The projection room was a big box let into Levels Six and Seven, underground, in the south side. The police had a projection going when we arrived. They were wading knee deep in miniature lunar landscape.
I think the newstapers were jolted. I know I was.
Jefferson beamed at us. “The Watchbird Two satellite is just over us now. It sends us a picture and we project it in real time.”
He waded out into the Moon, and we followed, thigh deep and a hundred feet tall. I could see my feet through the flat stone surface of Grimalde Crater, if I concentrated.
Dawn had fully arrived. The sun glared on the eastern horizon, not far below the crescent Earth. The crater-pocked landscape west of us was all glaring ridges and black shadow. Hovestraydt City was a doll house. Tiny figures in bright orange skintights with police insignia were leaving an airlock in the south face, on the road that led across the badlands to the Belt Trading Post.
Someone was walking toward them down the middle of the mad. I bent close above the doll-figure, looking for details. An inflate suit, sky blue, shorter than the approaching Iunie cops. Blond hair in the bubble helmet.
I heard a satisfied, “Ah.” When I turned, Marion Shaeffer added, “1 was pretty sure it would be a flatlander.”
Penzler’s room be second from the end in the west face. I picked it out, then traced a line to a tilted rock like an elongated egg. Past that point it was mostly shadows. I saw nobody anywhere in that whole stretch of moonscape, save for a sky blue suit and four orange ones, converging.
‘We seem to have only one suspect,” Captain Jefferson said. “Even a puffer wouldn’t take a killer out of range that fast”
Shaeffer asked, “Puffer?”
“Basically two wheels and a motor and a saddle. We use them a lot”
“Ah. What about a spacecraft?”
“We checked, of course. The only spacecraft in the vicinity came nowhere near here.”
I was thinking along different lines. “What’s a message laser look like? Our little blue suspect doesn’t seem to be carrying anything.”
“We’d see it. A message laser is about yay long—” Jefferson’s hands were a yard, or meter, apart. “—and masses nine kilos.”
“Well, those shadows could hide anything. Mind if I feel around in there? I might turn up the weapon.”
Tom and Desiree grinned at each other. Shaeffer stared. Jefferson said, “What? What did you say?”
The newstapers laughed outright Desiree said, “He’s Gil the Arm. Haven’t you ever heard of Gil the Arm?”
“He’s got an imaginary arm,” Tom added.
With impressive restraint Jefferson said, “Oh?”
“Combination of psychic powers,” I told him. “I lost my arm to a meteor, asteroid mining. Eventually I came back to Earth and got it replaced from the organ banks. But before that happened I found out that I’ve got a couple of the recognised psi powers. Esper sense: I can feel around inside a closed box, and reach through a wall and feel out the wiring behind it. Psychokinesis: I can move things with my mind, if they’re not too heavy. But it’s all limited by my imagination. As if I had a ghost arm and hand.”
I didn’t bother to add that psychic powers are notoriously undependable. What gave me confidence, this time, was that I was already trying it running my imaginary hand lightly over the smooth surface of the Grimalde plain, feeling its texture—cooled magma, cracked everywhere, the cracks filled by moondust—then plunging my hand in and running the ghostly rock between my fingers like water.
Hard rock here; pools of moondust in the rough land beyond Grimalde’s rim wall; here beneath the dust, an oxygen tank split down the middle by internal pressure. “It’d help if I knew what a message laser looks like,” I added. 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 thing like bulky rifles.
I pinched one between my thumb and two fingers. Rifle-stock 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 further back than this. The ridge would have blocked him, and it was already further 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 airlock 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 in trouble, and it made her voice brittle. “No, I was at the museum in Mare Tranquilitatis four years ago.”
“Did you see much of the Moon then?”
The shock was getting through to me. One suspect had been in position to fire through Chris Penzler’s window. I would have to testify that nobody was hiding out there in the shadows. I’d eliminated everyone but Naomi.
It was insane. What could Naomi have to do with Chris Penzler? But I remembered a vindictive glare directed toward our dinner table last night For Penzler?
Her golden hair was still rumpled from the pressure suit helmet. The rest of the suit was still on her. The big gaudy blue butterfly still covered her eyelids. She sat on the forward edge of a web chair. “I only stayed a week that time,” she said. “I...was in the mood for a dead world, but I was wrapped up in myself too. My husband and my little girl had just died. I guess I spent most of my time staring out the window of my room.”
“You left Hovestraydt City alone this evening,” the desk sergeant said. “You’ve been out four and a half hours. For a tourist that is reckless. Did you keep to known paths?”
“No, I played tourist I wandered. I spent some time on the big road, but I ducked into the shadows and the craters every so often. Why not? I couldn’t get lost I could see Earth.”
“Did you take a signal laser?”
“No. Nobody told me to. Have I broken some fool regulation, sergeant?”
The lunie woman’s lips twitched. “In a manner of speaking. You are accused of having stationed yourself several hundred meters west of the city; of having located Fourth Speaker Chris Penzler’s window, and kept watch until he stood up in his bathtub, at which time you fired a signal laser into his chest. Did you do that?”
Naomi was amazed, then horrified ... or she was a fine actress. “No. Why would I?” She turned. “Gil? Are you in on this?”
“Only as an observer,” I half-lied. Marion was looking at me with distrust. Clearly the suspect knew me.
The desk sergeant asked, “Ms. Mitchison? Do you know Chris Penzler?”
“I used to. He’s a Belter. My husband and I met him on Earth, almost five years ago. He was negotiating with the UN about some kind of jurisdictional problem. Is he dead?”
“No. He is badly injured.”
“And you’re really accusing me of attempted murder? With a message laser?”
“We are, yes.”
“But... I don’t have any reason. I don’t have a message laser either. Why me?” Her eyes flicked about the room: a butterfly fluttering against a window. “Gil?”
I flinched. “I’m not in this. It’s not my jurisdiction.”
“Gil, is attempted murder an organ bank crime? On the Moon?”
Sergeant Drury answered for me. “Why would we give a clumsy killer a second chance?”
“You can refuse to answer questions,” I said.
Naomi shook her head. “That’s all right But...is that a news camera?”
Jefferson crooked his finger at Tom and Desiree. The newstapers looked at each other and somehow agreed that resistance would be futile. They followed Jefferson out.
The desk sergeant’s eyes flicked to Marion. “Who might you be?”
“Marion Shaeffer, Captain, Belt police. The man who was shot is a Belt citizen.”
Drury’s eyes questioned me, and I answered. “Gil Hamilton, operative, ARM, here for the Conference. I know Ms. Mitchison. I’d like to stay.”
“Have you any suggestions?”
“Yes. Naomi, one problem is that we can’t find anyone else who could have been in the right place. You were. You’ve said you didn’t shoot Chris—”
“With what?”
“Who cares? If you’re not our clumsy killer, then you’re our only witness. Did you see anything unusual out there?”
She thought about it “I’m handicapped, Gil. I don’t know the Moon, and it was night I didn’t see anyone else.”
“Did you drop anything, or brush against anything, or break anything? Is there some way we could tell just where you were?”
“You could examine my suit.” Hostility was creeping into her voice.
“Oh, we’ll do that. We’d also like to examine your route. You’d have to lead us. We can’t make you do that”
“Gil, can I get some sleep first?”
I looked at the Sergeant Drury, who said, “Of course. You may find it easier when the sun’s higher.” She sent Naomi off with another cop.
“We’ve got men out there,” she said briskly. “There won’t be anyone tampering with evidence. What do you know about her?”
“I haven’t seen Naomi in ten years. I wouldn’t have said she was the killer type. When you take her outside, may I go along?”
“We’ll alert you. And you, Ms. Shaeffer.”
“Thanks. Make that Marion.”
“Okay. I’m Laura Drury. Make it Laura.”
We waited for the elevators. Marion said, “Gil, what do you consider the killer type?”
“Yeah, that’s a hard one, isn’t it? But Naomi strikes me as more the murder victim type.”
“What do you mean?”
She sounded like she was questioning a suspect. I put it down to habit I said, “Once upon a time I might have killed her myself. Naomi has a way of...inviting a pass, then slapping the passer down hard. I really think she gels a charge out of leaving a man horny and frustrated. This isn’t just subjective, Marion. I’ve heard other guys talk about it Still ... it was ten years ago, and she got married somewhere in there, and had a little girl. So. Your guess is as good as mine.”
The elevator came. We got in. Marion said, “I don’t have to guess. She was the only one out there, and she’s a flatlander.”
“So?”
She smiled. “The wound was too high. Eight, nine centimeters above the heart. Why?”
“The rim of the tub was too high.”
“Right Now, there aren’t any tubs in the Belt, except in the bubble worlds. A flatlander wouldn’t expect a lunie bathtub to stand so tall. When it came time to make her move, Naomi couldn’t see Penzler’s heart. She just took her best shot.”
I shook my head. “A lunie would know how tall the tub was, but he wouldn’t expect Penzler to be so short.”
“He must have seen Penzler—”
“Sure, and Naomi’s seen lunie bathtubs, too.” While she was mulling that, I added, “Maybe it was a Belter. You said it yourself the only tubs in the Belt are in the bubble worlds. You spin those for an Earth gravity Belt bathtubs are just like Earth’s.”
Marion grinned. “Got me.”
“And we’re still missing the main point. Why didn’t the killer just wait till Penzler got out of the tub? If it was Naomi, she’d already been waiting most of four hours.”
“Now, that is a damn good question,” Marion said. And we parted on that note, her to her room, me to mine. I could catch two or three hours on my back before 0610.
At exactly 0610 I rang Taffy’s doorbell.
“Gil! Are you alone?”
The long stretch of hall was quite empty. “At this hour, what sane man would be up?”
“Chiron, open door.”
I walked in. And she was already in flight! I leaned far forward to catch her weight, and managed not to bounce back into the hall. We took a long time over our first kiss. Tasting each other. By and by I noticed that she was wearing a surgeon’s paper coverall. Those things are intended to be used only once.
“Can I rip this off you?”
“Be my guest”
I tore it off in handfuls, with sound effects: the roar of an unendurably frustrated male. The paper was tough. A lunie couldn’t have done it I swept her in my arms and leapt for the bed, and bounced off again. Pulled my own clothes off more sedately, moved back to the bed, and had some trouble.
She whispered in my ear. “Let me dominate, okay? I’ve had some practice. The missionary position doesn’t work at all.”
“What do I have to know?”
Partly she told me, partly she showed me. We had to use our muscles to keep us together; gravity wouldn’t help. We bounced. We spent considerable time above the bed. Taffy told me not to worry about falling off, and I didn’t. Old and accustomed partners danced a new dance, with Taffy leading,
We rested. Then I made love to her standing up, with Taffy’s strong legs wrapped around my hips, one arm out to clutch the edge of the tub. In lunar gravity that position is almost restful. And I studied her face, joyful, glowing, familiar.
We rested again. Sweat stayed where it was; it wouldn’t drip. Taffy stirred in my arms and asked, “Hungry?”
“Yes!”
There was a tray on the table. Scrambled egg, chicken wimp, toast, coffee. “It may have cooled off,” she said. “It had to get here before you did. Otherwise we’d have to be dressed.”
We ate. I asked, “What is it with lunies? I keep hearing remarks. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect in the eighteenth century, with social diseases and no contraceptives.”
She nodded and swallowed and said, “Harry tried to explain it to me. People have been living on the Moon for a hundred and twenty years or so, but even eighty years ago there were only a few hundred. Human beings haven’t really adapted biologically to having children in low gravity. Maybe someday, but for now...they marry early and have two or three children and never use a contraceptive at all. Two or three children and a dozen or two dozen pregnancies that don’t come to term. The children are precious. It’s very important who the father is.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s the official position. But there are contraceptives, and somebody’s buying them. And long engagements are normal, and children born seven or eight months after the ceremony are also normal. I’d guess they try each other out, just like we do, but one at a time, and what they’re looking for is fertility, not compatibility. And they don’t talk about even that”
“Except Harry.”
She nodded. “Harry likes flatlander women. Society kind of frowns on that, but Harry’s too good a doctor to be fired.” She grinned at me. “That’s his story. He’s actually damned good. And he’s sterile, guaranteed. There are a fair number of men like that, and women too. They’re in a special position. Not really considered a threat, if you follow.”
I wanted to know more about that relationship. I tried an oblique approach. “Would you recommend that I take a lunie lover?”
She didn’t smile. “Don’t fail to seduce a lunie, Gil. What I mean is, don’t fail. Don’t ask unless the answer is yes. In fact—” Now she smiled. “Don’t ask. You can let yourself be seduced. Everyone knows flatlanders are easy.”
“Are we?”
“Sure. Now, would you like to meet Harry McCavity? Is that what you were getting at? You’d like him, and he doesn’t consider you a threat. Quite the reverse.”
“What?”
“You’re a good cover. You and I are roommates of long standing. Hove City society would really prefer that Harry keep his relationships purely social.”
“Oh. Okay, I’d like to meet him socially. I met him officially last night He was repairing a hole in a Belt delegate.” I told her about Penzler.
She didn’t like it “Gil, if someone’s shooting at offworld Conference delegates, shouldn’t you start wearing a mirror vest? And me too?”
“Not to worry. They’ve got a suspect.”
“That’s a relief. The right suspect?”
“She was the only one out there.” I discovered that I didn’t want to talk to Taffy about Naomi. “They’ll be expecting to call me in my room. And I need some sleep. When shall we twain meet again?”
“It looks like Thursday, same time, unless someone changes my schedule again.”
“Same time. Lord.”
“I thought you were used to my funny hours. Look, I’ll leave you a message if it looks like we can get together with Harry. Lunch or dinner, okay?”
“Okay.”
It was nine when I reached my room. I called the Mayor’s office, got his secretary, and was told that the Conference had been postponed for that day, but the conference room would be open for informal discussions.
Interesting. Chris was that important? But two other delegates had been up late into the night, and others could be suffering from time lag. I was just as glad they’d called it off.
I slept till noon. Then Laura Drury called. She was just going off duty, and a team of lunie police were leaving with Naomi in ten minutes.