"Larry Niven - The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Small as it was, the closet was nearly empty. A set of street clothes, a paper shirt, a pair of shoes, a small brown overnight case. All new. The few items in the bathroom medicine chest had been equally new and equally anonymous.
Ordaz said, "Well?"
"Belters are transients. They don't own much, but what they do own, they guard. Small possessions, relics, souvenirs. I can't be.. lieve he wouldn't have had something."
Ordaz lifted an eyebrow. "His space suit?"
"You think that's unlikely? It's not. The inside of his pressure suit is a Belier's home. Sometimes it's the only home he's got. He spends a fortune decorating it. If he loses his suit, he's not a Belter any more.
"No, I don't insist he'd have brought his suit. But he'd have had something. His phial of marsdust. The bit of nickel-iron they took out of his chest. Or, if he left all his souvenirs home, he'd have picked up things on Earth. But in this room-there's nothing."
"Perhaps," Ordaz suggested delicately, "he didn't notice his surroundings."
And somehow that brought it all home.
Owen Jennison sat grinning in a water-stained silk dressing gown. His space-darkened face lightened abruptly beneath his chin, giving way to normal suntan. His blond hair, too long, had been cut Earth style; no trace remained of the Belter strip cut he'd worn all his life. A month's growth of untended beard covered half his face. A small black cylinder protruded from the top of his head. An electric cord trailed from the top of the cylinder and ran to a small wall socket.
The cylinder was a droud, a current addict's transformer.
I stepped closer to the corpse and bent to look. The droud was a standard make, but it had been altered. Your standard current addict's droud will pass only a trickle of current into the brain.
Owen must have been getting ten times the usual charge, easily enough to damage his brain in a month's time.
I reached out and touched the droud with my imaginery hand. Ordaz was standing quietly beside me, letting me make my
examination without interruption. Naturally he had no way of knowing about my restricted psi powers.
Restricted was the operative word. I had two psychic powers:
telekinesis and esper. With the esper sense I could sense the shapes of objects at a distance; but the distance was the reach of an extra right arm. I could lift small objects, if they were no further away than the fingertips of an imaginary right hand. The restriction was a flaw in my own imagination. Since I could not believe my imaginary hand would reach further than that. . . it wouldn't.
Even so limited a psi power can be useful. With my imaginary fingertips I touched the droud in Owen's head, then ran them down to a tiny hole in his scalp, and further.
It was a standard surgical job. Owen could have had it done anywhere. A hole in his scalp, invisible under the hair, nearly im~ possible to find even if you knew what you were looking for. Even your best friends wouldn't know, unless they caught you with the droud plugged in. But the tiny hole marked a bigger plug set in the bone of the skull. I touched the ecstasy plug with my imaginary fingertips, then ran them down the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen's brain, down into the pleasure center.
No, the extra current hadn't killed him. What had killed Owen was his lack of wifi power. He had been unwilling to get up.
He had starved to death sitting in that chair. There were plastic squeezebottles all around his feet and a couple still on the end table. All empty. They must have been full a month ago. Owen hadn't died of thirst. He had died of starvation, and his death had been planned.
Owen, my crewmate. Why hadn't he come to me? Fm half a Belter myself. Whatever his trouble, I'd have gotten him out somehow. A little smuggling-what of it? Why had he arranged to tell me only after it was over?
The apartment was so clean, so clean. You had to bend close to smell the death; the air conditioning whisked it all away.
He'd been very methodical. The kitchen was open so that a catheter could lead from Owen to the sink. He'd given himself enough water to last out the month; he'd paid his rent a month in
advance. He'd cut the droud cord by hand, and he'd cut it short deliberately tethering himself to a wall socket beyond reach of the kitchen.
A complex way to die, but rewarding in its way. A month of ecstasy, a month of the highest physical pleasure man can attain. I could imagine him giggling every time he remembered he was starving to death. With food only a few footsteps away . . . but he'd have to pull out the droud to reach it. Perhaps he postponed the decision, and postponed it again. .
Owen and I and Homer Chandrasekhar, we had lived for three years in a cramped shell surrounded by vacuum. What was there to know about Owen Jennison that I hadn't known? Where was the weakness we did not share? If Owen had done this, so could I. And I was afraid.
"Very neat," I whispered. "Belter neat."
"Typically Belter, would you say?"
"I would not. Belters don't commit suicide. Certainly not this way. If a Belter had to go, he'd blow his ship's drive and die like a star. The neatness is typical. The result isn't."
"Well," said Ordaz. "Well." He was uncpmfortable. The facts spoke for themselves, yet he was reluctant to call me a liar. He fell back on formality.
"Mr. Hamilton, do you identify this man as Owen Jennison?"
"It's him." He'd always been a touch overweight, yet I'd recognized him the moment I saw him. "But let's be sure." I'd pulled the dirty dressing gown back from Owen's shoulder. A nearperfect circle of scar tissue, eight inches across, spread over the left side of his chest. "See that?"
"We noticed it, yes. An old burn?"
"Owen's the only man I know who could show you a meteor scar on his skin. It blasted him in the shoulder one day while he was outside the ship. Sprayed vaporized pressure-suit steel all over his skin. The doc pulled a tiny grain of nickel-iron from the center of the scar, just below the skin. Owen always carried that grain of nickel-iron. Always," I said, looking at Ordaz.
"We didn't find it."
"Okay."
"I'm sorry to put you through this, Mr. Hamilton. It was you who insisted we leave the body in situ."
"Yes. Thank you."
Owen grinned at me from the reading chair. I felt the pain, in my throat and in the pit of my stomach. Once I had lost my right arm. Losing Owen felt the same way.
"I'd like to know more about this," I said. "Will you let me know the details as soon as you get them?"
"Of course. Through the ARM's office?"
"Yes." This wasn't ARM's business, despite what I'd told Ordaz, but ARM's prestige would help. "I want to know why Owen died. Maybe he just cracked up. . . culture shock or something. But if someone hounded him to death, I'll have his blood."
"Surely the administration of justice is better left to-" Ordaz stopped, confused. Did I speak as an ARM or as a citizen?
I left him wondering.
The lobby held a scattering of tenants entering and leaving elevators or just sitting around. I stood outside the elevator for a moment, searching passing faces for the erosion of personality that must be there.
Mass-produced comfort. Room to sleep and eat and watch tridee, but no room to be anyone. Living here, one would own nothing. What kind of people would live like that? They should have looked all alike, moved in unison, like the string of images in a barber's mirrors.
Then I spotted wavy brown hair and a dark red paper suit. The manager? I had to get close before I was sure. His face was the face of a permanent stranger.
He saw me coming and smiled without enthusiasm. "Oh, hello, Mr. . . . uh . . . Did you find . . ." He couldn't think of the right question.
"Yes," I said, answering it anyway. "But I'd like to know some things. Owen Jennison lived here for six weeks, right?"
"Six weeks and two days, before we opened his room."