Flatlander - Larry Niven [57]
“Looks dangerous enough to me,” I said.
“It is. I reached in there myself,” Valpredo told me, “right after we got here. I thought I could flip the switch off. My whole arm went numb. Instantly. No feeling at all. I yanked it away fast, but for a minute or so after that my whole arm was dead meat. I thought I’d lost it. Then it was all pins and needles, like I’d slept on it.”
The cop who had brought me in had almost finished assembling the deep-sea fishing pole.
Ordaz waved into the circle. “Well? Have you ever seen anything like this?”
I shook my head, studying the violet-glowing machinery. “Whatever it is, it’s brand-new. Sinclair’s really done it this time.”
An uneven line of solenoids was attached to a plastic frame with homemade joins. Blistered spots on the plastic showed where other objects had been attached and later removed. A breadboard bore masses of heavy wiring. There were six big batteries hooked in parallel and a strange, heavy piece of sculpture in what we later discovered was pure silver, with wiring attached at three curving points. The silver was tarnished almost black, and there were old file marks at the edges.
Near the center of the arrangement, just in front of the silver sculpture, were two concentric solenoids embedded in a block of clear plastic. They glowed blue shading to violet. So did the batteries. A less perceptible violet glow radiated from everywhere on the machine, more intensely in the interior parts.
That glow bothered me more than anything else. It was too theatrical. It was like something a special effects man might add to a cheap late-night thriller to suggest a mad scientist’s laboratory.
I moved around to get a closer look at the dead man’s watch.
“Keep your head out of the field!” Valpredo said sharply.
I nodded. I squatted on my heels outside the borderline of dead grass.
The dead man’s watch was going like crazy. The minute hand was circling the dial every seven seconds or so. I couldn’t find the second hand at all.
I backed away from the arc of dead grass and stood up. Interstellar drive, hell. This blue-glowing monstrosity looked more like a time machine gone wrong.
I studied the single-throw switch welded to the plastic frame next to the batteries. A length of nylon line dangled from the horizontal handle. It looked like someone had tugged the switch on from outside the field by using the line, but he’d have had to hang from the ceiling to tug it off that way.
“I see why you couldn’t send it over to ARM Headquarters. You can’t even touch it. You stick your arm or your head in there for a second, and that’s ten minutes without a blood supply.”
Ordaz said, “Exactly.”
“It looks like you could reach in there with a stick and flip that switch off.”
“Perhaps. We are about to try that.” He waved at the man with the fishing pole. “There was nothing in this room long enough to reach the switch. We had to send—”
“Wait a minute. There’s a problem.”
He looked at me. So did the cop with the fishing pole.
“That switch could be a self-destruct. Sinclair was supposed to be a secretive bastard. Or the field might hold considerable potential energy. Something might go blooey.”
Ordaz sighed. “We must risk it. Gil, we have measured the rotation of the dead man’s wristwatch. One hour per seven seconds. Fingerprints, footprints, laundry marks, residual body odor, stray eyelashes, all disappearing at an hour per seven seconds.” He gestured, and the cop moved in and began trying to hook the switch.
“Already we may never know just when he was killed,” Ordaz said.
The tip of the pole wobbled in large circles, steadied beneath the switch, made contact. I held my breath. The pole bowed. The switch snapped up, and suddenly the violet glow was gone. Valpredo reached into the field, warily, as if the air might be red hot Nothing happened, and he relaxed.
Then Ordaz began giving orders, and quite a lot happened. Two men in lab coats drew a chalk outline around the mummy and the poker.