Flatlander - Larry Niven [68]
“No, thanks, but I’m wondering how good your artificial arm is. I’m carrying a transplant myself.”
Ecks looked me over carefully for signs of moral degeneration. “I suppose you’re also one of those people who keep voting the death penalty for more and more trivial offenses?”
“No, I—”
“After all, if the organ banks ran out of criminals, you’d be in trouble. You might have to live with your mistakes.”
“No, I’m one of those people who blocked the second corpsicle law, kept that group from going into the organ banks. And I hunt organleggers for a living. But I don’t have an artificial arm, and I suppose the reason is that I’m squeamish.”
“Squeamish about being part mechanical? I’ve heard of that,” Ecks said. “But you can be squeamish the other way, too. What there is of me is all me, not part of a dead man. I’ll admit the sense of touch isn’t quite the same, but it’s just as good. And—look.”
He put a hand on my upper forearm and squeezed.
It felt like the bones were about to give. I didn’t scream, but it took an effort. “That isn’t all my strength,” he said. “And I could keep it up all day. This arm doesn’t get tired.”
He let go.
I asked if he would mind my examining his arms. He didn’t. But then, Ecks didn’t know about my imaginary hand.
I probed the advanced plastics of Ecks’s false arm, the bone and muscle structure of the other. It was the real arm I was interested in.
When we were back in the car, Valpredo said, “Well?”
“Nothing wrong with his real arm,” I said. “No scars.”
Valpredo nodded.
But the bubble of accelerated time wouldn’t hurt plastic and batteries, I thought. And if he’d been planning to lower fifty pounds of generator two stories down on a nylon line, his artificial arm had the strength for it.
We called Peterfi from the car. He was in. He was a small man, dark-complected, mild of face, his hair straight and shiny black around a receding hairline. His eyes blinked and squinted as if the light were too bright, and he had the scruffy look of a man who has slept in his clothes. I wondered if we had interrupted an afternoon nap.
Yes, he would be glad to help the police in a murder investigation.
Peterfi’s condominium was a slab of glass and concrete set on a Santa Monica cliff face. His apartment faced the sea. “Expensive, but worth it for the view,” he said, showing us to chairs in the living room. The drapes were closed against the afternoon sun. Peterfi had changed clothes. I noticed the bulge in his upper left sleeve where an insulin capsule and automatic feeder had been anchored to the bone of the arm.
“Well, what can I do for you? I don’t believe you mentioned who had been murdered.”
Valpredo told him.
He was shocked. “Oh, my. Ray Sinclair. But there’s no telling how this will affect—” and he stopped suddenly.
“Please go on,” said Valpredo.
“We were working on something together. Something revolutionary.”
An interstellar drive?
He was startled. He debated with himself, then said, “Yes. It was supposed to be secret.”
We admitted to having seen the machine in action. How did a time compression field serve as an interstellar drive?
“That’s not exactly what it is,” Peterfi said. Again he debated with himself. Then, “There have always been a few optimists around who thought that just because mass and inertia have always been associated in human experience, it need not be a universal law. What Ray and I have done is to create a condition of low inertia. You see—”
“An inertialess drive!”
Peterfi nodded vigorously at me. “Essentially yes. Is the machine intact? If not—”
I reassured him on that point.
“That’s good. I was about to say that if it had been destroyed, I could recreate it. I did most of the work of building it. Ray preferred to work with his mind, not with his hands.”
Had Peterfi visited Sinclair last night?
“No. I had dinner at a restaurant down the coast, then came home and watched the holo wall. What times do I need alibis for?” he asked jokingly.
Valpredo told him. The joking look