ARM (2 page)

The dead man's watch was going like crazy. The minute hand was circling the dial every seven seconds or so. I couldn't find the second hand at all.

I backed away from the arc of dead grass and stood up. Interstellar drive, hell. This blue-glowing monstrosity looked more like a time machine gone wrong.

I studied the single-throw switch welded to the plastic frame next to the batteries. A length of nylon line dangled from the horizontal handle. It looked like someone had tugged the switch on from outside the field by using the line, but he'd have had to hang from the ceiling to tug it off that way.

“I see why you couldn't send it over to ARM Headquarters. You can't even touch it. You stick your arm or your head in there for a second, and that's ten minutes without a blood supply.”

Ordaz said, “Exactly.”

“It looks like you could reach in there with a stick and flip that switch off.”

“Perhaps. We are about to try that.” He waved at the man with the fishing pole. “There was nothing in this room long enough to reach the switch. We had to send—”

“Wait a minute. There's a problem.”

He looked at me. So did the cop with the fishing pole.

“That switch could be a self-destruct. Sinclair was supposed to be a secretive bastard. Or the field might hold considerable potential energy. Something might go blooey.”

Ordaz sighed. “We must risk it. Gil, we have measured the rotation of the dead man's wristwatch. One hour per seven seconds. Fingerprints, footprints, laundry marks, residual body odor, stray eyelashes, all disappearing at an hour per seven seconds.” He gestured, and the cop moved in and began trying to hook the switch.

“Already we may never know just when he was killed,” Ordaz said.

The tip of the pole wobbled in large circles, steadied beneath the switch, made contact. I held my breath. The pole bowed. The switch snapped up, and suddenly the violet glow was gone. Valpredo reached into the field, warily, as if the air might be red hot. Nothing happened, and he relaxed.

Then Ordaz began giving orders, and quite a lot happened. Two men in lab coats drew a chalk outline around the mummy and the poker. They moved the mummy onto a stretcher, put the poker in a plastic bag, and put it next to the mummy.

I said, “Have you identified that?”

“I'm afraid so,” Ordaz said. “Raymond Sinclair had his own autodoc—”

“
Did
he? Those things are expensive.”

“Yes. Raymond Sinclair was a wealthy man. He owned the top two floors of this building and the roof. According to records in his ’doc, he had a new set of bud teeth implanted two months ago.” Ordaz pointed to the mummy, to the skinned-back dry lips and the buds of new teeth that were just coming in.

Right. That was Sinclair.

That brain had made miracles, and someone had smashed it with a wrought-iron rod. The interstellar drive ... that glowing Goldberg device? Or had it been still inside his head?

I said, “We'll have to get whoever did it. We'll
have
to. Even so...” Even so. No more miracles.

“We may have her already,” Julio said.

I looked at him.

“There is a girl in the autodoc. We think she is Dr. Sinclair's great-niece, Janice Sinclair.”

It was a standard drugstore autodoc, a thing like a giant coffin with walls a foot thick and a headboard covered with dials and red and green lights. The girl's face was calm, her breathing shallow. Sleeping Beauty. Her arms were in the guts of the ’doc, hidden by bulky rubbery sleeves.

She was lovely enough to stop my breath. Soft brown hair showing around the electrode cap; small, perfect nose and mouth; smooth pale blue skin shot with silver threads...

That last was an evening dye job. Without it the impact of her would have been much lessened. The blue shade varied slightly to emphasize the shape of her body and the curve of her cheekbones. The silver lines varied, too, being denser in certain areas, guiding the eye in certain directions: to the tips of her breasts or across the slight swell of abdominal muscle to a lovely oval navel.

She'd paid high for that dye job. But she would be beautiful without it.

Some of the headboard lights were red. I punched for a readout and was jolted. The ’doc had been forced to amputate her right arm. Gangrene.

She was in for a hell of a shock when she woke up.

“All right,” I said. “She's lost her arm. That doesn't make her a killer.”

Ordaz asked, “If she were homely, would it help?”

I laughed. “You question my dispassionate judgment? Men have died for less!” Even so, I thought he could be right. There was good reason to think that the killer was now missing an arm.

“What do you think happened here, Gil?”

“Well ... any way you look at it, the killer had to want to take Sinclair's, ah, time machine with him. It's priceless, for one thing. For another, it looks like he tried to set it up as an alibi. Which means that he knew about it before he came here.” I'd been thinking this through. “Say he made sure some people knew where he was a few hours before he got here. He killed Sinclair within range of the ... call it a generator. Turned it on. He figured Sinclair's own watch would tell him how much time he was gaining. Afterward he could set the watch back and leave with the generator. There'd be no way the police could tell he wasn't killed six hours earlier, or any number you like.”

“Yes. But he did not do that.”

“There was that line hanging from the switch. He must have turned it on from outside the field ... probably because he didn't want to sit with the body for six hours. If he tried to step outside the field after he'd turned it on, he'd bump his nose. It'd be like trying to walk through a wall, going from field time to normal time. So he turned it off, stepped out of range, and used that nylon line to turn it on again. He probably made the same mistake Valpredo did: he thought he could step back in and turn it off.”

Ordaz nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly. It was very important for him—or her—to do that. Otherwise he would have no alibi and no profit. If he continued to try to reach into the field—”

“Yah, he could lose the arm to gangrene. That'd be convenient for us, wouldn't it? He'd be easy to find. But look, Julio: the girl could have done the same thing to herself trying to
help
Sinclair. He might not have been that obviously dead when she got home.”

“He might even have been alive,” Ordaz pointed out.

I shrugged.

“In point of fact, she came home at one-ten, in her own car, which is still in the carport. There are cameras mounted to cover the landing pad and carport. Doctor Sinclair's security was thorough. This girl was the only arrival last night. There were no departures.”

“From the roof, you mean.”

“Gil, there are only two ways to leave these apartments. One is from the roof, and the other is by elevator, from the lobby. The elevator is on this floor, and it was turned off. It was that way when we arrived. There is no way to override that control from elsewhere in this building.”

“So someone could have taken it up here and turned it off afterward ... or Sinclair could have turned it off before he was killed ... I see what you mean. Either way, the killer has to be still here.” I thought about that. I didn't like its taste. “No, it doesn't fit. How could she be bright enough to work out that alibi, then dumb enough to lock herself in with the body?”

Ordaz shrugged. “She locked the elevator before killing her uncle. She did not want to be interrupted. Surely that was sensible? After she hurt her arm, she must have been in a great hurry to reach the ’doc.”

One of the red lights turned green. I was glad for that. She didn't look like a killer. I said half to myself, “Nobody looks like a killer when he's asleep.”

“No. But she is where a killer ought to be.
Qué lástima
.”

We went back to the living room. I called ARM Headquarters and had them send a truck.

The machine hadn't been touched. While we waited, I borrowed a camera from Valpredo and took pictures of the setup in situ. The relative positions of the components might be important.

The lab men were in the brown grass, using aerosol sprays to turn fingerprints white and give a vivid yellow glow to faint traces of blood. They got plenty of fingerprints on the machine, none at all on the poker. There was a puddle of yellow in the grass where the mummy's head had been and a long yellow snail track ending at the business end of the poker. It looked like someone had tried to drag the poker out of the field after it had fallen.

Sinclair's apartments were roomy and comfortable and occupied the entire top floor. The lower floor was the laboratory where Sinclair had produced his miracles. I went through it with Valpredo. It wasn't that impressive. It looked like an expensive hobby setup. These tools would assemble components already fabricated, but they would not build anything complex.

Except for the computer terminal. That was like a little womb, with a recline chair inside a 360-degree wraparound holovision screen and enough banked controls to fly the damn thing to Alpha Centauri.

The secrets there must be in that computer! But I didn't try to use it. We'd have to send an ARM programmer to break whatever fail-safe codes Sinclair had put in the memory banks.

The truck arrived. We dragged Sinclair's legacy up the stairs to the roof in one piece. The parts were sturdily mounted on their frame, and the stairs were wide and not too steep.

I rode home in the back of the truck. Studying the generator. That massive piece of silver had something of the look of
Bird in Flight
: a triangle operated on by a topology student with wires at what were still the corners. I wondered if it was the heart of the machine or just a piece of misdirection. Was I really riding with an interstellar drive? Sinclair could have started that rumor himself to cover whatever this was. Or ... there was no law against his working two projects simultaneously.

I was looking forward to Bera's reaction.

Jackson Bera came upon us moving it through the halls of ARM Headquarters. He trailed along behind us. Nonchalant. We pulled the machine into the main laboratory and started checking it against the holos I'd taken in case something had been jarred loose. Bera leaned against the doorjamb, watching us, his eyes gradually losing interest until he seemed about to go to sleep.

I'd met him three years ago, when I had returned from the asteroids and joined the ARM. He was twenty then, and two years an ARM, but his father and grandfather had both been ARMs. Much of my training had come from Bera. And as I learned to hunt men who hunt other men, I had watched what it was doing to him.

An ARM needs empathy. He needs the ability to piece together a picture of the mind of his prey. But Bera had too much empathy. I remember his reaction when Kenneth Graham killed himself: a single surge of current through the plug in his skull and down the wire to the pleasure center of his brain. Bera had been twitchy for weeks. And the Anubis case early last year. When we realized what the man had done, Bera had been close to killing him on the spot. I wouldn't have blamed him.

Last year Bera had had enough. He'd gone into the technical end of the business. His days of hunting organleggers were finished. He was now running the ARM laboratory.

He
had
to want to know what this oddball contraption was. I kept waiting for him to ask ... and he watched, faintly smiling. Finally it dawned on me. He thought it was a practical joke, something I'd cobbled together for his own discomfiture.

I said, “Bera.”

And he looked at me brightly and said, “Hey, man, what is it?”

“You ask the most embarrassing questions.”

“Right, I can understand your feeling that way, but what
is
it? I love it, it's neat, but what is this that you have brought me?”

I told him all I knew, such as it was. When I finished, he said, “It doesn't sound much like a new space drive.”

“Oho, you heard that, too, did you? No, it doesn't. Unless—” I'd been wondering since I first saw it. “Maybe it's supposed to accelerate a fusion explosion. You'd get greater efficiency in a fusion drive.”

“They get better than ninety percent now, and that widget looks
heavy
.” He reached to touch the bent silver triangle gently with long, tapering fingers. “Huh. Well, we'll dig out the answers.”

“Good luck. I'm going back to Sinclair's place.”

“Why? The action is here.” Often enough he'd heard me talking wistfully of joining an interstellar colony. He must know how I'd feel about a better drive for the interstellar slowboats.

“It's like this,” I said. “We've got the generator, but we don't know anything about it. We might wreck it. I'm going to have a whack at finding someone who knows something about Sinclair's generator.”

“Meaning?”

“Whoever tried to steal it. Sinclair's killer.”

“If you say so.” But he looked dubious. He knew me too well. He said, “I understand there's a mother hunt in the offing.”

“Oh?”

He smiled. “Just a rumor. You guys are lucky. When my dad first joined, the business of the ARM was
mostly
mother hunts. The organleggers hadn't really got organized yet, and the Fertility Laws were new. If we hadn't enforced them, nobody would have obeyed them at all.”

“Sure, and people threw rocks at your father. Bera, those days are
gone
.”

“They could come back. Having children is basic.”

“Bera, I did not join the ARM to hunt unlicensed parents.” I waved and left before he could answer. I could do without the call to duty from Bera, who had done with hunting men and mothers.

I'd had a good view of the Rodewald Building while dropping toward the roof this morning. I had a good view now from my commandeered taxi. This time I was looking for escape paths.

There were no balconies on Sinclair's floors, and the windows were flush to the side of the building. A cat burglar would have trouble with them. They didn't look like they'd open.

I tried to spot the cameras Ordaz had mentioned as the taxi dropped toward the roof. I couldn't find them. Maybe they were mounted in the elms.