Flatlander - Larry Niven [9]
But I called Ordaz before I touched the drink.
“Yes, Mr. Hamilton? I was just going home for dinner.”
“I won’t keep you long. Have you found out anything new?”
Ordaz took a closer look at my phone image. His disapproval was plain. “I see that you have been drinking. Perhaps you should go home now and call me tomorrow.”
I was shocked. “Don’t you know anything about Belt customs?”
“I do not understand.”
I explained the ceremonial drunk. “Look, Ordaz, if you know that little about the way a Belter thinks, then we’d better have a talk. Soon. Otherwise you’re likely to miss something.”
“You may be right. I can see you at noon, over lunch.”
“Good. What have you got?”
“Considerable, but none of it is very helpful. Your friend landed on Earth two months ago, arriving on the Pillar of Fire, operating out of Outback Field, Australia. He was wearing a haircut in the style of Earth. From there—”
“That’s funny. He’d have had to wait two months for his hair to grow out.”
“That occurred even to me. I understand that a Belter commonly shaves his entire scalp except for a strip two inches wide running from the nape of his neck forward.”
“The strip cut, yah. It probably started when someone decided he’d live longer if his hair couldn’t fall in his eyes during a tricky landing. But Owen could have let his hair grow out during a singleship mining trip. There’d be nobody to see.”
“Still, it seems odd. Did you know that Mr. Jennison has a cousin on Earth? One Harvey Peele, who manages a chain of supermarkets.”
“So I wasn’t his next of kin, even on Earth.”
“Mr. Jennison made no attempt to contact him.”
“Anything else?”
“I’ve spoken to the man who sold Mr. Jennison his droud and plug. Kenneth Graham owns an office and operating room on Gayley in Near West Los Angeles. Graham claims that the droud was a standard type, that your friend must have altered it himself.”
“Do you believe him?”
“For the present. His permits and his records are all in order. The droud was altered with a soldering iron, an amateur’s tool.”
“Uh huh.”
“As far as the police are concerned, the case will probably be closed when we locate the tools Mr. Jennison used.”
“Tell you what. I’ll wire Homer Chandrasekhar tomorrow. Maybe he can find out things—why Owen landed without a strip haircut, why he came to Earth at all.”
Ordaz shrugged with his eyebrows. He thanked me for my trouble and hung up.
The coffee grog was still hot. I gulped at it, savoring the sugary, bitter sting of it, trying to forget Owen dead and remember him in life. He was always slightly chubby, I remembered, but he never gained a pound and never lost a pound. He could move like a whippet when he had to.
And now he was terribly thin, and his death grin was ripe with obscene joy.
I ordered another coffee grog. The waiter, a showman, made sure he had my attention before he lit the heated rum, then poured it from a foot above the glass. You can’t drink that drink slowly. It slides down too easily, and there’s the added spur that if you wait too long, it might get cold. Rum and strong coffee. Two of these and I’d be drunkenly alert for hours.
Midnight found me in the Mars Bar, running on scotch and soda. In between I’d been barhopping. Irish coffee at Bergin’s, cold and smoking concoctions at the Moon Pool, scotch and wild music at Beyond. I couldn’t get drunk, and I couldn’t find the right mood. There was a barrier to the picture I was trying to rebuild.
It was the memory of the last Owen, grinning in an armchair with a wire leading down into his brain.
I didn’t know that Owen. I had never met the man and never would have wanted to. From bar to nightclub to restaurant I had run from the image, waiting for the alcohol to break the barrier between present and past.
So I sat at a corner table, surrounded by 3D panoramic views of an impossible Mars. Crystal towers and long, straight blue canali, six-legged beasts and beautiful, impossibly slender men and women looked out at me across never-never land. Would Owen have found it sad or funny? He