Flatlander - Larry Niven [92]
Captain Jefferson used his belt phone to summon someone with a message laser. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “maybe you’d like to feel around in here?’” He patted at the southeast corner of the hologram city.
I reached into the wall. I found a small room, cramped, lined with racks. The only door felt thick, massive. It opened into the mirror works, in vacuum. I found varied equipment on the racks: armored inflated suits, personal jet packs, a heavy two-handed cutting torch. I described what I was finding. My audience could be expected to include skeptics.
And I tried not to think about what was actually happening: my own disembodied sense of touch reaching through rock walls to roam through a locked room seven floors above me. If I stopped believing, it couldn’t happen.
The racks held a score of things like bulky rifles.
I pinched one between my thumb and two fingers. Riflestock frame, compact excitation barrel, tingle of battery power, and a scope just big enough to feel as a bump. The message laser felt both light and heavy: no mass at all yet impossible to move.
A cop came in carrying the real thing. I held it in my hands and ran my imaginary hand over it, then through it. There was a dimmer switch and a cord that would plug into a pressure suit’s microphone.
You could talk with it. I wouldn’t have been surprised either way. Calling a deadly police weapon a message laser could have been no more than good public relations.
I waded west into the choppy cratered land our would-be killer must have fired from. The newstapers and lunie cops were watching me intently. God knows what they expected to see. I swept my imaginary hand back and forth through the landscape, like sifting intangible sand. The killer might well have dumped his weapon into a dust pool. He might equally well be hiding in one of those shadows, I thought, with a stock of air tanks and spare batteries. I sifted them.
Pools and lakes of shadow felt very cold and showed nothing, though I could feel the shapes of the rocks. Once I felt something like a twelve-foot artillery shell smashed against a crater rim. I asked Jefferson about it. He said it was probably from the rescue attempt after the Blowout eighteen years ago. It would have held water or air.
There was a high ridge, a crater wall. I felt around in the shadows behind it. The killer couldn’t have been placed farther back than this. The ridge would have blocked him, and it was already farther than Chris Penzler’s “three hundred, four hundred meters.”
I turned and went back over the same territory again. By now I was feeling foolish. No laser, no hidden killer, and the beginning of a headache.
The neon orange dolls had collected the blue doll and were going through the air lock. I waded back to where the others waited. I said, “I quit.”
The others didn’t hide their disappointment. Then Desiree brightened and said, “You’ll have to testify, won’t you? No weapon and no other suspect.”
“I guess I will. Let’s go see who they’ve got.”
The desk sergeant was a lunie woman with rounded oriental features and big boobs.
Forgive me! Later I got to know Laura Drury fairly well, but I was seeing her for the first time, and I admit I stared. On her spare, attenuated frame her attractive, ample breasts became her dominant feature. You don’t picture a Tolkien elf that way.
We stopped in the doorway, not wanting to interfere. Sergeant Drury asked, “Is this your first visit to the moon, Ms. Mitchison?”
And I went numb.
Naomi’s eyes flicked to us and away. It was the desk sergeant who concerned her. She knew she was