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

"That's funny. I -- back in a minute. What's happened? Is Owen dead?"
"Somebody is dead, Mr. Hamilton. He carried Mr. Jennison's ident in his
wallet."
"Okay. Now, Owen Jennison was a citizen of the Belt. This may have
interworld complications. That makes it ARM's business. Where's the body?"
"We found him in an apartment rented under his own name. Monica
Apartments, Lower Los Angeles, room 1809."
 "Good. Don't move anything you haven't moved already. I'll be right
over."

Monica Apartments was a nearly featureless concrete block, eighty
stories tall, a thousand feet across the edges of its square base. Lines of
small balconies gave the sides a sculptured look, above a forty-foot inset
ledge that would keep tenants from dropping objects on pedestrians. A hundred
buildings just like it made Lower Los Angeles look lumpy from the air.
Inside was a lobby done in anonymous modern. Lots of metal and plastic
showing; lightweight, comfortable chairs without arms; big ash trays; plenty
of indirect lighting; a low ceiling; no wasted space. The whole room might
have been stamped out with a die. It wasn't supposed to look small, but it
did, and that warned you what the rooms would look like.
I found the manager's office and the manager, a soft-looking man with
watery-blue eyes. His conservative paper suit, dark red, seemed chosen to
render him invisible, as did the style of his brown hair, worn long and combed
straight back without a part. "Nothing like this has ever happened here," he
confided as he led me to the elevator banks. "Nothing. It would have been bad
enough without his being a Belter, but now -- " He cringed at the thought.
"Newsmen. They'll smother us."
The elevator was coffin-sized, but with the handrails on the inside. It
went up fast and smooth. I stepped out into the long, narrow hallway.
What would Owen have been doing in a place like this? Machinery lived
here, not people.
Maybe it wasn't Owen. Ordaz had been reluctant to commit himself.
Besides, there's no law against picking pockets. You couldn't enforce such a
law on this crowded planet. Everyone on Earth was a pickpocket.
Sure. Someone had died carrying Owen's wallet.
I walked down the hallway to 1809.

It was Owen who sat grinning in the armchair. I took one good look at
him, enough to be sure, and then I looked away and didn't look back. But the
rest of it was even more unbelievable.
No Belter could have taken that apartment. I was born in Kansas; but
even I felt the awful anonymous chill. It would have driven Owen bats.
"I don't believe it," I said.
"Did you know him well, Mr. Hamilton?"
"About as well as two men can know each other. He and I spent three
years mining rocks in the main asteroid belt. You don't keep secrets under
those conditions."
"Yet you didn't know he was on Earth."
"That's what I can't understand. Why the blazes didn't he phone me if he
was in trouble?"