by Bob Shaw
“A duck! But there aren’t any ducks on Isher II.” In fact there are no birds of any description on Isher II, so my astonishment was justified.
“Vogt built this one—it’s his new hobby. He started off by making a pigeon, and he says he’ll eventually work up to an eagle, then he’s going to sell them to a museum or maybe start a travelling museum of his own.” We shook our heads in wonderment just as we had been doing over Vogt’s exploits since we were children. He had been the Government’s principal scientific adviser for years and had always had a home workshop full of fascinating and weird gadgets. Force of habit set me thinking that here was a reasonable would-you-believe-it? story, then I kicked myelf for being selfish and also for forgetting that Afton Reynolds would have killed it stone dead anyway.
The combined Tilton clan had dinner that evening at the big table in my mother’s kitchen and she even had my favourite sweet—hot apple pie and brown ale. I was beginning to forget all about the Isher II News Service and my new boss when the after-dinner talk came round to Vogt’s duck.
“What speed could it do, Dad?” my father asked indulgently.
“It was doing about twenty miles an hour,” Vogt said. ‘But I was going to work up to about thirty later on in the test programme.” His face darkened behind its white moustache. “It’ll take me weeks to re-build the guidance receivers. I’m going to send the bill to Bott—he’ll pay for this!”
“Is that his name—Bott?” I asked.
“That’s it. Theophilus V. Bott,” Jeff told me. “Grandad got it from the land office this afternoon when he was getting ready to sue.” There was an explosion of laughter which I didn’t join in because the sound of the name had done something queer to my stomach. I left the table and went to the call screen in the living room.
The night attendant in the reference library at my office turned out to be Sam Griggs, a studious-looking boy who owed me a week’s salary in accumulated poker debts and was always so helpful in consequence that it wouldn’t have been worth my while to make him pay up. He blinked when he saw me.
“I thought you were vacationing.”
“I am. I just want you to settle a bet. Would you look up the name of the current Top Gun for me?”
“Don’t need to,” Sam replied. “It’s Clint Cordner.”
“Grow up, Sam,” I said patiently. “No mother ever looked down at a helpless new-born babe and said, ‘Let’s call him Clint’. I want you to look up his real name.”
Sam hurried away and came back with a stricken look on his face. “The tape says his real name is Theophilus Vernon Bott.”
“I thought it might be something like that. Thanks Sam.” I faded him out and went back into the kitchen where the tobacco jar was being handed round and whisky glasses were clinking. I couldn’t see why the galaxy’s Top Gun should be living under what amounted to an alias right in the heart of a non-Duello sector, but I could sense I was on to something several sizes too big for Afton Reynolds to squash.
I had a late breakfast then drove slowly out to the boundary of our farm and over the lime into the old Ericsson place. It wasn’t actually raining but the grey sky had come down so low that the taller treetops were nuzzling into cloud. As the skimmer cruised silently at a height of four feet I caught occasional glimpses of robots at work down the long lines of protein plants. I could have sworn that one or two of them were painted yellow in place of the pale blue which was the Ericsson farm’s identification colour. This was odd because colour coding is important in keeping check on the willing but idiotic agricultural robots.
A minute later things began to look odder still.
I passed three places where irregular areas the size of football pitches were streaked with yellow paint or dye, then one where everything was lightly covered with white snow-like flakes. When within a couple of miles of the farmhouse I began, with a certain amount of uneasiness, to keep an eye open for the Top Gun. Any weapon that Bott/Cordner might be carrying on New Lincoln would have its electronic conscience governing the trigger, but that wouldn’t prevent him from beating a trespasser over the head with it.
Suddenly I heard an indistinct, angry voice bellowing somewhere near at hand. I was just about to glide quietly towards the nearest piece of cover when I made the shocking discovery that the voice was issuing from the clouds directly over my head.
After a moment of rigid panic I slammed the emergency brake, the skimmer dropped like a stone and I saw something wing down out of the mists in the general direction of the farmhouse. Just before it disappeared from view a rifle shot sounded. The flying object veered sharply to one side, emitted black smoke, then exploded. As the mist closed in, reducing visibility to a couple of hundred yards, I saw a descending billow of whiteness as though someone had burst a flour bag over the treetops.
After three deep drags on a cigarette I left the skimmer and went forward on foot. The white stuff was still drifting down when I reached the general area of the explosion—incredibly, it turned out to be feathers. I picked one up. It was a cheaply made plastic imitation, with a badly trimmed flash all round the edges….
“You one of Hardin’s men?” The voice behind me was cold and flat, just like a Top Gun’s voice ought to be.
“No! No, I’m not,” I said hastily turning round. “As a matter of fact I’m a neighbour of yours. Jack Tilton is the name.” I recognised Cordner at once. He was a tall man in his mid-forties, with straight black hair and grey eyes which had very clear, almost fluorescent, whites to them. His belly bulged slightly over the single gun belt he wore, but Clint Cordner made it look good, like a badge of experience.
“If you’re not one of Hardin’s men, what do you want?”
“I’ve got a complaint,” I said miserably, remembering the sixty or so hardened opponents the man before me had dropped in gun battles. “My grandfather has a flying model duck which he took months to build. Somebody on this farm shot it yesterday and it’s not hard to guess …’
A look of relief washed over Cordner’s face. “So that’s what I shot—a robot duck! I don’t mind telling you, man, when I saw that puff of smoke come out I wondered what the poor crittur had been eating. Yes:, sir, I was real worried about that bird.” He began to laugh.
“It isn’t funny.”
“I guess not,” he finally got out. “I’m real sorry about shooting the duck. I’ve been blasting away at Hardin’s torpedoes for days, man, and when the duck skimmed over me I fired by instinct.”
I decided to get down to the real business of my visit. “Perhaps I should tell you that, as well as being your neighbour, I’m a reporter.”
“A reporter, huh.” Cordner picked up his rifle and scraped some mud off it. “Isher II News Service?”
I nodded, wondering how Cordner had guessed, then decided to keep at him while he was in the mood to talk. “Naturally I’m curious about why you’re on Isher II at all, Mr. Cordner.”
“Call me Clint. Have you a cigarette? Herb Talmus—that’s my manager—doesn’t allow me to smoke while I’m training.” Cordner accepted the cigarette gratefully and puffed it into life.
“Now, about your reasons for …’
Cordner began to walk and I went with him. His legs were a lot longer than mine and I had to churn mud to keep up with him. Suddenly he seemed to reach a decision, slowed down and began to talk. “Herb told me not to say a word until he had worked the story out, but I’m going to get it all off my chest because I don’t like the plan. See?”
I made little circular movements with my head, to be taken as nodding or shaking according to his preference.
“I don’t know what story Herb is cooking up,” Cordner continued, ‘but the real reason I am here is that I’m being chased by a man who’s faster than I am, and I’m scared of him. You’ve heard of Luther Hardin?”
“Isn’t he the Number Three Gun?”
Cordner shook his head. “Number Two now—he got rid of Cal Mason, the old Number Two, last week. I heard it on
the radio. Shot him stone dead. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.”
“What?” I yelped. “What about all the poor guys you’ve shot?”
Cordner looked indignant. “Me! Me! I never … Oh, I get it. Say, you’re really out of touch here, aren’t you?”
“Well, I don’t take much interest in … blood sports,” I said primly, ‘but I’ve seen …’
“I’ve never killed anybody in my whole life,” Cordner interrupted. “I know you’ve seen newscasts of me shooting a lot of men, but they were real professionals—they had medics there to patch them up afterwards. None of them was ever clinically dead for more than a minute or two.”
“I didn’t know they did that.” I was genuinely surprised. “It never shows anything like that on the …’
“Of course not,” Cordner snapped. “The people who watch you in a gun fight want to see you go down and when you’re down they like to think you stay that way. It would spoil everything if they saw you get up again. That’s why you’ve got to drop out of the game altogether if you really stop one—all those armchair gunslingers would be annoyed if you showed you were still alive after they had drilled you with their pipes or hotdogs the week before.”
‘But you said Hardin had killed Cal Mason. Is he really dead?”
Cordner nodded. “Hardin’s psychotic. A throwback to the original gunfighters—refuses to have medics and challenges men to fight without their medics. A lot of men won’t do it and they get out—that’s why Hardin came up so fast. But Cal wouldn’t back down because he was too well known. It would have dishonoured The Game. Now there’s only me between Hardin and the top.”
“This is where your plan comes in,” I guessed. “What is it?”
“It isn’t my plan,” Cordner said quickly. “Herb Talmus thought it up, though I must admit it’s pretty smart—even if it is a bit sneaky and low. The Game will be better off without a character like Hardin going round killing folk. There ought to be a law….”
“You seem pretty sure the idea will work,” I prompted.
“It’s bound to! Hardin’s ship had been orbiting up there for days now. He has called me out every couple of hours but he can’t do anything until I accept the challenge—that’s why he keeps sending down torpedoes full of yellow paint and white feathers and amplified recordings of his voice. He’s trying to needle me, but he doesn’t realise that he’s the one who’s being needled. Right now he’s so mad he can’t think straight, so Herb is going to radio my acceptance for a fight this afternoon. Get it?”
I shook my head although I was, in fact, beginning to get the general drift. I found it hard to believe that two experienced operators like Cordner and Talmus could be so dumb. Admittedly the idea of the electro-neuro safety catch was new to them, but their brains couldn’t be completely paralysed. Or could they?
“Well,” Cordner continued, “Hardin will get down here in a hurry but we’ll explain that: the fight would be illegal and would carry a murder charge for the winner unless we use the local trick guns. Hardin will be so blood crazy by that time he won’t even stop to think that …’
“That,” I cut in, ‘if a gun won’t fire except in self-defence only the slower man’s will work because he’ll be the only one who’s defending himself.”
Cordner looked surprised. “You’ve been talking to Herb already, huh?”
“It’s the craziest idea I ever heard, Clint.” I began to laugh but choked it off because Cordner’s face was going hard.
“If it’s crazy,” he said coldly, ‘why is the Isher II News Service paying fifty thousand monits just to have a camera there?”
I gaped at him. “Now I know you’re crazy! Why I wouldn’t offer you ten cents for the whole galactic rights!”
“Yeah,” Cordner sneered. “Well, Reynolds signed the contract an hour ago. Herb has the cheque in his pocket right now.”
“Don’t be so….” Suddenly I felt weak. “Who signed the contract?”
“Your boss, of course—Afton Reynolds. Say, he didn’t put you in the picture very well, did he?” Cordner looked at me, obviously with a dawning suspicion that I was some kind of incompetent office boy who had wandered in on big things by mistake.
“You mean Reynolds is here … on your farm … now?”
‘Been down here since early this morning,” Cordner affirmed. “It was pretty smart of him to find out we were here. At first we didn’t want any publicity—what with things being a bit irregular and all—but fifty thousand monits! That’s as much as we’d get in the …’
I stopped listening to Cordner as it dawned on me what had gone wrong with my once-in-a-lifetime scoop. When I made my late night call to the office reference library I should have remembered that Sam Griggs owed twice as much money to Reynolds as he did to me. And the line about needing information to settle a bet had hardly been original—with my experience I should have done better than that.
I became aware of Cordner’s voice again. “Here they are now,” he was saying. “We’ll see who’s crazy, huh!”
Afton Reynolds and Herb Talmus looked alike. Two small, neat, flashily-dressed men who seemed completely out of place on Isher’s honest brown mud. Their smiles were alike too, like those of cats who had not only licked the cream but found a few drowned mice in it.
When the four of us came together beside a clump of cloud-truncated trees Reynolds nodded to Cordner and, still grinning affably, pulled me to one side. “Hello, Jackie boy,” he said.
“I’ll kill Griggs for this,” I replied conversationally, smiling and keeping my voice low.
Reynolds didn’t even try to cover up for his helper. “Sam has the makings of a good newshound, Jackie boy. Besides, you should be glad of an older and wiser head on a thing this size.”
“How would you like your older and wiser head beat into an older and wiser pulp?”
Reynolds stopped smiling. “I’m not going to argue with you now, Tilton. I suggest you get on back to your …’
“I suggest you try to get that cheque back before it’s too late, Reynolds. Otherwise, you’ll be out of a job. The agency can’t afford to lose that sort of money through your stupidity.”
“That does it,” Reynolds snapped, abandoning the attempt to convince the others we were having a friendly boss-to-employee chat, ‘you, my friend, are fired.”
“If I were your friend,” I said with as much dignity as I could raise, “I’d deserve to be fired.” I went back home as fast as the skimmer would carry me and sent a lengthy cable to the managing editor at the world office in Carrsville. After a light lunch I sat around for a while but early in the afternoon I was skimming back to Cordner’s farm—I just had to see the gunfight on which Reynolds had spent a whole year’s story-buying funds.
Luther Hardin didn’t look much like the popular image of a fast gun. He was small and pudgy, with a pale slab-cheeked face and tiny twitching mouth. Perhaps that was his trouble, I thought, trying to find a comfortable position behind the tree where I was hiding. If Hardin had been big, handsome and tough-looking he might have been content to fight under the auspices of a team of medics.
He was completely alone at one end of the marked-off arena, while Cordner, Talmus and Reynolds formed a little group at the other. Three cameras were set up and I noticed that Reynolds was operating them himself—there might not have been the time to get a proper camera team down, but I suspected that Reynolds intended to walk into head office having wrapped up the story of the century single-handed. Also, if Cordner was planning deliberately to slow his draw as a safeguard the cameras would need careful positioning to disguise the fact.
At last Talmus and Reynolds moved off to one side and I knew the show was about to start. A few seconds later Hardin and Clint Cordner began the ritual advance down the centre of the long narrow rectangle. It would have looked better in the dust under a scorching noonday sun, but squelching muck and a fine persistent drizzle were the best that Isher II was prepared to offer—I n
ever liked our climate more than at that moment.
Both men moved very slowly, Hardin walking quite upright, turned sideways so that the toe of his right boot never passed the heel of his left; Cordner walking square-on, but crouched forward hungrily.
My eyes began to smart and I wanted desperately to knuckle them but was afraid to try it in case of missing everything. Suddenly—no, suddenly isn’t the word for Hardin’s draw—the gun was just there in his hand, as though he had been holding it all along and I hadn’t noticed. Cordner must have been slower, but as far as I was concerned he performed his feat of “B simultaneously with Hardin.
The guns went phut!
Showers of purple sparks burst from Hardin’s and Cordner’s right hands and the guns dropped hissing into the mud. Both men danced around clumsily, nursing their arms. Hardin made little whimpering sounds like a sick pup.
When I reached the group I saw that their burns were painful-looking but not too severe. “Are your medics back at the farmhouse?”