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.
I had punched in the instructions and was relaxing with more coffee and a cigarette when Ordaz called.
Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz was a slender, dark-skinned man with straight black hair and soft black eyes. The first time I saw him in a phone screen, he had been telling me of a good friend's murder. Two years later I still flinched when I saw him.
“Hello, Julio. Business or pleasure?”
“Business, Gil. It is to be regretted.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Both. There is murder involved, but there is also a machine ... Look, can you see it behind me?” Ordaz stepped out of the field of view, then reached invisibly to turn the phone camera.
I looked into somebody's living room. There was a wide circle of discoloration in the green indoor grass rug. In the center of the circle, a machine and a man's body.
Was Julio putting me on? The body was old, half-mummified. The machine was big and cryptic in shape, and it glowed with a subdued, eerie blue light.
Ordaz sounded serious enough. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No. That's some machine.” Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. “Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?”
Ordaz came back on. He was smiling, barely. “I'm afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it.”
“Where are you now?”
“In Raymond Sinclair's apartment on the top floor of the Rodewald Building
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.
I had punched in the instructions and was relaxing with more coffee and a cigarette when Ordaz called.
Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz was a slender, dark-skinned man with straight black hair and soft black eyes. The first time I saw him in a phone screen, he had been telling me of a good friend's murder. Two years later I still flinched when I saw him.
“Hello, Julio. Business or pleasure?”
“Business, Gil. It is to be regretted.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Both. There is murder involved, but there is also a machine ... Look, can you see it behind me?” Ordaz stepped out of the field of view, then reached invisibly to turn the phone camera.
I looked into somebody's living room. There was a wide circle of discoloration in the green indoor grass rug. In the center of the circle, a machine and a man's body.
Was Julio putting me on? The body was old, half-mummified. The machine was big and cryptic in shape, and it glowed with a subdued, eerie blue light.
Ordaz sounded serious enough. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No. That's some machine.” Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. “Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?”
Ordaz came back on. He was smiling, barely. “I'm afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it.”
“Where are you now?”
“In Raymond Sinclair's apartment on the top floor of the Rodewald Building
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