Flatlander - Larry Niven [89]
Penzler’s door was closed. Desiree said, “They’ve got my camera. Can you get it back for me?”
“I’ll try.” I pushed the bell.
“And the pictures?”
“I’ll try.”
Marion Shaeffer was in uniform. She was my height, muscular, with broad shoulders and heavy breasts. Her ancestors would have been strong farm wives. Her deep tan ended sharply at the throat. “Come in, Hamilton, but stay out of the way. It’s not really your territory.”
“Nor yours.”
“He’s one of my people.”
Chris Penzler’s room was much like mine. It seemed crowded. Three of the six people present were lunies, and that made a difference. I got an impression of too many elbows flashing in my personal space. One was a redheaded, heavily freckled lunie policeman in orange marked with black. He was working the phone. The blond man in informal pajamas was just watching, and he was Mayor Watson himself. The third was a doctor, and he was working on Penzler.
They’d wheeled up a mobile autodoc, a heavy, dauntingly complex machine armed with scalpels, surgical lasers, clamps, hypos, suction tubes, sensor fingers ending in tiny bristles, all mounted on a huge adjustable stand. That took up room, too. The lunie was hard at work monitoring the keyboard and screen set into the ‘doc, sometimes typing rapid-fire commands with his long, fragile-looking fingers.
Penzler was on his back on the bed. The bed was wet with water and blood. A pressure bottle was feeding blood into Penzler’s arm; you can’t use gravity feed on the moon. We watched as the autodoc finished spraying foam over Penzler until it covered him from his chin to his navel.
I swore under my breath, but I couldn’t really claim they should have waited for me.
“Here.” Marion Shaeffer elbowed me in the ribs and handed me three holograms. “The reporters took pictures. Good thing. Nobody else had a camera.”
The first picture showed Penzler on the bed. His whole chest was an ugly deep red, beginning to blister around the edges but burned worse than that in the center. White and black showed where a charred hole had been burned deep into the bone of the sternum, an inch wide and an inch deep. The wound must have been sponged out before the picture was taken.
The second holo showed him faceup in bloody bathwater. The wounds were the same, and he looked dead.
The third was a shot through the picture window, taken over the rim of the tub.
“I don’t get this,” I said.
Penzler turned his head a bare minimum and looked at me with suffering eyes. “Laser. Shot me through the window.”
“Most laser wounds don’t spread like this. The wound would be narrower and deeper, wouldn’t it, Doctor?”
The doctor jerked his chin down and up without looking around. But Penzler made a strong effort to face me. The doctor stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Laser. I saw. Stood up in the tub. Saw someone out there on the moon.” Penzler stopped to pant a bit, then, “Red light. Blast bounced me back in the water. Laser!”
“Chris, did you see only one person?”
“Yah,” he grunted.
Mayor Watson spoke for the first time. “How? It’s night out there. How could you see anything?”
“I saw him,” Penzler said thickly. “Three hundred, four hundred meters. Past the big tilted rock.”
I asked, “What was he? Lunie, Belter, flatlander? What was he wearing?”
“Couldn’t see. It happened too fast. I stood up, I looked out, then flash. I thought … for a second … I couldn’t tell.”
“Let him rest now,” the doctor said.
Nuts. Penzler should have seen that much. Not that it would prove anything. A Belter could wear a pressure suit. A flatlander could get a skintight made, though you’d expect to find records. A lunie … well, there exist short lunies, shorter than, for instance, Desiree Porter, who was a Belter.
I stepped past the tub to reach the window. The tub was still full of pink water. Penzler would have bled to death or drowned if Tom and Desiree hadn’t acted so quickly.
I looked out on the moon.
Dawn had crawled down the peaks to touch their bases. Most of the lowlands were still puddles of black, and the shadow of Hovestraydt City seemed