Flatlander Read online

  Tom Reinecke was standing behind the seated Desiree, their faces level. It was a nice effect, and they knew it. I said, “What do you two want?”

  “News,” Desiree said. “Are you getting anywhere with the conference?”

  “Secret. Anyway, we postponed it.”

  “We heard that. Do you think Naomi Mitchison will be convicted?”

  “Up to the jury.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  Tom cut in smoothly. “It’s the speed of the trial that impressed us. Why do you suppose it went so fast?”

  “Oh, hell.” I was fully awake. “They think they’ve got a locked room murder. One suspect, locked out on the moon. If they could eliminate Naomi, they’d invent themselves a real problem. No suspects. So they aren’t really trying.”

  “How would you go about it?” Tom asked, while Desiree was saying, “Would you change the law?”

  They’d caught me half asleep and gotten me talking. It served me right. “Changing the law wouldn’t make anything different. How would I get her off? I’d prove she wasn’t there, or I’d prove someone else was, or maybe I’d prove the killer wasn’t where we thought he was.”

  Tom asked, “How would you do that?”

  “I’m tired. Go away and leave me alone.”

  Desiree asked, “Is she guilty?”

  “Chiron, phone off. No calls for eight hours.”

  I didn’t know.

  Getting to sleep took a long time.

  7. LAST NIGHT AND MORNING AFTER

  We discussed the trial over our rolls and coffee next morning. Belters and flatlanders both expressed surprise at its speed and at the number of jurors.

  The lunies were affronted. They asserted that the accused’s agony of anticipation should be as brief as possible. As for the jury, the moon had never had a large population with vast leisure. Three were enough. A larger jury would only get tangled in a dozen different viewpoints, like any committee. Like our own.

  It got rather heated.

  Chris Penzler was out of his travel chair, but foam bandaging still bulked out his shirt, and he moved like an old man. He wasn’t inclined to join the discussions. Neither was I. Once I tried to suggest that the length of a trial should depend on the complexity of the case. Nobody much liked that, and in fact Marion Shaeffer insisted that I was biased in the accused’s favor. I dropped it.

  Presently Bertha Carmody called us to order, said a few words intended to soothe ruffled feelings, and adjourned us to the courtroom.

  * * *

  I wasn’t called again. Chris Penzler was. He testified at length as to his relationship to Itch and Naomi on Earth.

  He said he had seen Naomi when she had arrived at Hovestraydt City. She had given him a cold glare, and he had returned it, and they had avoided each other since. He repeated that he couldn’t describe what he saw before he was shot. Lunie, Belter, flatlander: he couldn’t say.

  He didn’t seem to be trying to hurt Naomi. It was as if he were trying to work out a puzzle with the court’s help.

  Defense called Dr. Harry McCavity, who testified that from the nature of the wound, the beam must have spread abnormally. Asked to agree that something other than a message laser had been used—something cobbled together by an amateur, for instance, so that it didn’t collimate very well—McCavity dithered. The hole in Penzler was not that much too big. And, damn him, he raised my suggestion of a drop of oil on the aperture.

  They wrapped it up faster than I would have believed.

  At eleven hundred the elf woman started her summing up. She pointed out that Naomi had motive, method, and opportunity.

  Jurisprudence did not require that motive be proved (I had wondered if that was true in lunar law), but Naomi had motive enough. Circumstances had struck Naomi a terrible blow; she had made a half-mad attempt to escape an intolerable environment; Chris Penzler had blocked it for his own motives. Prosecution made no excuse for Penzler, but his vindictive act had been the straw that broke her mind.

  Method? Naomi had been a top computer programmer. Breaking the code of the Hovestraydt City computer wouldn’t be easy, but her needs were not great. She needed only to enter a computer-guarded gun room without leaving a record in the computer memory.

  Opportunity? Someone had fired at Penzler from the badlands west of Hovestraydt City. Penzler had seen her; a known psychic had testified that nobody else was in the vicinity. Had Naomi Mitchison fired that beam? Who else?

  During his own summing up Boone made a big thing of the missing weapon. The jury must disregard Gil “the Arm’s” testimony as to the absence of other suspects or accept that there was no weapon, either, and thus no murder. The nature of the wound indicated that the weapon was homemade, using skills Naomi Mitchison didn’t have. Gil Hamilton’s talent had missed it and the killer, too.

  Prosecution’s counterargument was concise. There had been a laser. Ignore the nature of both weapon and would-be killer; if Hamilton couldn’t find it, the weapon must have been broken up. There were dust pools to hide the parts. Jury must disregard the absence of the laser and consider the presence of a suspect caught out on the moon with an air system going sour.

  By shortly after noon the judge was instructing the jury. By thirteen hundred the jury had retired.

  We straggled off to lunch. I wasn’t hungry, of course, but I managed to get Bertha Carmody talking around her sandwich.

  “I wonder if they’ve really got enough information to make a decision,” I ventured. “The summing up seemed so quick.”

  “They’ve got everything they need,” Bertha said. “They’ve got a computer with access to all the records of the trial, dossiers for everyone who was so much as mentioned, and anything in the city library. If a point of law comes up, they can call the judge day or night until they bring in a verdict. What more do they need?”

  They needed to have been in love with Naomi Mitchison.

  I couldn’t concentrate during the afternoon session. I was trying to outguess a jury several floors away. Talk flowed past me …

  “I wonder if you’re not a bit quick to convict,” Octavia Budrys said, “knowing that a conviction can be reversed.”

  “You’ve watched a trial,” Bertha Carmody said. “Did you have any quarrel with the proceedings?”

  “Only that it was so quick. I’ll admit that the case seems open and shut. What will happen to her now?”

  The delegate from Clavius said, “We’ve been through that. She’ll spend six months in the holding tank. It’s the same technology used on the slowboats, the interstellar star-ships, and it’s quite safe. Then, barring a reversal, she’ll be broken up.”

  “She won’t be touched until then?”

  “Barring an emergency, no.”

  “What does the lunar law call an emergency?”

  That was the question that snapped me wide awake.

  Ward gave us details. There had been emergencies. Six years ago a quake had ripped one of the domes open at Copernicus. The doctors had used everything they could get their hands on, including holding tanks. They’d preserved the felons’ central nervous systems until their grace time was up. They’d done the same after the Blowout of eighteen years ago. Two years ago there was a patient whose odd tissue rejection patterns matched a holding tank felon’s …

  Rare and unlikely events. Yeah. Maybe we didn’t really have six months.

  There were calls waiting on my phone from Sergeant Laura Drury and Artemus Boone. I took Drury’s call first.

  She was sitting cross-legged on a bed, quite naked. I hadn’t thought lunies were that casual. Naked, she was a sheer delight: brown hair three feet long floating in the room’s air currents; a long, slender, graceful body with lines of hard muscle; heavy breasts that floated, too; and legs that went on forever. But her words drove all prurient thoughts out of my mind.

  “Gil, forgive the voice-only. I called to tell you the jury’s come back,” she said. “I thought you should hear it from someone
you know. It’s a conviction. She’ll be flown to Copernicus tomorrow morning. I’m sorry.”

  There was no shock. I’d been expecting it.

  The phone asked, “Will there be a reply?”

  “Chiron, record reply. Thanks for calling, Laura. I appreciate it. Chiron, phone off.”

  I stared out the window for a minute before I remembered the other call.

  The black-bearded lawyer was seated behind an ancient computer terminal in an equally ancient windowless office. His message was short. “My client has asked me to ask you to call her. Her number is two-seven-one-one. You may have to get it through the police. I apologize for refusing your calls earlier, but in my judgment it was best.”

  Her timing was silly. The trial was over. Oh, well. “Chiron, phone, call two-seven-one-one.”

  “Please identify yourself.”

  “Gilbert Hamilton.”

  I waited while the city computer compared voice prints, while it called Naomi’s room, while Naomi—“Gil! Hello!”

  She looked awful. She looked like a once-lovely woman coming out of a year on the wire. Her gaiety was a brittle mask. I said, “Hello. Isn’t your timing a little off? I might have been able to do something.”

  She brushed it off. “Gil, will you spend my last night with me? We used to be good friends, and I don’t want to be alone.”

  I would have preferred a night on the rack. “There’s Alan Watson. There’s your lawyer.”

  “I’ve seen enough of Artemus Boone to last—Gil, he’s all tied up in my mind with the trial. Please?” She hadn’t even mentioned Alan.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said.

  A last night with Naomi. The thought terrified me.

  Taffy wasn’t answering her phone. I tried Harry McCavity’s room and got Harry.

  “She’s in a brush-up class on trace element dietary deficiencies,” he said. “I took it last year. Flatlanders don’t need it except in places like Brazil. What’s up?”

  “Naomi Mitchison’s been convicted.”

  “Is she guilty?”

  “For all I know. She’s been lying about something. She wants me to spend her last night with her.”

  “Well? You’re old friends, aren’t you?”

  “How would Taffy feel about that?”

  He looked puzzled. “You know her. She doesn’t think she owns either of us. Anyway, it’s a mission of mercy. You’re sitting up with a sick friend. There isn’t anyone sicker than Naomi Mitchison right now.” When he got no response, he asked, “What do you want to hear?”

  “I want someone to talk me out of it.”

  He thought it over. Then, “Taffy wouldn’t try. But she’ll want to hold your hand when it’s over, I think. I’ll tell her. Maybe she can get some time early tomorrow. Shall I let you know?”

  “Futz!”

  “Witness is unresponsive. Does it help if I tell you I sympathize? I’ll get drunk with you if she’s not free.”

  “I may need that. Chiron, phone off. Chiron, phone, call two-seven-one-one.” Futz. I was going to have to go through with it.

  I found a cop outside her door. He took my retina prints and checked them with the city computer. He grinned down at me and started to say something, looked again, and changed his mind. He said instead, “You look like they’re about to break you up.”

  “It feels like they already did.”

  He let me past.

  It was party time. Naomi wore floating luminous transparencies, blue with flashes of scarlet. The butterfly fluttering on her eyelids had iridescent blue wings. She smiled and ushered me in, and for a moment I forgot why I was here. Then her eyes flicked to the clock, and mine followed. 1810, city time.

  0628, city time. Early morning. Two orange hemispheres looked me in the eye as I emerged. I looked up. The cop guarding Naomi’s door had been replaced by Laura Drury.

  I asked, “How long has she got?”

  “Half an hour.”

  Futz, I already knew that. The landscape within my skull was blanketed in fog. Later I remembered the chill in Drury’s voice. I was in no shape to notice then.

  I said, “I hate to let her sleep, and I hate to wake her up. What do I do?”

  “I don’t know her. If she went to sleep happy; let her sleep.”

  “Happy?” I shook my head. She hadn’t been happy. Should I wake her? No. I said, “I want to thank you for calling. It was kind.”

  “That’s all right.”

  I considered telling Laura that she’d better get her phone fixed or stop mumbling the commands. I was almost that woozy. Tell a lunie she’d exposed her nakedness to a flatlander? Not me. I waved and turned away and staggered to the elevators.

  At the ground floor level I decided I wanted to be alone. I aimed myself toward my room. I changed my mind before I got there.

  Taffy studied me for a moment. Then she pulled me in, worked my rumpled clothes off, got me facedown on the bed, poured oil on me, and started a massage. When she felt some of the tension leaving me, she spoke. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Um. I don’t think so.”

  “What do you want? Coffee? Sleep?”

  “More massage,” I said. “She was the perfect hostess.”

  “It was her last chance.”

  “It was reminiscence time. She wanted to cover a ten-year gap in one night. We did a lot of talking.”

  She said nothing.

  “Taffy? Do you want to have children?”

  Her hands stopped, then resumed kneading my calf muscle and Achilles tendon. “Some day.”

  “With me?”

  “What brought this on?”

  “Naomi. Chris Penzler. They both waited too long. I wouldn’t want to wait too long.”

  She said, “Pregnant women don’t make good surgeons. They turn clumsy. I’d have to drop my career for six or seven months. I’d want to think about that.”

  “Right.”

  “And I’d want to finish my tour here.”

  “Right.”

  “I’d want to get married. A fifteen-year contract. I wouldn’t want to raise a child alone.”

  In my fatigue-doped state I hadn’t thought that far. Fifteen years! Still— “Sounds reasonable. How many birthrights do you have?”

  “Just the two.”

  “Good. Me, too. Why don’t we use them both? More efficient.”

  She kissed the small of my back, then went back to working the bones and joints of my feet. She asked, “What did she say that got you so worked up about children?”

  I tried to remember …

  Naomi fluttered around the bar in a cloud of blue and scarlet transparencies. She made navy grogs in huge balloon glasses with constricted rims. I gathered we weren’t expected to stay sober. She asked, “What have you been doing for ten years?”

  I told her how I had fled Earth for the Belt, emphasizing her part in it. I thought she’d like that. I told her how we’d set a bomb to move a small asteroid, how the asteroid had shattered— “I usually just say a meteor got me. But it was our own meteor.”

  She wanted me to show her my imaginary arm. In lunar gravity it was possible to heft the weight of the glass now that it was nearly empty.

  She told me about life with Itch. He was savagely jealous and an inconsiderate lover, and he slept with women who looked like genetic failures next to Naomi herself. He had the fragile ego of any half-successful comic.

  “So why did you marry him?”

  She shrugged.

  I spoke before I thought. “Did you like him being jealous? Maybe it kept other men at just the right distance.”

  “I didn’t like being slapped around for it!” I was looking for a change of subject when she added, “When I was climbing out of that bathroom window, I swore I’d never let a man father a child on me again. That was even before I knew Miranda was dead.”

  “It’s a big thing to give up.”

  For an instant her look was wary, secretive. Then, “Maybe I’m a l
oser in the evolution game. You don’t have children yourself, do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you out of the evolution game?”

  “Not yet.” I hefted my empty glass in my imaginary hand. “Every so often someone almost kills me. Maybe … maybe it’s time.”

  Naomi got up so energetically that for a moment she floated. “Futz this. Let’s see what’s for dinner.”

  “There were subjects she shied away from,” I told Taffy.

  She was working on my shoulders. “That’s not surprising.”

  “Granted. The organ banks, Penzler getting shot at … and children. She chopped that off fast, and that’s not surprising, either, I guess.”

  “Gil, you didn’t grill her, did you?”

  “No!” But I’d flinched. Guilt? “I only noticed things. I think she lied on the stand. I know she did. But why?”

  “She’d have had to be crazy.”

  “Yeah. I asked her why she came back to the moon. She said she was in a black mood, and the lifelessness of the moon suited her fine. But she only went out that once. Hovestraydt City isn’t lifeless at all, and she wasn’t staying in her room all that time, either.”

  “So?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  Taffy said, “I’ll be leaving for Mare Orientale this evening. Marxgrad wants a—”

  “Futz!”

  “—surgeon with specialty training in the autonomic muscle system. I can learn a lot there. I’m sorry, Gil.”

  “Futz, I’m just glad you didn’t go yesterday. I’ll get drunk with Harry.”

  “Turn over. Do you want to go to sleep? Here?”

  “I don’t know what I want. I thought I didn’t want to talk.”

  The lights dimmed. I barely noticed. They brightened again half a minute later, and suddenly I was sitting upright, bug-eyed, sweating.

  Taffy said, “The linear accelerator?”

  “Yes. She’s on her way. When Luke Garner was a boy, that flicker would have been the electric chair.”

  “The what?”

  “Skip it.”

  “Lie down.” She went to work on my abdomen. “I don’t see why you’re quite this shook up. I had the idea she never even slept with you.”