Flatlander - Larry Niven [61]
Poor Janice. When she woke up … For a solid month I’d wakened to that same stunning shock, the knowledge that my right arm was gone.
The taxi settled. Valpredo was waiting below.
I speculated … Cars weren’t the only things that flew. But anyone flying one of those tricky ducted-fan flycycles over a city, where he could fall on a pedestrian, wouldn’t have to worry about a murder charge. They’d feed him to the organ banks regardless. And anything that flew would leave traces anywhere but on the landing pad itself. It would crush a rosebush or a bonsai tree or be flipped over by an elm.
The taxi took off in a whisper of air.
Valpredo was grinning at me. “The thinker. What’s on your mind?”
“I was wondering if the killer could have come down on the carport roof.”
He turned to study the situation. “There are two cameras mounted on the edge of the roof. If his vehicle was light enough, sure, he could land there, and the cameras wouldn’t spot him. Roof wouldn’t hold a car, though. Anyway, nobody did it.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll show you. By the way, we inspected the camera system. We’re pretty sure the cameras weren’t tampered with. Nobody even landed here until seven this morning. Look here.” We had reached the concrete stairs that led down into Sinclair’s apartments. Valpredo pointed at a glint of light in the sloping ceiling, at heart level. “This is the only way down. The camera would get anyone coming in or out It might not catch his face, but it’d show if someone passed. It takes sixty frames a minute.”
I went on down. A cop let me in.
Ordaz was on the phone. The screen showed a young man with a deep tan and shock showing through the tan. Ordaz waved at me, a shushing motion, and went on talking. “Fifteen minutes? That will be a great help to us. Please land on the roof. We are still working on the elevator.”
He hung up and turned to me. “Andrew Porter, Janice Sinclair’s lover. He tells us that he and Janice spent the evening at a party. She dropped him off at his home around one o’clock.”
“Then she came straight home, if that’s her in the ‘doc.”
“I think it must be. Mr. Porter says she was wearing a blue skin-dye job.” Ordaz was frowning. “He put on a most convincing act, if it was that. I think he really was not expecting any kind of trouble. He was surprised that a stranger answered, shocked when he learned of Doctor Sinclair’s death, and horrified when he learned that Janice had been hurt.”
With the mummy and the generator removed, the murder scene had become an empty circle of brown grass marked with random streaks of yellow chemical and outlines of white chalk.
“We had some luck,” Ordaz said. “Today’s date is June 4, 2124. Dr. Sinclair was wearing a calendar watch. It registered January 17, 2125. If we switched the machine off at ten minutes to ten—which we did—and if it was registering an hour for every seven seconds that passed outside the field, then the field must have gone on at around one o’clock last night, give or take a margin of error.”
“Then if the girl didn’t do it, she must have just missed the killer.”
“Exactly.”
“What about the elevator? Could it have been jiggered?”
“No. We took the workings apart. It was on this floor and locked by hand. Nobody could have left by elevator …”
“Why did you trail off like that?”
Ordaz shrugged, embarrassed. “This peculiar machine really does bother me, Gil. I found myself thinking, Suppose it can reverse time? Then the killer could have gone down in an elevator that was going up.”
He laughed with me. I said, “In the first place, I don’t believe a word of it. In the second place, he didn’t have the machine to do it with. Unless … he made his escape before the murder. Dammit, now you’ve got me doing it.”
“I would like to know more about the machine.”
“Bera’s investigating it now. I’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything. And I’d like to know more about how the killer couldn’t possibly have left.”
He looked at me. “Details?”
“Could someone have opened a window?”
“No. These apartments are forty years old. The smog was still bad