Flatlander - Larry Niven [8]
I’d held the nail file in my imaginary hand. I’d felt it, just as I’d felt my missing fingernails getting too long. I had run my thumb along the rough steel surface; I had turned the file in my fingers. Telekinesis for lift, esper for touch.
“That’s it,” Owen had said the next day. “That’s all we need. One crewman, and you with your eldritch powers. You practice, see how strong you can get that lift. I’ll go find a sucker.”
“He’ll have to settle for a sixth of net. Cubes’s widow will want her share.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll swing it.”
“Don’t worry!” I’d waved a pencil stub at him. Even in Ceres’s gentle gravity it was as much as I could lift—then. “You don’t think TK and esper can make do for a real arm, do you?”
“It’s better than a real arm. You’ll see. You’ll be able to reach through your suit with it without losing pressure. What Belter can do that?”
“Sure.”
“What the hell do you want, Gil? Someone should give you your arm back? You can’t have that. You lost it fair and square, through stupidity. Now it’s your choice. Do you fly with an imaginary arm, or do you go back to Earth?”
“I can’t go back. I don’t have the fare.”
“Well?”
“Okay, okay. Go find us a crewman. Someone I can impress with my imaginary arm.”
I sucked meditatively on a second Luau grog. By now all the booths were full, and a second layer was forming around the bar. The voices made a continuous hypnotic roar. Cocktail hour had arrived.
… He’d swung it, all right. On the strength of my imaginary arm, Owen had talked a kid named Homer Chandrasekhar into joining our crew.
He’d been right about my arm, too.
Others with similar senses can reach farther, up to halfway around the world. My unfortunately literal imagination had restricted me to a psychic hand. But my esper fingertips were more sensitive, more dependable. I could lift more weight. Today, in Earth’s gravity, I can lift a full shot glass.
I found I could reach through a cabin wall to feel for breaks in the circuits behind it. In vacuum I could brush dust from the outside of my faceplate. In port I did magic tricks.
I’d almost ceased to feel like a cripple. It was all due to Owen. In six months of mining I had paid off my hospital bills and earned my fare back to Earth, with a comfortable stake left over.
“Finagle’s black humor!” Owen had exploded when I had told him. “Of all places, why Earth?”
“Because if I can get my UN citizenship back, Earth will replace my arm. Free.”
“Oh. That’s true,” he’d said dubiously.
The Belt had organ banks, too, but they were always undersupplied. Belters didn’t give things away. Neither did the Belt government. They kept the prices on transplants as high as they would go. Thus they dropped the demand to meet the supply and kept taxes down to boot.
In the Belt I’d have to buy my own arm. And I didn’t have the money. On Earth there was social security and a vast supply of transplant material.
What Owen had said couldn’t be done, I’d done. I’d found someone to hand me my arm back.
Sometimes I’d wondered if Owen held the choice against me. He’d never said anything, but Homer Chandrasekhar had spoken at length. A Belter would have earned his arm or done without. Never would he have accepted charity.
Was that why Owen hadn’t tried to call me?
I shook my head. I didn’t believe it.
The room continued to lurch after my head stopped shaking. I’d had enough for the moment. I finished my third grog and ordered dinner.
Dinner sobered me for the next lap. It was something of a shock to realize that I’d run through the entire life span of my friendship with Owen Jennison. I’d known him for three years, though it had seemed like half a lifetime. And it was. Half my six-year life span as a Belter.
I ordered coffee grog and watched the man pour it: hot, milky coffee laced with cinnamon and other spices and high-proof rum poured in a stream of blue fire. This was one of the special drinks served by a human headwaiter, and it was the reason they kept him around. Phase two of the ceremonial drunk: