Flatlander - Larry Niven [72]
“Okay.”
“See, he had his children by his first wife. I’m not denying him children … Maybe he married me because I had a touch of, urn, masculine insight. Maybe. But he doesn’t know it, and he doesn’t want to. I don’t know whether he’d laugh it off or kill me.”
I had Valpredo drop me off at ARM Headquarters.
This peculiar machine really does bother me, Gil … Well it should, Julio. The Los Angeles Police were not trained to deal with a mad scientist’s nightmare running quietly in the middle of a murder scene.
Granted that Janice wasn’t the type. Not for this murder. But Drew Porter was precisely the type to evolve a perfect murder around Sinclair’s generator, purely as an intellectual exercise. He might have guided her through it; he might even have been there and used the elevator before she shut it off. It was the one thing he forgot to tell her: not to shut off the elevator.
Or: he outlined a perfect murder to her, purely as a puzzle, never dreaming she’d go through with it—badly.
Or: one of them killed Janice’s uncle on impulse. No telling what he’d said that one of them couldn’t tolerate. But the machine had been right there in the living room, and Drew had wrapped his big arm around Janice and said, Wait, don’t do anything yet; let’s think this out …
Take any of these as the true state of affairs, and a prosecutor could have a hell of a time proving it. He could show that no killer could possibly have left the scene of the crime without Janice Sinclair’s help, and therefore … But what about that glowing thing, that time machine built by the dead man? Could it have freed a killer from an effectively locked room? How could a judge know its power?
Well, could it?
Bera might know.
The machine was running. I caught the faint violet glow as I stepped into the laboratory and a flickering next to it … and then it was off, and Jackson Bera stood suddenly beside it, grinning, silent, waiting.
I wasn’t about to spoil his fun. I said, “Well? Is it an interstellar drive?”
“Yes!”
A warm glow spread through me. I said, “Okay.”
“It’s a low-inertia field,” said Bera. “Things inside lose most of their inertia … not their mass, just the resistance to movement. Ratio of about five hundred to one. The interface is sharp as a razor. We think there are quantum levels involved.”
“Uh huh. The field doesn’t affect time directly?”
“No, it … I shouldn’t say that. Who the hell knows what time really is? It affects chemical and nuclear reactions, energy release of all kinds … but it doesn’t affect the speed of light. You know, it’s kind of kicky to be measuring the speed of light at 370 miles per second with honest instruments.”
Dammit. I’d been half hoping it was an FTL drive. I said, “Did you ever find out what was causing that blue glow?”
Bera laughed at me. “Watch.” He’d rigged a remote switch to turn the machine on. He used it, then struck a match and flipped it toward the blue glow. As it crossed an invisible barrier, the match flared violet-white for something less than an eye blink. I blinked. It had been like a flashbulb going off.
I said, “Oh, sure. The machinery’s warm.”
“Right. The blue glow is just infrared radiation being boosted to violet when it enters normal time.”
Bera shouldn’t have had to tell me that. Embarrassed, I changed the subject. “But you said it was an interstellar drive.”
“Yah. It’s got drawbacks,” Bera said. “We can’t just put a field around a whole starship. The crew would think they’d lowered the speed of light, but so what? A slowboat doesn’t get that close to lightspeed anyway. They’d save a little trip time, but they’d have to live through it five hundred times as fast.”
“How about if you just put the field around your fuel tanks?”
Bera nodded. “That’s what they’ll probably do. Leave the motor and the life support system outside. You could carry a god-awful amount of fuel that way … Well, it’s not our department. Someone else’ll be designing the star-ships,” he said a bit wistfully.
“Have you thought of this thing in relation to robbing banks? Or espionage?”
“If a gang could