03-Flatlander Page 10

  Once before the Chambers kids had disappeared. If we weren’t lucky, they might disappear again. Sometimes the ARM business was like digging a pit in quicksand. If you dug hard enough, you could maintain a noticeable depression, but as soon as you stopped …

  The Freezer Law of 2122 had given the ARM a field day. Some of the gangs had simply retired. Some had tried to keep going and wound up selling an operation to an ARM plant. Some had tried to reach other markets, but there weren’t any, not even for Loren, who had tried to expand into the asteroid belt and found that they wouldn’t have him, either.

  And some had tried kidnapping, but inexperience kept tripping them up. The name of a victim points straight at a kidnapper’s only possible market. Too often the ARMs had been waiting.

  We’d cleaned them out. Organlegging should have been an extinct profession this past year. The vanished jackals I spent my days hunting should have posed no present threat to society.

  Except that the legitimate transplants released by the Freezer Law were running out. And a peculiar thing was happening. People had started to disappear from stalled vehicles, singles apartment houses, crowded city slidewalks.

  Earth wanted the organleggers back.

  No, that wasn’t fair. Put it this way: Enough citizens wanted to extend their own lives at any cost …

  If Anubis was alive, he might well be thinking of going back into business.

  The point was that he would need backing. Loren had taken over his medical facilities when Anubis had retired. Eventually we’d located those and destroyed them. Anubis would have to start over.

  Let the second Freezer Bill pass, and Leviticus Hale would be spare parts. Charlotte and Holden Chambers would inherit … how much?

  I got that via a call to the local NBA news department. In 134 years Leviticus Hale’s original 320,000 dollars had become seventy-five million UN marks.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the morning on routine. They call it legwork, though it’s mostly done by phone and computer keyboard. The word covers some unbelievable long shots.

  We were investigating every member of every Citizen’s Committee to Oppose the second Freezer Bill in the world. The suggestion had come down from old man Garner. He thought we might find that a coalition of organleggers had pooled advertising money to keep the corpsicles off the market. The results that morning didn’t look promising.

  I half hoped it wouldn’t work out. Suppose those committees did turn out to be backed by organleggers? It would make prime time news anywhere in the world. The second Freezer Bill would pass like that. But it had to be checked. There had been opposition to the first Freezer Bill, too, when the gangs had more money.

  Money. We spent a good deal of computer time looking for unexplained money. The average criminal tends to think that once he’s got the money, the game is over.

  We hadn’t caught a sniff of Loren or Anubis that way.

  Where had Anubis spent his money? Maybe he’d just hidden it away somewhere, or maybe Loren had killed him for it. And Tiller had shot at me because he didn’t like my face. Legwork is gambling, time against results.

  It developed that Holden Chambers’s environs were free of eavesdropping devices. I called him about noon.

  There appeared within my phone screen a red-faced, white-haired man of great dignity. He asked to whom I wished to speak. I told him and displayed my ARM ident. He nodded and put me on hold.

  Moments later I faced a weak-chinned young man who smiled distractedly at me and said, “Sorry about that. I’ve been getting considerable static from the news lately. Zero acts as a kind of, ah, buffer.”

  Past his shoulder I could see a table with things on it: a tape viewer, a double handful of tape spools, a tape recorder the size of a man’s palm, two pens, and a stack of paper, all neatly arranged. I said, “Sorry to interrupt your studying.”

  “That’s all right. It’s tough getting back to it after Year’s End. Maybe you remember. Haven’t I seen you—? Oh. The floating cigarette.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I’ve got an imaginary arm.” And it’s a great conversational device, an icebreaker of wondrous potency. I was a marvel, a talking sea serpent, the way the kid was looking at me. “I lost an arm once, mining rocks in the Belt. A sliver of asteroidal rock sheared it off clean to the shoulder.”

  He looked awed.

  “I got it replaced, of course. But for a year I was a one-armed man. Well, here was a whole section of my brain developed to control a right arm, and no right arm. Psychokinesis is easy enough to develop when you live in a low-gravity environment.” I paused just less than long enough for him to form a question. “Somebody tried to kill me outside Midgard last night. That’s why I called.”

  I hadn’t expected him to burst into a fit of the giggles. “Sorry,” he got out. “It sounds like you lead an active life!”

  “Yah. It didn’t seem that funny at the time. I don’t suppose you noticed anything unusual last night?”

  “Just the usual shootings and muggings, and there was one guy with a cigarette floating in front of his face.” He sobered before my clearly deficient sense of humor. “Look, I am sorry, but one minute you’re talking about a meteor shearing your arm off, and the next it’s bullets whizzing past your ear.”

  “Sure, I see your point.”

  “I left before you did. I know censored well I did. What happened?”

  “Somebody shot at us with a hunting laser. He was probably just a nut. He was also part of the gang that kidnapped—” He looked stricken. “Yah, them. There’s probably no connection, but we wondered if you might have noticed anything. Like a familiar face.”

  He shook his head. “They change faces, don’t they?”

  “Usually. How did you leave?”

  “Taxi. I live in Bakersfield, about twenty minutes from High Cliffs. Where did all this happen? I caught my taxi on the third shopping level.”

  “That kills it. We were on the first.”

  “I’m not really sorry. He might have shot at me, too.”

  I’d been trying to decide whether to tell him that the kidnap gang might be interested in him again. Whether to scare the lights out of him on another long shot or leave him off guard for a possible kidnap attempt. He seemed stable enough, but you never knew.

  I temporized. “Mister Chambers, we’d like you to try to identify the man who tried to kill me last night. He probably did change his face—”

  “Yah.” He was uneasy. Many citizens would be if asked to look a dead man in the face. “But I suppose you’ve got to try it. I’ll stop in tomorrow afternoon, after class.”

  So. Tomorrow we’d see what he was made of.

  He asked, “Imaginary arm? I’ve never heard of a psi talking that way about his talent.”

  “I wasn’t being cute,” I told him. “My limited imagination. I can feel things out with my fingertips, but not if they’re farther away than an arm can reach.”

  “But most psis can reach farther. Why not try a hypnotist?”

  “And lose the whole arm? I don’t want to risk that.”

  He looked disappointed in me. “What can you do with an imaginary arm that you can’t do with a real one?”

  “I can pick up hot things without burning myself.”

  “Yah!” He hadn’t thought of that.

  “And I can reach through walls. I can reach two ways through a phone screen. Fiddle with the works or—here, I’ll show you.”

  It doesn’t always work. But I was getting a good picture. Chambers showed life-sized, in color and stereo, through four square feet of screen. It looked like I could reach right into it. So I did. I reached into the screen with my imaginary hand, picked a pencil off the table in front of him, and twirled it like a baton.

  He threw himself backward out of his chair. He landed rolling. I saw his face, pale gray with terror, before he rolled away and out of view. A few seconds later the scre
en went blank. He must have turned the knob from offscreen.

  If I’d touched his face, I could have understood it. But all I’d done was lift a pencil. What the hell?

  My fault, I guessed. Some people see psi powers as supernatural, eerie, threatening. I shouldn’t have been showing off like that. But Holden hadn’t looked the type. Brash, a bit nervous, but fascinated rather than repulsed by the possibilities of an invisible, immaterial hand.

  Then, terror.

  I didn’t try to call him back. I dithered about putting a guard on him, decided not to. A guard might be noticed. But I ordered a tracer implanted in him.

  Anubis might pick Chambers up at any time. He needn’t wait for the General Assembly to declare Leviticus Hale dead.

  A tracer needle was a useful thing. It would be fired at Chambers from ambush. He’d probably never notice the sting, the hole would be only a pinprick, and it would tell us just where he was from then on.

  I thought Charlotte Chambers could use a tracer, too, so I picked up a palm-size pressure implanter downstairs. I also traded the discharged barrel on my sidearm for a fresh one. The feel of the gun in my hand sent vivid green lines sizzling past my mind’s eye.

  Last, I ordered a standard information package, C priority, on what Chambers had been doing for the last two years. It would probably arrive in a day or so.

  The winter face of Kansas had great dark gaps in it, a town nestled in each gap. The weather domes of various townships had shifted kilotons of snow outward, to deepen the drifts across the flat countryside. In the light of early sunset the snowbound landscape was orange-white, striped with the broad black shadows of a few cities within buildings. It all seemed eerie and abstract, sliding west beneath the folded wings of our plane.

  We slowed hard in midair. The wings unfolded, and we settled over downtown Topeka.

  This was going to look odd on my expense account. All this way to see a girl who hadn’t spoken sense in three years. Probably it would be disallowed … yet she was as much a part of the case as her brother. Anyone planning to recapture Holden Chambers for reransom would want Charlotte, too.

  Menninger Institute was a pretty place. Besides the twelve stories of glass and mock brick which formed the main building, there were at least a dozen outbuildings of varied ages and designs that ran from boxlike rectangles to free-form organics poured in foam plastic. They were all wide apart, separated by green lawns and trees and flower beds. A place of peace, a place with elbow room. Pairs and larger groups passed me on the curving walks: an aide and a patient or an aide and several less disturbed patients. The aides were obvious at a glance.

  “When a patient is well enough to go outside for a walk, then he needs the greenery and the room,” Doctor Hartman told me. “It’s part of his therapy. Going outside is a giant step.”.

  “Do you get many agoraphobes?”

  “No, that’s not what I was talking about. It’s the lock that counts. To anyone else that lock is a prison, but to many patients it comes to represent security. Someone else to make the decisions, to keep the world outside.”

  Doctor Hartman was short and round and blond. A comfortable person, easygoing, patient, sure of himself. Just the man to trust with your destiny, assuming you were tired of running it yourself.

  I asked, “Do you get many cures?”

  “Certainly. As a matter of fact, we generally won’t take patients unless we feel we can cure them.”

  “That must do wonders for the record.”

  He was not offended. “It does even more for the patients.

  Knowing that we know they can be cured makes them feel the same way. And the incurably insane … can be damned depressing.” Momentarily he seemed to sag under an enormous weight. Then he was himself again. “They can affect the other patients. Fortunately, there aren’t many incurables these days.”

  “Was Charlotte Chambers one of the curables?”

  “We thought so. After all, it was only shock. There was no previous history of personality disturbances. Her blood psychochemicals were near enough normal. We tried everything in the records. Stroking. Fiddling with her chemistry. Psychotherapy didn’t get very far. Either she’s deaf or she doesn’t listen, and she won’t talk. Sometimes I think she hears everything we say … but she doesn’t respond.”

  We had reached a powerful-looking locked door. Doctor Hartman searched through a key ring, touched a key to the lock. “We call it the violent ward, but it’s more properly the severely disturbed ward. I wish to hell we could get some violence out of some of them. Like Charlotte. They won’t even look at reality, much less try to fight it … here we are.”

  Her door opened outward into the corridor. My nasty professional mind tagged the fact: if you tried to hang yourself from the door, anyone could see you from either end of the corridor. It would be very public.

  In these upper rooms the windows were frosted. I suppose there’s good reason why some patients shouldn’t be reminded that they are twelve stories up. The room was small but well lighted and brightly painted, with a bed and a padded chair and a tridee screen set flush with the wall. There wasn’t a sharp corner anywhere in the room.

  Charlotte was in the chair, looking straight ahead of her, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair was short and not particularly neat. Her yellow dress was of some wrinkleproof fabric. She looked resigned, I thought, resigned to some ultimately awful thing. She did not notice us as we came in.

  I whispered, “Why is she still here if you can’t cure her?”

  Doctor Hartman spoke in a normal tone. “At first we thought it was catatonic withdrawal. That we could have cured. This isn’t the first time someone has suggested moving her. She’s still here because I want to know what’s wrong with her. She’s been like this ever since they brought her in.”

  She still hadn’t noticed us. The doctor talked as if she couldn’t hear us. “Do the ARMs have any idea what was done to her? If we knew that, we might be better able to treat her.”

  I shook my head. “I was going to ask you. What could they have done to her?”

  He shook his head.

  “Try another angle, then. What couldn’t they have done to her? There were no bruises, broken bones, anything like that.”

  “No internal injuries, either. No surgery was performed on her. There was the evidence of drugging. I understand they were organleggers.”

  “It looks likely.” She could have been pretty, I thought. It wasn’t the lack of cosmetics or even the gaunt look. It was the empty eyes, isolated above high cheekbones, looking at nothing. “Could she be blind?”

  “No. The optic nerves function perfectly.”

  She reminded me of a wirehead. You can’t get a wirehead’s attention, either, when house current is trickling down a fine wire from the top of his skull into the pleasure center of his brain. But no, the pure egocentric joy of a wirehead hardly matched Charlotte’s egocentric misery.

  “Tell me,” Doctor Hartman said. “How badly could an organlegger frighten a young girl?”

  “We don’t get many citizens back from organleggers. I … honestly can’t think of any upper limit. They could have taken her on a tour of the medical facilities. They could have made her watch while they broke up a prospect for stuff.” I didn’t like what my imagination was doing. There are things you don’t think about, because the point is to protect the prospects, keep the Lorens and the Anubises from reaching them at all. But you can’t help thinking about them anyway, so you push them back, push them back. These things must have been in my head for a long time. “They had the facilities to partly break her up and put her back together again and leave her conscious the whole time. You wouldn’t have found scars. The only scars they can’t cure with modern medicine are in the bone itself. They could have done any kind of temporary transplant—and they must have been bored, Doctor. Business was slow. But—”

  “Stop.” He was gray around the edges. His voice was weak and hoarse.

  “But org
anleggers aren’t sadists generally. They don’t have that much respect for the stuff. They wouldn’t play that kind of game unless they had something special against her.”

  “My God, you play rough games. How can you sleep nights, knowing what you know?”

  “None of your business, Doctor. In your opinion, is it likely that she was frightened into this state?”

  “Not all at once. We could have brought her out of it if it had happened all at once. I suppose she may have been frightened repeatedly. How long did they have her?”

  “Nine days.”

  Hartman looked worse yet. Definitely he was not ARM material.

  I dug in my sporran for the pressure implanter. “I’d like your permission to put a tracer needle in her. I won’t hurt her.”

  “There’s no need to whisper, Mr. Hamilton—”

  “Was I?” Yes, dammit, I’d been holding my voice low, as if I were afraid to disturb her. In a normal voice I said, “The tracer could help us locate her in case she disappears.”

  “Disappears? Why should she do that? You can see for yourself—”

  “That’s the worst of it. The same gang of organleggers that got her the first time may be trying to kidnap her again. Just how good is your … security …” I trailed off. Charlotte Chambers had turned around and was looking at me.

  Hartman’s hand closed hard on my upper arm. He was warning me. Calmly, reassuringly, he said, “Don’t worry, Charlotte. I’m Doctor Hartman. You’re in good hands. We’ll take care of you.”

  Charlotte was half out of her chair, twisted around to search my face. I tried to look harmless. Naturally I knew better than to try to guess what she was thinking. Why should her eyes be big with hope? Frantic, desperate hope. When I’d just uttered a terrible threat.

  Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find it in my face. What looked like hope gradually died out of her eyes, and she sank back in her chair, looking straight ahead of her without interest. Doctor Hartman gestured, and I took the hint and left.

  Twenty minutes later he joined me in the visitors’ waiting room. “Hamilton, that’s the first time she’s ever shown that much awareness. What could possibly have sparked it?”