Only two heirs, both orphans, one kind of introverted, the other … What did you do to Charlotte?”
“Charlotte Chambers? We drove her mad. We had to. She was the only one who’d notice if Holden Chambers suddenly got too different.”
“What did you do to her?”
“We made a wirehead out of her.”
“The hell. Someone would have noticed the contact in her scalp.”
“No, no, no. We used one of those induction helmets you find in the ecstasy shops. We kept her in the helmet for nine days, on full. When we stopped the current, she just wasn’t interested in anything anymore.”
“How did you know it would work?”
“Oh, we tried it out on a few prospects. It worked fine. It didn’t hurt them after they were broken up.”
“Okay.” I went to the phone and dialed ARM Headquarters.
“It solved the money problem beautifully,” he ran on. “I plowed most of it into advertising charges. And there’s nothing suspicious about Leviticus Hale’s money. When the second Freezer Bill goes through—well, I guess not. Not now. Unless—”
“No,” Bera said for both of us.
I told the man on duty where we were, and to stop monitoring the tracers, and to call in the operatives watching corpsicle heirs. Then I hung up.
“I spent six months studying Chambers’s college courses. I didn’t want to blow his career. Six months! Answer me one,” Anubis said, curiously anxious. “Where did I go wrong? What gave me away?”
“You were beautiful,” I told him wearily. “You never went out of character. You should have been an actor. Would have been safer, too. We didn’t suspect anything until—” I looked at my watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”
“Censored dammit! You would say that. When I saw you looking at me in Midgard, I thought that was it. That floating cigarette. You’d got Loren, now you were after me.”
I couldn’t help it. I roared. Anubis sat there, taking it. He was beginning to blush.
They were shouting something, something I couldn’t make out Something with a beat. DAdadadaDAdadada …
There was just room for me and Jackson Bera and Luke Garner’s travel chair on the tiny balcony outside Garner’s office. Far below, the marchers flowed past the ARM building in half-orderly procession. Teams of them carried huge banners. LET THEM STAY DEAD, one suggested, and another in small print: Why not revive them a bit at a time? FOR YOUR FATHER’S SAKE, a third said with deadly logic.
They were roped off from the spectators, roped off into a column down the middle of Wilshire. The spectators were even thicker. It looked like all of Los Angeles had turned out to watch. Some of them carried placards, too. THEY WANT TO LIVE TOO, and ARE YOU A FREEZER VAULT HEIR?
“What is it they’re shouting?” Bera wondered. “It’s not the marchers; it’s the spectators. They’re drowning out the marchers.”
DAdadadaDAdadadaDAdadada. It rippled up to us on stray wind currents.
“We could see it better inside, in the boob cube,” Garner said without moving. What held us was a metaphysical force, the knowledge that one is there, a witness.
Abruptly, Garner asked, “How’s Charlotte Chambers?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Didn’t you call Menninger Institute this morning?”
“I mean I don’t know how to take it They’ve done