Flatlander - Larry Niven [98]
Alan said, “That flat-topped rock where she watched the stars would have been perfect, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. A beautiful view of Chris’s window. What I don’t believe is that she’d lead us there. Alan, would a lunie go sightseeing on the moon at night?”
He laughed. “A lunie can always wait two weeks. A tourist has to go home.” The grim look returned. “Most tourists pick daytime. It does look funny. Dammit.”
Light and shadow. All moonscape and no clues. Every time we walked into full sunlight, I had to blink against the glare. My visor took a fraction of a second to darken, and it was too long. We took the easy paths, but we stopped to climb obvious vantage points.
The silence was getting to me. I asked, “Was your father named after the city itself?”
“Oh … partly. The Jacob Hovestraydt, the man who founded the city, was my great-grandfather. And he had two daughters, and one didn’t have children, and the other had Dad and my three aunts. So we’re the direct genetic line. Dad was practically born mayor. We’ve talked about it, how he grew up … Hey, stay away from there. You don’t know how deep it is.”
I’d been about to wade through a dust pool, scuffing my feet, looking for pieces of a laser. But he was right, of course.
I said, “I’d like another crack at the projection room. Could you get me that?”
“I think so.”
“Did you ever show Naomi the projection room?”
He stopped walking. “How’d you know?”
“I just wondered.”
We marched our crooked path in silence for a time. Then Alan said, “Every time some offworlder bigwig showed up, he had to meet the kid. Me. Once upon a time I told Dad I didn’t like it. He said he went through the same thing when his grandfather was mayor. And his mother picked his school courses for him. Political science, air cycle engineering, ecology, economics. His first job was in the Garden. Then he was in maintenance, tending the air system.”
“And you? Are you being groomed for mayor?”
“Maybe. Dad was in the police, too, for a while. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to run Hovestraydt City … and I’m sure Dad wouldn’t force me, and I’m not sure I could. I don’t want to now. I want to travel. Look, Gil, we’ve almost reached the tilted rock. That’s too close.”
“I wonder. In the first place, I don’t trust a Belter’s sense of distance on the moon.”
“Mmm … yes. In fact … the closer the killer was, the better the chance Penzler would see him. And Naomi wouldn’t have, because she was farther west. He could have been just behind the rock.”
“Yeah, and we’ll look.”
“He’d have had to be in sunlight, wouldn’t he, for Penzler to see him?” Alan squatted, then leapt. Soared. Graceful as all hell. His parabola peaked at the rock’s rounded tip, and he clutched it with all four limbs, then began his own investigations.
To me it seemed a precarious perch for an aspiring marksman.
From Chris’s window the tilted rock had looked like an elongated egg. But the side in darkness was almost flat. I played my headlamp over it. The surface was rough and white.
I scraped my gloved fingers over it. Crumbly white stuff adhered to my fingers. It disappeared as I watched. What the hell?
“No laser parts, no footprints, no puffer tracks, nothing,” Alan said. “And there’s too much dust around. If he has any brains, the killer wouldn’t have been walking where there’s dust. Gil, we’ll have to backtrack.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think Chris saw his killer.”
“What?”
“Why would the killer be in sunlight? He’d be half-blind in the glare. It was just dawn, with most of this region in shadow. He’d have had to go looking for sunlight to stand in so Chris could see him. It’s plain silly.”
“Then what did he see?”
“I don’t know yet. I want another look at Chris’s room.”
“Gil, what’s your stake in this?”
“Aesthetic. She’s too beautiful to be broken up.” Too flippant. I tried again. “I loved her once, and I hated her once. Now she’s an old friend in trouble. You?”
“I love her.”
We weren’t looking for clues now. The