I got into my suit in a hell of a hurry, then stopped and made myself go through the checkout routine. I was long out of practice. I reached the south face airlock and found the rest of the party still in sight on the road. I bounced after them.
There were seven of us: Naomi, Marion Shaeffer, me, and four tall lunie cops. The freckled redhead was Jefferson. The face above the tallest of the orange suits was also familiar.
I’d seen him talking to the Mayor last night at dinner.
“Alan Watson?”
“Yes, that’s right. You’re one of the Conference delegates—”
“Gil Hamilton. ARM.” We shook gloves. He was a thin young man with straight black hair, a narrow nose, thick shaggy eyebrows, blunt-fingered hands as strong as mine.
He couldn’t make himself smile. Frightened for Naomi? The smallish painting on his chest showed an esoteric spacecraft nearing the North America nebula, all in reds and blacks. We set off, Naomi leading. The road west was a trade road; it sometimes carried heavy equipment, up to the size of a damaged spacecraft. It was broad and smooth, but not straight Follow it far enough and you would reach the Belt Trading Post.
We had come four or five hundred yards, without much conversation, when Naomi said, “I turned off here. I wanted to climb that rock.”
She was pointing at a faceted lump a considerable distance away. It was the tallest point around. I had first seen it glowing in darkness, lit by imminent dawn, when I looked out my window last night.
We followed Naomi toward it Marion asked, “Did you climb it?”
“Yes.”
The sun was only six degrees up the sky. We walked in shadow most of the time. It would have been like wading through ink, but for our headlamps. The footing was chancy. Naomi stumbled as often as I did, more often than the lunies. Marion had trouble too.
She stopped Naomi at one point, where our only route of approach would round a spur of black volcanic glass.
“Okay, what’s around this turn?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “It was dark, it was all different. I’m not even sure this is the way I came.”
The peak was a thousand feet high and not particularly steep. It would give a good view of Hove City, I thought; but we were north of where Chris Penzler had spotted his assassin. A cop directed Naomi to climb it.
She wasn’t exactly agile, in unfamiliar gravity, with the inflated suit restricting her movements. But she didn’t have any trouble till she was three hundred feet up. Then she started yelping. She came down dangerously fast.
“It’s hot!” she complained. “It burned me right through the suit!”
“Where?” Alan Watson demanded.
“My chest and arms. It’s okay now, I think, but I can’t climb it in daylight. Shall I try the other side?”
Marion said, “No, skip it. Where next?”
Naomi led us south. I wondered if we would learn anything this way. Whether or not she was lying, her answer would be the same: it was dark I don’t know the Moon, this probably isn’t the way I came. Tentatively, she had lied already. When I’d climbed out of my tub, the peak was sunlit for the upper hundred feet. Why had she tried to climb the sunlit side today, if she’d had the chance to learn better last night?
Of course she could have started earlier yesterday... and climbed in total darkness. I didn’t like that either.
And I hated where she was leading us.
This was familiar territory. I had sifted it in miniature, felt its contours with my imaginary hand. I half remembered landmarks large or strange; and so, it seemed, did Naomi.
Like a hill-sized boulder that had split nicely down the middle, leaving flat planes uppermost Naomi described it before we reached it She pointed out one half of the split monolith and said, “I climbed up on that one. I lay on my back and looked at the stars, and sometimes at Hove City. More than half the windows were dark by then. There was nice backlighting from behind, from the spaceport and the mirror works.”
She moved to climb up on it, but Marion yanked her back. The orange-clad cops searched with headlamps and powerful flashlights, for bootscrapes, footprints, anything Naomi might have dropped. When they gave up on the sides, Watson and Jefferson reached the top in one leap and searched that Slanted sunlight made the lamps unnecessary.
Marion jumped up and joined them. She balanced on boot-toes and fingertips and searched with her face two inches from the rock.
“Nothing,” she said. “Are you awe you were in this territory?”
“I was right up there on that rock!”
Marion looked satisfied; Jefferson looked grim. Alan Watson had a haunted look. I climbed up after them; knowing.
It was roomy and almost flat. It would be a good place to stretch out and watch stars. I looked toward the city, and Chris Penzler’s “tilted rock” was almost in line-of-sight, assuming I had the right rock. I could look right into Chris’s window around four hundred yards away. The sun made me squint. But at night that window would make a fine shooting gallery.
I thought it over for a few seconds. Then I said, “Hamilton speaking, I’d like to try a couple of things, if nobody has any objection. First, I’d like to test fire a messenger laser.”
I used Jefferson’s. He showed me how to hook the transceiver cable into my helmet mike, and how to aim the thing, first making sure the dimmer switch was at full dim. If you turned it up, the safety gave you five minutes and then turned it down again. Otherwise you could accidentally vaporize whoever you were trying to call. You never used fall power (Jefferson explained) for anything closer than an orbiting spacecraft.
He showed me how to find and call the Watchbird One satellite, using the scope. I got a computer. It gave me a news update. Spacecraft Chili Bird had safely departed the Belt Trading Post for Confinement Asteroid. Sunspot activity was on the increase, but no solar flares had yet formed.
I asked Jefferson, “These things do function as weapons, don’t they?”
“In an emergency, yes.”
“How?”
He showed me how to turn the dimmer switch to full bright-I fired at a darkish rock. I got a half-second burst of red flame, and a hole three inches deep and a quarter of an inch wide.
“Half a second isn’t much of a message,” I said.
So he showed me how to override the safety. “It burns out the sender, of course, and you get just enough time to yell, ‘Help! Blowout!’ That can be enough.”
I handed it back. “Second,” I said, “I’d like to go straight back to Hove City from here, and I’d like to take an escort. Officer Watson, would you care for a stroll?”
He said, “All right. See you later, Naomi, and don’t worry.”
She nodded jerkily, wearing the same stony expression she’d worn all this time.
We hadn’t gone far when Watson said, “Operative Hamilton, we can adjust our helmet mikes so we won’t disturb the others.
“I know how. Call me Gil.”
“I’m Alan.”
We set our radios for privacy. I said, “It finally hit me that I was missing the point. You and I aren’t looking for the same killer as the rest of them. We think Naomi’s not guilty, right?”
“She’d never kill a man from ambush.”
“So we’re looking for someone else. Sticking to Naomi’s route won’t give him to us. She never saw him.”
He bought it. He relaxed, just a little. “She can’t even tell us where he wasn’t. That place where she watched the stars: he could have come after she left. Penzler saw his killer, didn’t he? Jefferson says he did.”
I’d known Naomi ten years ago; but Alan Watson knew her now. He believed her. Could I be wrong?
I filed the question. “Penzler says he saw something, but he can’t even describe the suit. Something human, past the tilted rock. So let’s walk toward the tilted rock, taking our time and looking around.”
We walked through pools of glare and shadow, with almost no in-between. The colors were mostly browns and grays and whites. Alan said, “I wish I knew what to look for. It’s a shame she didn’t lose something.”
I shrugged that off. “We aren’t looking for anything Naomi dropped. This is where the killer had to be. We check the high points because he had to have a view of Chris’s window. We look for tracks of a vehicle, or burn marks from a rocket, anything that could get him out of here before the police started looking for him. He had ten minutes, or more. And look for pieces of a laser. I would have found a laser, but it could have been broken up.”
“Your imaginary arm?”
Skeptical. He’d have his chance to sneer at my imaginary arm; when I testified for the prosecution against Naomi.
The thought of Naomi being broken up for spare parts gave me the creeps. I could never be neutral where Naomi was concerned. But say that love and hate could add to make indifference ... say I could feel nothing for Naomi. It would still be like taking scissors to a George Barr painting. Vandalism.
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, did 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 awhile. 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 further 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 tilted rock was behind us; Penzler couldn’t have seen anything here. Like the keen-eyed Indian in his forest, or the street-wise mugger on his home turf; Alan Watson knew this part of the Moon. He’d see anything worth seeing. To me it was all moonscape.
I did get him talking about the Conference.
“Six out of ten of you are off-worlders,” he said. “We don’t even have a voting majority. I can see why some citizens don’t like that. But they’re wrong. The Moon is a kind of halfway house between the mud and the sky... between Earth and the Belt. We gain some advantages from that, but we have to keep you both satisfied too. The organ bank problem doesn’t make that any easier.”
His lecturer’s manner made him seem older, somehow. If he went into politics, he’d succeed at it
“Might I ask, are these your father’s views too?”
“We’ve talked about it, but I’m not just quoting him.” He smiled. “The last Conference established the holding tanks. Even if Naomi’s convicted, she still goes into a holding tank for six months. Six months to prove she’s innocent, and I’m very glad of that.”
“Wups. Alan, does she know that? She may be more scared than she has to be.”
“Oh, good Lord!” He was horrified.
“So you never told her. So make an opportunity. Can she have visitors?”
“She’s in her own room with the phone turned off and the door geared to reject her voice. I’m sure a policeman could visit her. I just didn’t think. The trial’s set for day after tomorrow, and she thinks that’s it, the end. I’ll tell her, Gil.
Gil, what are you doing?”
We had reached Hovestraydt City and I was hard up against Chris Penzler’s window. I said, “Checking the scene of the crime from the other side, kid.”
I noted with approval that I was in the fields of three cameras. Our clumsy killer might conceivably want to plant a small bomb on the window.
I peered in. Chris was on his back on the bed, covered with foam plastic from chin to navel and armpit to armpit. The mobile autodoc was standing above him like a polished steel nursemaid.
“Alan, come here a second. Do you see anything like a miniature hologram in there? On a wall, or the table?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Dammit”
“Why?”
“Maybe it was moved. I still can’t see our half-competent marksman sticking his face into sunlight, blinding himself; just before he fired. I thought maybe Chris had a holo of his mother or someone on the wall, and he saw it reflected in the window just before he got shot. But there’s nothing.”
The door opened, and closed behind Harry McCavity.
The doctor prodded his unconscious patient for a bit, then moved to the autodoc screen and typed, read the screen for a bit, typed again…ran his hands through his fluffy brown hair in a swift gesture that changed nothing ... turned around, and jumped a yard in the air when he saw faces peering in the window.
I gestured in a curve to the left. We’ll come through the airlock. He glared and gestured back. Up Uranus!
A few minutes later we knocked at the door and he let us in. “We were looking around,” Alan said lamely.
“For what?” McCavity demanded.
I said, “A hologram portrait. My idea. Have you seen anything that might fit?”
“No.”
“It’ s important-”
“No!”
“Can he answer questions?” I waved at Chris Penzler.
“No. Let him alone, he’s doing fine. He’ll be mobile tomorrow ... not comfortable, but mobile. Ask him then. Gil, are you booked for dinner?”
“No. What time do you like?”
“Say half an hour. We can check with Ms. Grimes, see if she’s off duty. Perhaps she can join us.”