ARM by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page B

have brained Ray with—no, he couldn't. The poker wouldn't be moving any faster than a glacier. Ray would just dodge.”
    And he couldn't pull a poker out of the field, either. His fist wouldn't close on it after it was inside. But he could have tried and still left with his arm intact, I thought.
    Did Urthiel know anything of the circumstances surrounding Edward Sinclair's exemption?
    “Oh, that's an old story,” she said. “Sure, I heard about it. How could it possibly have anything to do with, with Ray's murder?”
    “I don't know,” I confessed. “I'm just thrashing around.”
    “Well, you'll probably get it more accurately from the UN files. Edward Sinclair did some mathematics on the fields that scoop up interstellar hydrogen for the cargo ramrobots. He was a shoo-in for the exemption. That's the surest way of getting it: make a breakthrough in anything that has anything to do with the interstellar colonies. Every time you move one man away from Earth, the population drops by one.”
    “What was wrong with it?”
    “Nothing anyone could prove. Remember, the Fertility Restriction Laws were new then. They couldn't stand a real test. But Edward Sinclair's a pure math man. He works with number theory, not practical applications. I've seen Edward's equations, and they're closer to something Ray would come up with. And Ray didn't need the exemption. He never wanted children.”
    “So you think—”
    “I don't care which of them redesigned the ramscoops. Diddling the Fertility Board like that, that takes brains .” She swallowed the rest of her drink, set the glass down. “Breeding for brains is never a mistake. It's no challenge to the Fertility Board, either. The people who do the damage are the ones who go into hiding when their shots come due, have their babies, then scream to high heaven when the board has to sterilize them. Too many of those and we won't have Fertility Laws anymore. And that —” She didn't have to finish.
    Had Sinclair known that Pauline Urthiel was once Paul?
    She stared. “Now just what the bleep has that got to do with anything?”
    I'd been toying with the idea that Sinclair might have been blackmailing Urthiel with that information. Not for money but for credit in some discovery they'd made together. “Just thrashing around,” I said.
    “Well ... all right. I don't know if Ray knew or not. He never raised the subject, but he never made a pass, either, and he must have researched me before he hired me. And, say, listen: Larry doesn't know. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't blurt it out.”
    “Okay.”
    “See, he had his children by his first wife. I'm not denying him children ... Maybe he married me because I had a touch of, um, masculine insight. Maybe. But he doesn't know it, and he doesn't want to. I don't know whether he'd laugh it off or kill me.”
* * * *
    I had Valpredo drop me off at ARM Headquarters.
    This peculiar machine really does bother me, Gil ... Well it should, Julio. The Los Angeles Police were not trained to deal with a mad scientist's nightmare running quietly in the middle of a murder scene.
    Granted that Janice wasn't the type. Not for this murder. But Drew Porter was precisely the type to evolve a perfect murder around Sinclair's generator, purely as an intellectual exercise. He might have guided her through it; he might even have been there and used the elevator before she shut it off. It was the one thing he forgot to tell her: not to shut off the elevator.
    Or: he outlined a perfect murder to her, purely as a puzzle, never dreaming she'd go through with it—badly.
    Or: one of them killed Janice's uncle on impulse. No telling what he'd said that one of them couldn't tolerate. But the machine had been right there in the living room, and Drew had wrapped his big arm around Janice and said, Wait, don't do anything yet; let's think this out ...
    Take any of these as the true state of affairs, and a prosecutor could have a hell of a time proving it. He