Scatterbrain (2003) SSC Read online

  “Is that the guy who loaned us—”

  “I expect it’s Yonnie’s boss.” She dialed and got a lunie computer construct who put her straight through.

  He was a beanpole lunie, young but balding, his fringe of black hair a tightly coiled ruff. “Lawman Bauer-Stanson? I’m Hector Sanchez. Are you currently in possession of a piece of Shreve Development property?”

  Hecate said, “Yes. We arranged the loan through Ms. Kotani, your chief of security, but I’m sure she—”

  “Yes, of course, of course. She consulted my office, all most proper, and if I’d been available, I’d have done just what Ms. Kotani—but Mr. Shreve is extremely upset. We’d like the device back at once.”

  This was starting to feel peculiar. Hecate hesitated, looking at me. I opened the conference line, and said, “Shall we decontaminate the device first?”

  Faced by two talking heads, he became flustered. “Decontaminate? For what?”

  “I’m not at liberty—I’m Gil Hamilton, by the way, with the ARM. Happened to be available. I’m not at liberty to discuss details, but let’s say that there was a spacecraft involved, and citizens of Earth, and—” I let a stutter develop. “I-if we hadn’t had the, the device, it would have been an impossible situation. Impossible. But some r-radioactive material got tracked inside the S-shreveshield—Is that how you pronounce it?”

  “Yes, perfect.”

  “So we need to know, Mr. Sanchez. We sprayed any dust off with an oxygen tank, but n-now what? Shall we run it through decontamination at Helios Power One? Or just return it as is? For that matter, may we turn it off? Or are there neutrons trapped in that field just waiting to be sprayed everywhere?”

  Sanchez took a moment to collect himself. Thinking hard. Mr. Shreve, what would he want? It seemed their experiment had been used to clean up after a spacecraft accident involving celebrity flatlanders! Just as well that it was being hushed up. Witnesses might still remember a two-wheeled thing moving safely through radioactive debris. Meanwhile this ARM, this flatlander, seemed scared spitless by the Mark 29.

  Ultimately Shreve Development would want the tale told. What they didn’t want was noses poking into their experimental shield generator for details of construction.

  Hector Sanchez said, “Turn it off. That’s quite safe. We’ll do our own decontamination.”

  “Police lemmy okay?”

  “I…don’t think so. We’ll send a vehicle. Where are you?”

  Hecate took over. “We’ll bring it to Helios Power One. We’re a bit busy now, so give us two or three hours to get it there.”

  She clicked off, and looked at me. “‘May we turn it off?’”

  “Playing dumb.”

  “Convincing. The accent helps. Gil, what’s on your mind?”

  “Standard practice. Hold something back. It lets a perp display guilty knowledge.”

  “Uh-huh. You may find that’s harder on the Moon. There aren’t so many of us, and communications are sacred. You can be dead a thousand ways because someone didn’t speak, or didn’t listen, or couldn’t. But be that as it may, what’s on your mind? Is this another talent?”

  “Hunch, Hecate. Something funny’s going on. Sanchez doesn’t seem to know what it is. He’s just worried. But—this Mr. Shreve must be the Shreveshield Shreve, the inventor himself, the way Sanchez is acting. What does he want?”

  “He’s supposed to be retired, Gil. But if there was a radioactive spill somewhere—”

  “That’s what I mean. Something radioactive, he’d want the Mark 29, but he’d want it right now. He doesn’t. He’d want it where the spill happened, but no, he doesn’t. He’ll come get it at Helios Power One. Maybe it’s more a matter of where he doesn’t want the Mark 29.”

  She mulled it. “Suppose his man gets here and the Mark 29 hasn’t arrived yet?”

  I liked it. “Somebody might get upset.”

  “I’ll fix it. Next?”

  I stretched. “It’ll be a while before we have anything to look at. Let’s see if there’s a commissary.”

  “You scout out dinner,” she said. “I’ll make their widget vanish, then I want to check on the corpse.”

  There was no commissary, no restaurant either. There was a coin-operated dispenser wall in the Lounge. I glanced into the greenhouse: dead of night.

  So we bought handmeals from the dispenser and took them into the greenhouse.

  An artificial full Earth glowed overhead. The stars weren’t flaming, but something about them…ah. They were color-coded. Deep red for Mars, brighter red for Aldebaran, violet for Sirius….

  Lunies try to turn their greenhouses into gardens, and there are always individual touches. There were fruits and vegetables to be picked as dark surprises, from a hill sculpted into a shadowy Sitting Buddha.

  Hecate reported, “The body is en route. John Ling got us two waldo tugs. The second one is keeping the first in view. That way there’s a camera watching the corpse at all times.” She stopped to spit cherry seeds. “Good man. And Nunnally Sterne says he’s set aside one of the handling rooms for an autopsy. We’ll do it through leaded glass, with waldos.”

  I was carving a pear the size of a melon, partly by feel. “What do you think we’ll find?”

  “What am I offered?”

  “Well, radiation, of course, or a leak. No gunshot or stab wounds or concussions, I’d have found that—”

  “Psi powers are notoriously undependable,” she said.

  I didn’t take offense, because of course she was right. I said, “I can generally count on mine. They’ve saved my life more than once. They’re just limited.”

  “Tell me.”

  So I told her a story, and we ate the pear and the handmeals, and a quiet descended.

  Taffy and I aren’t exactly lockstepped. But Taffy and I and Harry McCavity, her lunie surgeon, and Laura Drury, my lunie cop, are lockstepped; and Taffy and I are affianced to become pregnant, someday. I used to like a complicated love life, but I’ve started to lose that. So the dark and quiet companionship began to feel ominous, and I said, just to be saying something, “She could have been poisoned.”

  Hecate laughed.

  I persisted. “What if you murder someone, then freeze-dry her, then toss her three kilometers in lunar gravity? You don’t expect anyone’ll find her, not in Del Rey, but if someone did—”

  “Tossed how? A little portable mass driver on the rim?”

  “Damn.”

  “Would you have found bruising?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And then she made the footprints?”

  Double damn. “If we had specs on our mass driver, we’d know how accurate it was. Maybe the footprints were already there, and Killer just fired the body at where they ended. Then again, there aren’t any portable mass drivers.”

  Hecate was laughing. “All right, who made the footprints?”

  “Your turn.”

  “She walked in,” Hecate said. “Trick was to erase any footprints that led in from the rim.”

  “Blast from an oxygen tank?”

  “A lemmy doesn’t carry that much oxygen. A serious spacecraft would. A spacecraft could just spray the whole area with the rocket motor, but…Gil, a ship could just land in the crater, push her out, and take off. You said so yourself.”

  I nodded. “That’s starting to look like it. Besides, why would anyone walk into Del Rey Crater?”

  “What if the killer persuaded her she was wearing a rad-shielded suit?”

  Riiight. Still too many possibilities. “What if there was something valuable hidden in there? A bank heist. A dime disk with ARM secret weapons on it.”

  “A secret map of the vaults under the Face on Mars—”

  “Down comes a lemmy to pick it up. Back goes a lemmy with the copilot left behind.”

  “How long ago? If it was forty or fifty years, say, your lemmy wouldn’t even have a Shreveshield. It’d be a suicide mission.”

  Which narrowed the window a lit
tle. Hmm….

  “I never tried lockstepped,” Hecate Bauer-Stanson said.

  “Well, it’s easier with four. And we’re constantly being moved around, so getting together is a hobby in itself.”

  “Four?”

  I stood. “Hecate, I need the recycler again.”

  “And I’ve probably got message lights.”

  The phones were signaling messages for both of us. Hecate punched hers up while I used the recycler. When I came out she was beckoning frantically. I moved to her shoulder.

  “This is Lawman Bauer-Stanson,” she said.

  The construct said, “Please hold for Maxim Shreve.”

  Maxim Shreve was seated in a diagnostic chair, a reclining traveler with an extended neck rest for his greater length. Old and sick, I judged, holding himself together by little more than will. “Lawman Bauer-Stanson, we need the Mark 29 back at once. My associates tell me that it has not reached Helios Power One.”

  “Haven’t they—? Will you hold while I try to find out?” Hecate punched HOLD and glared at me. “The Mark 29’s under a tarp with dirt on it. We can’t uncover it because Hector Sanchez has landed a cargo shell in plain view of it. What do I say now?”

  I said, “It isn’t loaded yet. Your man has a lemmy flying around the site looking for more casualties. Tell him that, but don’t admit there’s been a crash.”

  She mulled it for a moment, then put Shreve back on.

  The old man was standing, dark and skeletally gaunt: Baron Samedi. Travel chair or no, in lunar gravity he could loom. The instant Hecate appeared he was raging.

  “Lawman Bauer-Stanson, Shreve Development has never been in trouble with the law. We’re not only a good corporate citizen, we’re one of Luna City’s major sources of income! Ms. Kotani cooperated with your office when you expressed a need. I presume that need is over. What must I do to get the Mark 29 back quickly?”

  I’d figured that out, but it wasn’t a thing to be broadcast.

  Hecate said, “Sir, the device hasn’t even been loaded yet. My man on the spot is still searching for casualties, but her police vehicle is too big to get inside the, uh,” Hecate allowed herself a bit of agitation. “Site. Sir, lives may depend on your device. Are lives at stake at your end?”

  Shreve seemed to have recovered his aplomb. He floated back into his chair. “Lawman, the device is experimental. We’ve never put any test subject in an experimental Shreveshield without medical monitors, and I include whole herds of minipigs! What if the field hiccoughed with your man on it? Is she even a lunie citizen? Is her suit equipped with medical ports?”

  “Yes, I see. I’ll call Lawman Cervantes.”

  “Wait, Lawman. Did it work?”

  Hecate frowned.

  “Did the shield perform as it should? Is everyone all right? No radiation?”

  Hecate said, “The, um, user tracked some radioactive material into the shield, but that certainly wasn’t the Shreveshield’s fault. It worked fine, far as we can tell—”

  Maxim Shreve’s eyes rolled up in his head and all his pain wrinkles smoothed out. In that instant it was as if his life was vindicated. Then he remembered us.

  “I wish you could tell me more of the circumstances,” he said briskly. “We will certainly want recordings if our device resolved a calamity. Without frying anyone!”

  “We’ll have the device back in your hands within hours, and of course we’re very grateful,” Hecate said. “I expect we’ll be able to tell you the complete story within the week, but even then it may be confidential for a time.”

  “That’s all right then. Good-bye, Lawman, ah, Bauer-Stanson.” He was gone.

  She didn’t turn. “Now what?”

  I said, “Tell your men to get the pilot inside.”

  “Pilots. Sanchez and a new voice heard from. Better if you invite them in, O Prince from a Foreign Land.”

  “All right.”

  “Cameras on their vehicle,” she said.

  “Um…stet. Hecate, what have you got to work with?”

  “Six of my police. They’ve been setting up to examine the body. Two Helios personnel. They cooperated when we buried the Mark 29, so they’ll cooperate when we uncover it. Two police lemmies—”

  “Stet. Here’s what we do. One lemmy takes off out of sight. Then the other hovers while the first one lands. We only want the dust cloud and a fast shuffle of police lemmies while your men uncover the Mark 29.”

  “This had better be worth the hassle.” She got up and reached past me to connect my phone to the lunie cops outside. “Wylie, ARM Ubersleuth Hamilton wants to talk to your visitors. Then get back to me.”

  I waited.

  Sanchez and a woman with short crisp blond hair fitted their heads into camera view. Bubble helmets still reflect light and hide a jawline. Sanchez said, “We came for the Mark 29, Hamilton—”

  The woman edged him out. “Hamilton? I’m Geraldine Randall. We were told we could pick up the Shreveshield here. I hope it hasn’t got itself lost.”

  Randall was in charge, very much so. I said, “No, no, not at all, but things are a bit complicated at present. Come in and wait, won’t you?”

  “I’ll be right in,” Randall said with a glowing smile.

  She was going to leave Sanchez to watch the damn cargo shell. “Both of you, please. You may have to sit in. I don’t know what authority I have here. Probably whatever nobody else wants.” Just a touch of bitterness showing.

  She frowned, nodded.

  I switched off. Hecate was still miming. My own message light was blinking, but I waited. Presently Hecate sat back and blew hair out of her eyes.

  I said, “Sanity check. When you gave him details, Shreve calmed down. Yes?”

  She thought about it. “I guess he did.”

  “Uh-huh. But you didn’t tell him anything reassuring. Device hasn’t been loaded for return? It’s sitting around the site of a disaster? involving spacecraft and extralunar celebrities? waiting for someone to use it? again?”

  Hecate said, “Maybe his med chair doped him to stop a stroke. No, dammit, he was lucid. And who the hell is Geraldine Randall?”

  “Bauer-Stanson? Hamilton? I’m Geraldine Randall.” We stood, and my feet left the floor, and Randall reached up to shake hands with Hecate and down to shake hands with me. She was six-foot-five and lush, with short curls of buttery blond hair, full lips, and a wide smile. A short lunie in her forties, I judged her, carrying enough weight to round her out. “What news?”

  “Cervantes says it’s on the way,” Hecate said. “Knowing Cervantes, it could mean he’s almost ready to launch.”

  Sanchez looked miserable. Randall was losing her smile. “Hamilton, I hope you’re using the device only for the purpose intended. Max Shreve is seriously worried about security.”

  I said, “Randall, I was pulled out of bed because there was flatlander politics involved, and I’m an ARM with the rank of Ubersleuth. If somebody’s been high-handed, he’ll have two governments on his tail, not just Shreve Inc.”

  “Persuasive,” she said.

  “Ms. Randall, it’s all being recorded. Think of the movie rights!”

  “Not persuasive. We may not hold those. The disaster didn’t take place on our turf. Hamilton, we want the device back.”

  “Are you with Shreve Inc. or the government?”

  “Shreve,” she said.

  “In what capacity?”

  “I’m on the board.”

  She didn’t look that old. “For how long?”

  “I was one of the original six.”

  “Six?”

  Hecate was offering coffee. Randall took one and added sugar and cream. She said, “Thirty-five years ago Max Shreve came to five of us with the designs for an active shield against radiation. Everything he told us proved out. He made us rich. There’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for Max Shreve.”

  “He sent you? He wants it back that urgently?”

  She ran a long-fingered hand through her
short curls. “Max doesn’t know I came, but he seemed very upset on the phone. I don’t see it as that urgent, myself, but I’m starting to wonder. How many lunie police have left eye tracks and fingerprints on the Mark 29? And what do I have to do to get it back?”

  Message light for Hecate. She picked up. I said, “It’s probably incoming now. Randall, I suppose I’ll sound naive, but I can’t believe you’re old enough—”

  She laughed. “I was twenty-six. I’m sixty-one now. Lunar gravity is kind to human bodies.”

  “Would you try the same gamble again?”

  She thought it over. “Maybe. I’m not sure a con man could have put together as good a package as Max had. He was a lunie, we could track him. He did very well at Luna City University. He could talk fast, too. Kandry Li wanted to go for a smaller version of the shield, and we watched Max talk her out of it. He made diagrams, charts, models, all on the spot. He played Kandry’s own computer like a pipe organ. I think I could do his damn lecture myself.”

  “Do it.”

  She stared at me.

  “I was just a kid when the Shreveshield came out. I wanted one just big enough for me. Why can’t I have it?”

  She laughed; trailed off. “Well. It doesn’t scale up. You need a bigger template to retain the hysteresis effect that traps the neutrons. Otherwise, the shield effect just fades out on you. That’s what the—” She caught herself.

  “Right,” I said.

  Hecate Bauer-Stanson flicked off her privacy. “It’s down,” she said. “You can collect it anytime. Shall I give you some men to load it?”

  “I’d be most grateful,” Randall said to Hecate. She didn’t have to tell Sanchez to see to it, because he was already leaving. To me she said, “We had to reconfigure the circuitry pattern. It’s not the same fractal; it’s not even related. Well, thank you both—” and she was gone too.

  “Gil, you’ve got a message light.”

  Hecate watched over my shoulder as I played the message from the Los Angeles ARM. Split field, a computer composite of the dead woman’s suit manifested next to Luke Garner in a travel chair.

  Luke at 188 was paraplegic, had been for years, but he looked healthier than Maxim Shreve. Happier, too. He spoke rituals of courtesy, then, “We think your suit was customized from one of the pressure suits that came up with the first Moon colony. Thing is, those suits were returned to NASA for study. Your deader really did get it from Earth. It’s ninety to a hundred years old.