Flatlander - Larry Niven [70]
I didn’t, either. We left.
Back in the car. It was seventeen-twenty; we could pick up a snack on the way to Pauline Urthiers place. I told Valpredo, “I think it was a transplant. And he didn’t want to admit it. He must have gone to an organlegger.”
“Why would he do that? It’s not that tough to get an arm from the public organ banks.”
I chewed that. “You’re right. But if it was a normal transplant, there’ll be a record. Well, it could have happened the way he said it did.”
“Uh huh.”
“How about this? He was doing an experiment, and it was illegal. Something that might cause pollution in a city or even something to do with radiation. He picked up radiation burns in his arm. If he’d gone to the public organ banks, he’d have been arrested.”
“That would fit, too. Can we prove it on him?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to. He might tell us how to find whoever he dealt with. Let’s do some digging: maybe we can find out what he was working on six months ago.”
Pauline Urthiel opened the door the instant we rang. “Hi! I just got in myself. Can I make you drinks?”
We refused. She ushered us into a smallish apartment with a lot of fold-into-the-ceiling furniture. A sofa and coffee table were showing now; the rest existed as outlines on the ceiling. The view through the picture window was breathtaking. She lived near the top of Lindstetter’s Needle, some three hundred stories up from her husband.
She was tall and slender, with a facial structure that would have been effeminate on a man. On a woman it was a touch masculine. The well-formed breasts might be flesh or plastic but were surgically implanted in either case.
She finished making a large drink and joined us on the couch. And the questions started.
Had she any idea who might have wanted Raymond Sinclair dead?
“Not really. How did he die?”
“Someone smashed in his skull with a poker,” Valpredo said. If he wasn’t going to mention the generator, neither was I.
“How quaint.” Her contralto turned acid. “His own poker, too, I presume. Out of his own fireplace rack. What you’re looking for is a traditionalist.” She peered at us over the rim of her glass. Her eyes were large, the lids decorated in semipermanent tattoos as a pair of flapping UN flags. “That doesn’t help much, does it? You might try whoever was working with him on whatever his latest project was.”
That sounded like Peterfi, I thought. But Valpredo said, “Would he necessarily have a collaborator?”
“He generally works alone at the beginning. But somewhere along the line he brings in people to make the hardware. He never made anything real by himself. It was all just something in a computer bank. It took someone else to make it real. And he never gave credit to anyone.”
Then his hypothetical collaborator might have found out how little credit he was getting for his work, and— But Urthiel was shaking her head. “I’m talking about a psychotic, not someone who’s really been cheated. Sinclair never offered anyone a share in anything he did. He always made it damn plain what was happening. I knew what I was doing when I set up the FyreStop prototype for him, and I knew what I was doing when I quit It was all him. He was using my training, not my brain. I wanted to do something original, something me.”
Did she have any idea what Sinclair’s present project was?
“My husband would know. Larry Ecks, lives in this same building. He’s been dropping cryptic hints, and when I want more details, he has this grin—” She grinned herself suddenly. “You’ll gather I’m interested. But he won’t say.”
Time for me to take over or we’d never get certain questions asked. “I’m an ARM. What I’m about to tell you is secret,” I said. And I told her what we knew of Sinclair’s generator. Maybe Valpredo was looking at me disapprovingly, maybe not.
“We know that the field can damage a human arm in a few seconds. What we want to know,” I said, “is whether the killer is now wandering around with a half-decayed hand or arm—or foot, for