"Niven, Larry - ARM 1 - ARM" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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ARM
by Larry Niven
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Copyright (c)1975 by Larry Niven
First published in Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg, 1975

Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com

Science Fiction
Hugo Award Nominee

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The ARM Building had been abnormally quiet for some months now.
We'd needed the rest -- at first. But these last few mornings the silence had had an edgy quality. We waved at each other on our paths to our respective desks, but our heads were elsewhere. Some of us had a restless look. Others were visibly, determinedly busy.
Nobody wanted to join a mother hunt.
This past year we'd managed to cut deep into the organlegging activities in the West Coast area. Pats on the back all around, but the results were predictable: other activities were going to increase. Sooner or later the newspapers would start screaming about stricter enforcement of the Fertility Laws, and then we'd all be out hunting down illegitimate parents ... all of us who were not involved in something else.
It was high time I got involved in something else.
This morning I walked to my office through the usual edgy silence. I ran coffee, carried it to my desk, punched for messages at the computer terminal. A slender file slid from the slot. A hopeful sign. I picked it up one-handed so that I could sip coffee as I went through it and let it fall open in the middle.
Color holographs jumped out at me. I was looking down through a pair of windows over two morgue tables.
_Stomach to brain: LURCH! What a hell of an hour to be looking at people with their faces burned off! Get eyes to look somewhere else and don't try to swallow that coffee. Why don't you change jobs?_
They were hideous. Two of them, a man and a woman. Something had burned their faces away down to the skulls and beyond: bones and teeth charred, brain tissue cooked.
I swallowed and kept looking. I'd seen the dead before. These had just hit me at the wrong time.
Not a laser weapon, I thought ... though that was chancy. There are thousands of jobs for lasers and thousands of varieties to do the jobs. Not a hand laser, anyway. The pencil-thin beam of a hand laser would have chewed channels in the flesh. This had been a wide, steady beam of some kind.
I flipped back to the beginning and skimmed.
Details: They'd been found on the Wilshire slidewalk in West Los Angeles around 4:30 A.M. People don't use the slidewalks that late. They're afraid of organleggers. The bodies could have traveled up to a couple of miles before anyone saw them.
Preliminary autopsy: They'd been dead three or four days. No signs of drugs or poisons or puncture marks. Apparently the burns had been the only cause of death.
It must have been quick, then: a single flash of energy. Otherwise they'd have tried to dodge, and there'd be burns elsewhere. There were none. Just the faces and char marks around the collars.
There was a memo from Bates, the coroner. From the look of them, they might have been killed by some new weapon. So he'd sent the file over to us. Could we find anything in the ARM files that would fire a blast of heat or light a foot across?
I sat back and stared into the holos and thought about it.
A light weapon with a beam a foot across? They make lasers in that size, but as war weapons, used from orbit. One of those would have vaporized the heads, not charred them.
There were other possibilities. Death by torture, with the heads held in clamps in the blast from a commercial attitude jet. Or some kind of weird industrial accident: a flash explosion that had caught them both looking over a desk or something. Or even a laser beam reflected from a convex mirror.
Forget about its being an accident. The way the bodies were abandoned reeked of guilt, of something to be covered up. Maybe Bates was right. A new illegal weapon.
And I could be deeply involved in searching for it when the mother hunt started.
* * * *
The ARM has three basic functions. We hunt organleggers. We monitor world technology: new developments that might create new weapons or that might affect the world economy or the balance of power among nations. And we enforce the Fertility Laws.
Come, let us be honest with ourselves. Of the three, protecting the Fertility Laws is probably the most important.
Organleggers don't aggravate the population problem.
Monitoring of technology is necessary enough, but it may have happened too late. There are enough fusion power plants and fusion rocket motors and fusion crematoriums and fusion seawater distilleries around to let any madman or group thereof blow up the Earth or any selected part of it.
But if a lot of people in one region started having illegal babies, the rest of the world would scream. Some nations might even get mad enough to abandon population control. Then what? We've got eighteen billion on Earth now. We couldn't handle more.
So the mother hunts are necessary. But I hate them. It's no fun hunting down some poor sick woman so desperate to have children that she'll go through hell to avoid her six-month contraceptive shots. I'll get out of it if I can.
I did some obvious things. I sent a note to Bates at the coroner's office. _Send all further details on the autopsies and let me know if the corpses are identified._ Retinal prints and brain-wave patterns were obviously out, but they might get something on gene patterns and fingerprints.
I spent some time wondering where two bodies had been kept for three to four days, and why, before being abandoned in a way that could have been used three days earlier. But that was a problem for the LAPD detectives. Our concern was with the weapon.
So I started writing a search pattern for the computer: Find me a widget that will fire a beam of a given description. From the pattern of penetration into skin and bone and brain tissue, there was probably a way to express the frequency of the light as a function of the duration of the blast, but I didn't fool with that. I'd pay for my laziness later, when the computer handed me a foot-thick list of light-emitting machinery and I had to wade through it.