Andromeda Gun (2 page)

First, he would have to be guided into cooperation with his species, for in his own language the man was an outlaw, a term which implied some law he was outside of. Tracing the concept of “law” through the brain’s conceptual areas, G-7 arrived at: going to church; keeping cleaned and shaved; being polite to women; not robbing and killing.

Probing tentacles of light diverged through the sleeper’s brain, connecting synapses, jury-rigging junctions between the man’s atrophied love centers and his equally disused concepts of social responsibility. G-7 was making its first attempt to guide the man, prompting him to take his first step in which appeared to be a journey of a thousand miles toward respectability.

Now interwoven with the neuron patterns of its host, using the man’s language, G-7 felt its first human emotion. It thrilled to the knowledge that this currently saddleless saddle tramp, this ignoble brute it had inhabited, would eventually be hailed by others of its species as Saint Ian the First.

At the moment, storms sweeping from the vagus nerve were battering the man’s thalamus. Nudging a neuron here, straightening a chain of molecules there, G-7 went about pacifying the brain’s outraged stomach as Johnny Loco stirred, stretched, and opened his eyes.

G-7 was amazed by the clarity, range, the depth and color perception of the man’s binocular vision. At the angle at which he lay, the man could see the crest of the defile, and from five hundred yards G-7 could estimate the cubic volume of the boulder atop the crest, the spaceship which had brought it to this planet called earth in a galaxy called the Milky Way from a star cluster which, it would later learn, men had named Andromeda.

Drifting into full wakefulness, Johnny Loco noticed first his boots on the seat above his head with his feet still in them. He could not recall when he had last slept with his feet over his head, but it was a good position for curing a hangover. Ordinarily he would have been very sick from the rotgut he had drunk last night in Idaho Falls.

Idaho Falls! The very words rang as a knell , and he closed his eyes again to shut out his memories. He had bet a hundred dollars on a two-card draw to an inside straight and had lost the pot to a pair of jacks. He had bet and lost his horse and saddle and had tried to bet his pistol, but the other gamblers would not let him bet the weapon. It had a hair trigger, and its handle was so full of notches that drawing it was like grabbing a saw.

If he couldn’t learn to play poker, he might as well quit robbing banks, he thought. All he had left from the Boise holdup was thirty-seven cents and a ticket to Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. Remembering the stage ticket, he could account for the position of his boots. The stagecoach had overturned, which meant he had paid good money for fare to nowhere, and if he didn’t make Shoshone Flats by six the bank would be closed. He reopened his eyes, suddenly alert.

Today was Saturday and if he didn’t get to the bank before closing time, he’d have no funds for Sunday. It was against his principles to rob banks after hours or after dark. He was a bank robber, not a night-crawling burglar, so it was imperative that he get to town in time to find and steal a fast horse for his getaway and rob the bank before nightfall. Still marveling at his clear head and unroiled stomach, he climbed through the window and looked over the wreckage.

One glance at the angle of the driver’s head told him the man’s neck was broken. One of the horses was dead, and the other, still in harness, had a broken foreleg. Loco slid down from the side of the stagecoach, walked over, pulled his pistol, and killed the lame horse in an act of mercy so conventional it was unaccompanied by compassion for the beast. Reloading and reholstering his pistol, he knelt beside the body of the driver and pulled the man’s wallet from his pocket. He riffled through the contents.

There was a paper dollar and a two-dollar meal ticket with eighty cents unpunched drawn on a Miss Stewart’s Restaurant in Shoshone Flats. The ticket was made out to Will Trotter by the Territorial Stage Lines. Loco kept the dollar and returned the meal ticket to the wallet when he noticed the width of the dead man’s belt. He unbuckled the belt and slid it out of the belt straps.

Apparently Will Trotter had not been a trusting person. Loco found nine silver dollars concealed in the belt. That sum, with an additional twenty-three cents he found in the driver’s jeans was the extent of his salvage. Loco was not disappointed. He had robbed banks for less money.

Standing, he looked up at the road and saw the two lead horses farther down munching on the roadside grass. He climbed the hill and walked down the road to take the reins of the first horse, a Percheron. It was no horse for a man of his calling, but it was as good as the Clydesdale farther down the road, good enough to carry him within stealing distance of a faster horse. He started to swing aboard the Percheron when, for the first time in his life, Johnny Loco reconsidered.

Here was an opportunity to become respectable. If he took Will Trotter’s body into Shoshone Hats, he would be regarded as a citizen doing his duty. He was twenty-eight, time for him to start thinking about making his old age a possibility. He couldn’t go on forever as an itinerant bank robber.

He held the idea at arm’s length, eyeing it distastefully. Respectability was for women and men with green eyeshades and bankers who put mortgages on the homes of widows and orphans. Admittedly he wasn’t called Johnny Loco without a reason, but he had not yet gone plumb loco.

Yet the idea had its good points. Neither of these heavy draft horses could get him close enough to town and leave him much time to spare for finding a faster horse, stealing it, and robbing the bank. If he rode in on an errand of mercy, bringing Will Trotter’s corpse, his behavior might lull the natural suspicion of the natives toward a stranger and give him more time to act unobserved. He could spend a leisurely half hour or so finding a fast horse, steal it, rob the bank, and pound leather to Green River where he would bushwhack Colonel Blicket and the sergeant.

Suddenly he realized he was planning ahead. Colonel Blicket had always been a great one for plans. Maybe the master’s lessons were finally getting through to the student, Loco thought, as he walked down the road and grasped the head harness of the Percheron.

The beast balked at a stranger’s touch, swerving its head away from the man. With a beautiful demonstration of brute power and fearlessness, in G-7’s opinion, the man jerked the horse’s head around, slapped its jaw with a resounding whack, and said curtly, “Move, you son of a bitch!”

In utter obeisance, with complete docility, the great beast moved to follow the man. Shades of the stalkthorns of Mirfak! But the man had commanded with the flat of his hand.

Back at the body, Loco, augmenting his plan to appear honest, put eleven cents back into the dead man’s trouser pockets and buckled the dead man’s money belt back on while G-7 made an instantaneous reevaluation of the host it had occupied. The brute beauty and valor here buckling contained too much energy to be controlled outright without a loss of fissioning power. Its host would have to be nudged or enticed toward the light, and at the moment its most likely lure seemed to be this mysterious Colonel Blicket whose insult had aroused in its host such implacable hatred. Hatred, G-7 realized, was a negative motivational force, but it could find no positive forces 11 in the brain of its host nearly so strong.

Very well, G-7 decided, let hatred be the spur to raise this ignoble spirit.

Unaware that his fate was being decided, Johnny Loco draped the one-hundred-and-seventy pound body over the Percheron with casual ease and said aloud to himself, “Yeah, I either got to learn to play poker or quit robbing banks, unless I can find some richer banks to rob.”

Again the man was unaware that the addition of the last phrase to his sentence had catapulted him to heights of intelligence he had never before achieved. Always in the past his thinking had been “either-or.” Now he had added an option, and he weighed the option. After he robbed the bank at Shoshone Flats and killed the colonel at Green River, he might head east and hold up the more prosperous banks back in the States.

The being inside was acutely aware that Ian McCloud—it rejected the alias as untruthful—was perverting its suggestion that he carry the body into town. The man did not regard his proposed actions as a step toward respectability but as a ruse for facilitating the theft of a horse. Still G-7 was not dismayed. Old habit patterns, it knew, often persisted, but it also knew that time, the implacable foe of large-molecule organisms, was on its side. Day and night the silent hammers of reformation would be pounding in this man’s brain.

Meanwhile G-7 had more pleasant observations to make, more pertinent data to absorb about this planet men called earth.

Golden light from a young sun fell lavishly on this side of the globe, warming the cheeks of the man and triggering universal photosynthesis in lush grass across the floor of a valley dotted with herds of cattle and spotted, here and there, with fenced fields of hay and corn. Northwestward the peaks of the mountains soared to snow-tipped summits. Forests of stately trees skirted the lower fringes of the peaks. It was a many-shaded world of blues, greens, whites, grays, varicolored flowers, and, toward the south, the silver sheen of the river seen through a lacework of pale green cottonwoods and willows. The pure air held enough hydrogen to fuel untold fusion furnaces for millennia, and once, when the man forded a creek and stopped to drink, G-7 found the water cool and pure in its native state.

The man, possessing limited but acute senses, was the only discord in this symphonic flow of free energy. Riding slouched on the broad back of the horse, he needed but to inhale and his nose registered and clarified the syrupy redolence of alfalfa, the lushness of grass, the pungency of pine resin, the musky maleness of corn pollen. His ears recorded the roadside scurryings of chipmunks, identified insect sounds, the thump of a falling pinecone in the woods to his left, and, far to southward, the plaintive lowing of a cow. Yet this rich panoply of sounds and smells was keyed on a strange alertness. McCloud was sniffing the air for human body odor, listening for the metallic click of a rifle’s bolt. Though seemingly indolent and relaxed, the man rode in wariness of his fellow human beings.

G-7 was no stranger to violence, but interspecies destructiveness ordinarily occurred from collisions on crowded planets. Here, where no other human being or human habitation was visible for miles, McCloud feared for his life, and he only feared for it because he wanted to live long enough to kill Colonel Blicket and his aide-de-camp.

This was a world of paradoxes mystifying even to a universal intelligence. A bank robber who risked his life for the possession of material trinkets lived to avenge an insult, a nonmaterial epithet. Obviously McCloud’s pride had been offended by the colonel’s abusive language, and pride was a cardinal sin. Very well, G-7 decided, it would use the man’s sin, tempt him with dishonest trifles to betray him into righteous consequences.

Three hours of sunlight were left—the bank would still be open—when Ian McCloud rode into the outskirts of Shoshone Flats with Will Trotter’s body draped over the trailing horse. He felt ill at east as he approached the two rows of sod shanties, log huts, and frame buildings strung along the wagon ruts of the main street. Leading a funeral cortège into a strange town was a job for an undertaker’s assistant; the production of corpses, not their processing, was his line of business.

Frame buildings grew more frequent as he approached the midsection of the town. Looking over the horses he saw tethered or before hitching racks, he could not see one more suited to running than to pulling a plow. Most of the beasts looked winded while standing still, those that were able to stand, and the Clydesdale he rode would have been even money against most of them in a race.

An old lady in a sunbonnet, holding the hand of a boy of ten or so, was the first citizen he saw. She stood at the frayed beginnings of a boardwalk, leaning over and peering at the body on the horse behind him as he rode up.

Politely tipping his hat, he asked, “Ma’m, who’s sheriff of this here town?”

“Sheriff Faust… Run ahead, Hickam, and wake the old gentleman up… Land sakes, young man, is that Will Trotter you got there?”

“Yes’m,” he answered, as the boy turned and ran down the sidewalk. “I reckon it was.”

“Lordy mercy,” she exclaimed, falling into stride with the Percheron, “this is going to break Trudy Spence’s heart. Him and her been engaged for three years. Poor Trudy! Widowed afore she’s wed… Dead Man’s Curve got him. Am I right, young man?”

“Yes’m. I reckon.”

“I knowed it. You can’t fool Betsy Troop about that road. Been traveling it for twenty years. Traveled it afore the Indians moved out and the Mormons moved in. Don’t know which of them two I’d rather have. Either one would outrun the other in a two-man race to the boondocks… Well, I’ll say this for Will Trotter, he looks natural, except his head’s kinda on backwards… You can’t fool me about Dead Man’s Curve, mister. Only time that curve’s safe for vehicles is when there’s forty two feet of snow on the road. People around here won’t do nothing about it either. Reckon they figure if they wait long enough, that kink’s going to grow out of the road.”

Betsy Troop’s monologue, begun for McCloud as a chatty conversation, swelled to a tirade directed against a growing audience as more wayside idlers fell into step with the ambling Percheron, commenting on its burden with low voices.

“Can’t expect them Mormons to do no road work, what with them planting all day and plowing all night…”

McCloud rode on, aloof above the tumult, as Betsy Troop, having dismissed the Mormons, turned her attention to “the lazy, no-count Gentiles” gathering alongside the Percheron. He directed the cortège toward the sheriff’s office, recognizable from the barred windows at the rear of the stone building, and pulled up before the front porch. A tall, gray-haired man emerged, tugging a suspender over a shoulder, his star pinned to the top half of a suit of gray flannel underwear. He had the dignity of age if not the authority in his manner as he walked down from the porch to look at the body.