Andromeda Gun Page 11

  When the sitter responded with a slack-mouthed grin, Ian whipped a kick to the side of his head. The man toppled, his shoulder thudding against the ground. He bobbled back to a sitting position and bounded to his feet.

  Down the line, the splat and thump of the kick and the fall caught the attention of the remaining sitters who scrambled to their feet. Moving on to a facedown moaner, Ian brought the man to his feet with a kick in the ribs. All were standing now, except for three who were out cold.

  The curses, cuffs, and kicks made it plain to all who heard them that the mild-mannered deputy who had earned their contempt in the saloon was fast developing into an efficient lawman. When Ian dressed ranks, they responded with alacrity. He set the lantern on the boardwalk, grabbed the wandering cowboy’s leg, slapped on the last leg iron, threaded the chain through it, and snapped the padlock.

  After retrieving the lantern, Ian turned back to find the most ablebodied man was not necessarily the most able. The leg iron had reversed the walker’s circle and extended his radius. He was rolling up the line by pivoting the chain gang on the unconscious anchormen.

  Sprinting over, Ian reversed the man’s direction, let him straighten out the line, then slapped him hard across the cheek.

  The man stopped, shook his head, and said, “Huh,” in the manner of a man suddenly awakened.

  “What’s your name?” Ian barked.

  “Mickey… Mickey O’Shea.”

  Ian backhanded him on the opposite cheek and asked, “Do you know me?”

  “Sho,” the man said. “You’re Chief I.N. Black Cloud.”

  Ian slapped him again. “Think harder.”

  “Deputy Ian McCloud.”

  “You’ll do. Were you in the army?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Which one?”

  “The CSA.”

  “You’re my point. Hold this lantern as a guidon and move out to the jail after I’ve made a legal announcement.”

  Ian walked before the middle of the line, hands on hips, his tin star glinting in the lantern light.

  “Y’all are under arrest on four charges: disturbing the peace, shooting off firearms inside the town limits, racing horses on the town’s street during trading hours, and being too drunk to set on a horse. Your next of kin will be notified when your horses come home without you.

  “Now, listen, you mules. You front ones have got to drag the back ones to jail when I give the command, but don’t jerk too hard. Them convicts is public property.”

  He walked over and picked up the legs of the surplus drunk. Dragging the man travois fashion to the head of the line, he shouted, “Forward, march!”

  Enough ex-soldiers were among them to comply with the order and get the line moving, but it was a slow route step with the tail end dragging. Ian didn’t force the pace out of concern for the drunk he was dragging. The man’s head was bouncing against the boardwalk with enough force to disjoint his neck, and a dead man couldn’t pay a fine or help build a road.

  Ian dropped his burden off in the first cell and led the point to the rear. Peeling off prisoners as he rolled back the chain, Ian stacked the unconscious men in a pile in one cell, reasoning that they wouldn’t be uncomfortable. He might have a dead one or two, but he didn’t have time to take an inventory because he had to go back and collect evidence of the crimes. Anyway, the corpses would keep till morning.

  He walked back to the rope with a gunnysack for collecting firearms, smelling the weapons before he dropped them into the bag. Three had not been fired, possibly because the owners were too drunk to pull the triggers, and the unfired weapons presented him with a legal problem. Was an intent to disturb the peace as grave a crime as disturbing the peace?

  He solved the problem on the spot by firing the weapons before he tossed them into the gunnysack.

  He was rolling up the rope when he heard a low moaning farther down the street. Swinging his lantern, he walked over to find his eighteenth prisoner, an older man whose boot heel must have caught in a stirrup, dragging him a ways. The man’s weapon was still in its holster, which indicated the prisoner had not intended to break the law.

  But the man was old and gray, fit only to be a water boy, and he should have known better than to associate with criminals. Ian drew the man’s weapon, fired it, dropped the pistol into the bag, and dragged his eighteenth prisoner to the jail by his collar. Out of deference to the possible innocence of the oldster, Ian threw him on top of the pile in the first cell.

  When he returned to the pallet, it occurred to Ian that he had ordered only fourteen lunch boxes from Liza to be brought to the work site, tomorrow. He had counted on there being enough poker winners among the prisoners to collect a few fines for the road fund, and if nobody paid their fines four prisoners wouldn’t eat, unless he had some dead ones back there.

  Thought of the possible dead disturbed him. He had not planned so well, after all. No arrangements had been made wan Near-Sighted Charlie to rebate part of the funeral expenses to the road fund.

  Its faint luminescence hidden in the light of the moon, G-7 flitted along the magnetic fields of Earth toward the spaceship among the boulders atop the crag of Dead Man’s Curve. As it zoomed and swooped in easy gradients, it mulled over the report it would send to Galactic Central.

  Any objective analysis of the data it had acquired would point to its immediate withdrawal from the planet, but three factors weighed against objectivity: the potential of its host organism, once converted, to become a force for good; its failure, or more accurately, the failure of McCloud to explore the motivational power of biological attraction; and, third the vague evidence of a prior visitation which it dare not mention unless it was ready to welcome a committee of visiting luminaries.

  It wasn’t, primarily because of the second factor, biological attraction, which, nevertheless, would have to be touched on in the report, but in a manner commensurate with G-7’s missionary purposes on the planet.

  G-7 arrived at the cubelike boulder, entered the compression chamber, and moved into the control room as a cloud of condensed photons capable of operating the photoelectric communications scanner. Using the preliminary scanner to compose a rough draft, G-7 phrased the first paragraph onto the screen. Since the first paragraph was merely a situation report, it went directly to the point.

  G-7 to M-17 Central, Galactic Brotherhood. Primary organisms on planet hereafter called “Earth” are bipedal hydrocarbon compounds which concert electrochemical energy into mechanical force by hinged calcium compound levers. Primary communication method of earth beings is by controlled gaseous emissions. Secondary method is achieved through differing wave lengths of light, usually black on white. Other methods of communication are by impact, using whips, butt ends of quirts, toes of boots.

  So far, so good. G-7 encapsulated the situation report and scanned in the plans section with greater care. The final, encapsulated version read:

  Rudimentary brotherhood awareness of selected host is to be amplified by reinforcing the being’s binary reproductive programming in condensed but increasing increments.

  Translated from officialese, G-7 was announcing its intention to enhance the power of love in its host organism, a standard operating procedure for galactic scouts. Galactic Central would accept the statement without assuming any disturbance of the subject-object relationship missionary work demanded. Of course, no entity at GC had ever seen Earth women through the eyes of an Earth man. No being, there, could evaluate the lightness of Gabriella, the beckonings of Liza, or the regal slouch of the Shoshone Princess.

  For a moment, G-7’s fancy dallied over the image of the half-breed dance hall girl, considering an alteration of Ian’s world lines to include a visit upstairs at Bain’s place. Relative to the Shoshone Princess, a visit would matter little, probably not more than a dollar. Relative to G-7 it might cost a fissioned ion to swing its host into a love groove, particularly in a setting where Ian’s attentions were focused on his take from the poker table
s. Besides, Ian’s visit upstairs might endanger the employer—employee relationship Ian had established between himself and the saloon keeper.

  Wrenching itself away from earthly thoughts, G-7 concentrated on wording the delicate third paragraph of its progress report, the predictions section. Roughly, it scanned in the message it wished to convey:

  The intelligence of Earth’s inhabitants makes them adequate for conversion to Galactic Brotherhood, but their morality is doubtful.

  Although not yet worded in the language of diplomacy, this was the substance of the message G-7 wished to convey, but the pessimism was at odds with the esprit de corps of the Interplanetary Exploration Legion. Too defeatist.

  G-7 revised the prediction to read:

  Conversion of Earth beings held possible.

  G-7

  That should do it. Let GC draw its own conclusions.

  G-7 encapsulated the final draft, placed the three capsules into the transmission chamber, set the accelerated light-wave length, built up the booster, and pushed the transmit button that sent the micro-blip hurtling back to Central at a constant acceleration of three to the second power commencing at the speed of light.

  G-7 floated into the diffusion chamber, diffused, and moved once more into the moonlight, confident that its neutral prediction would be read as optimistic at Galactic Central. As through all previous eons, with one exception, a scout had landed and the situation was well in hand.

  But the one exception might well have occurred on this planet. Probably here G-3 had vanished. It must have been deetherealized through loss of entropy, because the alternative was theoretically impossible.

  The impossible alternative was that G-3 had betrayed a trust.

  8

  Court convened promptly at seven a.m. in the Sheriff’s Office, Town of Shoshone Flats, Territory of Wyoming, the Honorable Abraham I. Bernbaum presiding. Eighteen defendants were found guilty on two counts of disturbing the peace, firing weapons inside the town’s limits, and being too drunk to ride a horse. Evidence was submitted to the court by Deputy Sheriff Ian McCloud—eighteen pistols which had been fired and were identified as belonging to the defendants.

  Each defendant was given the choice of thirty days at hard labor or paying a fine of thirty dollars. Six men paid their fines and were released, twelve were incarcerated. A third charge, racing horses on a commercial street during trading hours, was dropped after the deputy consulted with the mayor, as an expression of magnanimity on the part of the town’s administration. Trial was witnessed by the town’s mayor and the daughter of the jail’s commissary stewardess.

  Monies collected were disbursed to the representative of the jail’s stewardess for food purchases, to the judge for court costs, to the town’s administration fund, and the town’s road fund. After the trial at 7:10 a.m., the prisoners were marched to Miss Stewart’s Restaurant for breakfast.

  Mayor Winchester joined Ian for a ceremonial breakfast paid for from the town’s administration fund. Winchester was effusive in his compliments, but he slowed down long enough to ask, “When will the road be finished, deputy?”

  “September 2.”

  When the prisoners were returned to their cells to be held until Ian procured tools and transportation for the work gang, Sheriff Faust was temporarily awakened by the clanging cell doors. “Where’d you get all them prisoners, deputy?”

  “Off a trotline.”

  “Keep up the good work, boy, and you’ll be high sheriff when I resign.”

  After Ian bought implements from the hardware store and rented two wagons and four mules from the livery stable, he had three dollars left to deposit in the road fund. He made a forty-eight-dollar deposit to his personal account and was complimented by Mr. Graves, the banker, for being the major depositor in the Shoshone Flats Territorial Bank.

  At a gravel pit, three miles out, the prisoners disembarked to load the wagons. Under the quiet urgings of the deputy, who personally discussed work problems with each individual, the wagons were loaded swiftly. Two abreast and in cadence, the prisoners were marched the remaining distance behind the loaded wagons with implements at “shoulder arms.” Work commenced one quarter-mile west of Dead Man’s Curve.

  Ian used what was left of the morning to whip his crew into shape. Since all were ill with hangovers, there was a tendency among the crew members to slack off as the morning wore on, but Ian counteracted the tendency with an inspirational example.

  Selecting a lanky, rawboned man who was not equaling the tempo of a man ahead of him in shoveling dirt from the drainage ditch, Ian dismounted from Midnight and said, “Hey you, over here.”

  When the man walked over to stand slackly before him, Ian asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Hank Sheldon.”

  “It appears to me, Hank, you’re a little slow this morning. Ain’t you feeling good?”

  “No, captain, I truly ain’t. My stomach’s still riled from all the rotgut I drunk last night, and I got a splitting headache.”

  Ian stepped forward and backhanded the loaded end of the quirt into the man’s stomach. Hank Sheldon jackknifed forward, coughing and gasping in pain. Ian waited until the gasping slowed and then tilted the man’s chin up so he could look into the prisoner’s eyes. “That help your stomach any, Hank?”

  “Yes, sir. It sure did. Settled it right now.”

  “How about that head of yours?” Ian asked. “It feel all right?”

  “Clear as a bell, captain. Clear as a bell.”

  “Good! Now get back in the ditch and use that shovel like you meant it.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “We’ve got twenty-eight days to build this road to Shoshone Flats. Finish it on time, and I’ll give every man of you two days off for good behavior. But if any man’s caught soldiering on the job, I got the cure for what ails him.”

  Hank Sheldon stepped up his cadence to match the increased tempo of the man ahead of him. As the work moved briskly apace, Ian rode forward to survey the curve he had vowed to conquer. An outcropping of granite twenty feet high jutted for one hundred yards from the base of the hill toward the river where the channel narrowed into the defile from which Dead Man’s Curve had been cut. Forty yards back from the lip of the cut there was a slight saddleback before the hill rose to its crest.

  Ian had never thought of granite as stuff to be cut through. Now reality faced him, and he knew he could spend six months whittling away at the spur with picks and shovels. He could not build the road over it, for the face of the hill was too sheer, but to tunnel under it would be even more of a task.

  He turned back to the crew. It was against his principles to seek advice, but he swallowed his pride and yelled, “Any of you galoots ever done any mining?”

  “Mickey O’Shea, back on the grader,” someone answered.

  Ian remembered the name and the man. He rode back to the place where mules were pulling a heavy log back and forth across the road ahead of the crew spreading gravel, and he called to the mule driver riding the log, “Hey you, come here.”

  The man leaped from the log, reached down, and picked up a large, hand-sized rock.

  “If you want me, deputy, you’re coming after me. I ain’t taking the butt end of the quirt from you or nobody else.”

  Ian admired the man’s spirit.

  “I ain’t after you. I’m after your know-how. They tell me you’re a miner.”

  “Have been, along with a couple dozen other trades.”

  “Put down your rock, O’Shea, and climb this hill with me. I got to order some blasting power for cutting the edge off this hill, and I don’t know how much.”

  Mickey O’Shea followed the horse at a wary distance and looked up at the ledge. “I’m a miner, not a road builder,” he said, finally, “but if you’re willing to bank a little curve through the saddleback, which looks like a fault from here, I could blow a gulch through it with maybe a ton of that new-fangled stuff they call dynamite.”

  “Where’d you get a ton of dy
namite?”

  “Give me a night off, with four fast horses and a heavy buckboard, then don’t ask me no questions, and I can requisition it from the explosive shack at Old Hickory Mine.”

  “What’ll it cost?”

  “Nothing. That’s why I don’t want you asking me no questions.”

  “You got a wife or sweetheart here in this valley?”

  “I got both.”

  “Then you’ll get your night off. But let’s mosey up the hill to figure the cutback line.”

  Atop the ledge to be blasted, almost on its lip and as yet not consciously noticed by human eyes, stood a boulder shaped as a cube three feet in all dimensions. Preset for a planetary blastoff, it was G-7’s spaceship, and G-7 was not ready to depart a planet where there was very much work left to be done. Tomorrow’s dynamiting would bury the craft under tons of debris.

  Glad to be released from heavy labor, O’Shea was happy to climb the hill. As they neared the crest, O’Shea spotted the strangely shaped boulder and brought it to Ian’s conscious attention.

  “Look at that rock, captain. It’s an artifact, or I’ll eat my boots.”

  “What’s an artifact?”

  “Something made by hand.”

  The two climbed to the boulder.

  “I’d say it was the cornerstone of some Aztec building,” O’Shea commented, “except the Aztecs didn’t get this far north.”

  Ian thought a moment.

  “The schoolmarm wants a new stone building down near the stake boundary. This would make a cornerstone.”

  “I could get a crowbar and lever it over the ledge,” O’Shea suggested. “It’ll fall to the road, and we can haul it to the building site.”

  “You do that, O’Shea,” Ian said with surprising amiability, “and you’re my foreman.”

  Blasting operations the following day were so successful that Ian christened the cut “O’Shea’s Gap,” and had the name entered on the town’s records.

  Within the next week the road fund built so fast from the poker proceeds that Ian was able to hire the town’s tailor to make blue denim uniforms for the prisoners at such a reasonable price that Ian was able to add almost a hundred dollars to Bernbaum’s bill and still save the town money. Now he was by all odds the bank’s prime depositor. When Banker Graves passed him on the sidewalk in the company of Bain and the mayor, the banker’s greeting was, “Good morning, Deputy McCloud, Mr. Bain, Mayor Winchester.”