Flatlander - Larry Niven [54]
“It’s got to be better than being catatonic,” Bera said.
“Does it? There’s no way to turn off a wirehead. She’ll have to go through life with a battery under her hat. When she comes back far enough into the real world, she’ll find a way to boost the current and bug right out again.”
“Think of her as walking wounded.” Bera shrugged, shifting an invisible weight on his shoulders. “There isn’t any good answer. She’s been hurt, man!”
“There’s more to it than that,” Luke Garner said. “We need to know if she can be cured. There are more wireheads every day. It’s a new vice. We need to learn how to control it What the bleep is happening down there?”
The bystanders were surging against the ropes. Suddenly they were through in a dozen places, converging on the marchers. It was a swirling mob scene. They were still chanting, and suddenly I caught it.
ORganleggersORganleggersORganleggers …
“That’s it!” Bera shouted in pleased surprise. “Anubis is getting too much publicity. It’s good versus evil!”
The rioters started to collapse in curved ribbon patterns. Copters overhead were spraying them with sonic stun cannon.
Bera said, “They’ll never pass the second Freezer Bill now.”
Never is a long time to Luke Garner. He said, “Not this time, anyway. We ought to start thinking about that. A lot of people have been applying for operations. There’s quite a waiting list. When the second Freezer Bill fails—”
I saw it. “They’ll start going to organleggers. We can keep track of them. Tracers.”
“That’s what I had in mind.”
ARM
The ARM Building had been abnormally quiet for some months now.
We’d needed the rest—at first. But these last few mornings the silence had had an edgy quality. We waved at each other on our paths to our respective desks, but our heads were elsewhere. Some of us had a restless look. Others were visibly, determinedly busy.
Nobody wanted to join a mother hunt.
This past year we’d managed to cut deep into the organlegging activities in the West Coast area. Pats on the back all around, but the results were predictable: other activities were going to increase. Sooner or later the newspapers would start screaming about stricter enforcement of the Fertility Laws, and then we’d all be out hunting down illegitimate parents … all of us who were not involved in something else.
It was high time I got involved in something else.
This morning I walked to my office through the usual edgy silence. I ran coffee, carried it to my desk, punched for messages at the computer terminal. A slender file slid from the slot. A hopeful sign. I picked it up one-handed so that I could sip coffee as I went through it and let it fall open in the middle.
Color holographs jumped out at me. I was looking down through a pair of windows over two morgue tables.
Stomach to brain: LURCH! What a hell of an hour to be looking at people with their faces burned off! Get eyes to look somewhere else and don’t try to swallow that coffee. Why don’t you change jobs?
They were hideous. Two of them, a man and a woman. Something had burned their faces away down to the skulls and beyond: bones and teeth charred, brain tissue cooked.
I swallowed and kept looking. I’d seen the dead before. These had just hit me at the wrong time.
Not a laser weapon, I thought … though that was chancy. There are thousands of jobs for lasers and thousands of varieties to do the jobs. Not a hand laser, anyway. The pencil-thin beam of a hand laser would have chewed channels in the flesh. This had been a wide, steady beam of some kind.
I flipped back to the beginning and skimmed.
Details: They’d been found on the Wilshire slidewalk in West Los Angeles around 4:30 A.M. People don’t use the slidewalks that late. They’re afraid of organleggers. The bodies could have traveled up to a couple of miles before anyone saw them.
Preliminary autopsy: They’d been dead three or four days. No signs of drugs or poisons or puncture marks. Apparently