Flatlander - Larry Niven [71]
She stood and pulled the upper half of her body stocking down around her waist.
She looked very much a real woman. If I hadn’t known—and why would it matter? These days the sex change operation is elaborate and perfect. Hell with it; I was on duty. Valpredo was looking nonchalant, waiting for me.
I examined both of her arms with my eyes and my three hands. There was nothing. Not even a bruise.
“My legs, too?”
I said, “Not if you can stand on them.”
Next question. Could an artificial arm operate within the field?
“Larry? You mean Larry? You’re out of your teeny mind.”
“Take it as a hypothetical question.”
She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. There aren’t any experts on inertialess fields.”
“There was one. He’s dead,” I reminded her.
“All I know is what I learned watching the Gray Lens-man show in the holo wall when I was a kid.” She smiled suddenly. “That old space opera.”
Valpredo laughed. “You, too? I used to watch that show in study hall on a little pocket phone. One day the principal caught me at it.”
“Sure. And then we outgrew it. Too bad. Those inertialess ships … I’m sure an inertialess ship wouldn’t behave like those did. You couldn’t possibly get rid of the time compression effect.” She took a long pull on her drink, set it down, and said, “Yes and no. He could reach in, but—you see the problem? The nerve impulses that move the motors in Larry’s arm, they’re coming into the field too slowly.”
“Sure.”
“But if Larry closed his fist on something, say, and reached into the field with it, it would probably stay closed. He could have brained Ray with—no, he couldn’t. The poker wouldn’t be moving any faster than a glacier. Ray would just dodge.”
And he couldn’t pull a poker out of the field, either. His fist wouldn’t close on it after it was inside. But he could have tried and still left with his arm intact, I thought.
Did Urthiel know anything of the circumstances surrounding Edward Sinclair’s exemption?
“Oh, that’s an old story,” she said. “Sure, I heard about it. How could it possibly have anything to do with, with Ray’s murder?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed.: “I’m just thrashing around.”
“Well, you’ll probably get it more accurately from the UN files. Edward Sinclair did some mathematics on the fields that scoop up interstellar hydrogen for the cargo ramrobots. He was a shoo-in for the exemption. That’s the surest way of getting it: make a breakthrough in anything that has anything to do with the interstellar colonies. Every time you move one man away from Earth, the population drops by one.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Nothing anyone could prove. Remember, the Fertility Restriction Laws were new then. They couldn’t stand a real test. But Edward Sinclair’s a pure math man. He works with number theory, not practical applications. I’ve seen Edward’s equations, and they’re closer to something Ray would come up with. And Ray didn’t need the exemption. He never wanted children.”
“So you think—”
“I don’t care which of them redesigned the ramscoops. Diddling the Fertility Board like that, that takes brains.” She swallowed the rest of her drink, set the glass down. “Breeding for brains is never a mistake. It’s no challenge to the Fertility Board, either. The people who do the damage are the ones who go into hiding when their shots come due, have their babies, then scream to high heaven when the board has to sterilize them. Too many of those and we won’t have Fertility Laws anymore. And that—” She didn’t have to finish.
Had Sinclair known that Pauline Urthiel was once Paul?
She stared. “Now just what the bleep has that got to do with anything?”
I’d been toying with the idea that Sinclair might have been blackmailing Urthiel with that information. Not for money but for credit in some discovery they’d made together. “Just thrashing around,” I said.
“Well … all right. I don’t know if Ray knew or not. He never raised the subject, but he never made a pass, either, and he must have researched me before he hired me. And, say, listen: Larry doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t blurt