Fat Bill scowled. “Last time, I got forty percent.”
“But that was peanuts,” said Pav. “And this is creds!” He capitalized the last word. But as Fat Bill hesitated, he swung his legs down from the desk and stood up. “Why am I wasting my time?” he asked, of no one in particular. “People have seen me play. I can find a backer somewhere else.”
“Hold it!” said Fat Bill as Pavanaz made to leave. “You’ll sign a contract, making me your manager on twenty percent?”
“Damn right!” Pavanaz nodded.
“So, I may be crazy but…let’s work it out,” said the other. When they’d finished doing that, then he began to talk in earnest….
“Gaddy was a ground staff mechanic in the Corps,” (said Fat Bill), “just a kid who patched up fighters when they got shot up. His girl and her folks lived here on Shankov’s—on the other side—in a little mountain township that got more than its fair share of sunlight by virtue of its elevation. It got a lot of exposure to the Khuum, too. The night Gaddy and his girl got married, in one of the cities under the cloud layer, the Khuum took out her village. For no good reason; it wasn’t tactical or in support or anything; just the Khuum being the Khuum. Her folks died. But…it was like they were Gaddy’s folks, too.
“After that Gaddy was changed. He became a Gunner—for the duration. He survived because there was a girl to come back to, and because there were Khuum to keep going after. He led a love-hate life, you know? Out scouting one time, he came across a gaggle of Khuum bandits attacking an alien ship. But I’m talking alien! He’d never seen anything like it before, it was that weird. And no one ever saw anything like it since. It must have been sort of just passing through this sector.
“That alien ship was in a bad way, crippled, its shields going down like dominoes. Gaddy didn’t know if it was friendly or what, but he knew how he felt about the Khuum. He went in, took the bandits by surprise and played all hell with them—which gave the alien ship time to get itself operational again and back in the action. Gaddy’d cut the Khuum pack down to just three when finally one of them got him and burned his fighter. He was cut up and burned, too, but he managed to eject. Spinning in space, he saw the alien ship open up with one godawful weapon that erased those three Khuum fighters like chalk off a blackboard! Then he passed out….
“When he came round he was inside the alien ship and they were working on him, putting him right. He saw the mess he was in—mainly his hands—and passed out again. But they fixed him up with those gloves of his, put him in a life-support pod and dropped him just inside the Corps radius. Our boys picked up the alien ship on their scanners, and when they went for a look-see found Gaddy.
He asked for out and the Corps let him go. Hell, he’d done his bit, and maybe he’d finally figured out just how lucky he’d been. The Khuum were retreating by then, and the sheer science that came out of Gaddy’s alien life-support pod put the finishing touches to it. A year later the war was over, and the Khuum had backed off wherever they’d come from.
“Gaddy came back to Shankov’s; eventually he and his woman had their baby son—Aces. But the girl hadn’t been the same since her folks got theirs. She died young and Gaddy was left on his own with the kid. He raised him, turned him loose when he was seventeen, then dropped out of sight. Sort of retired himself—from everything. That was two or three years ago.
“And that’s about as much as I know. I got it in bits and pieces here and there—with difficulty. See, people respect Gaddy; they let him alone. The way I see what happened here today, Aces was really kissed off and cajoled his father into taking you down a peg.”
Pavanaz nodded sourly. “Not hard to figure,” he said. And then he frowned. “So his hands were burned up, right? And the aliens gave him those gloves?”
“You got it. And he’s never been seen without ’em.”
“Aliens,” said Pav, still frowning, “with weapons and an advanced technology we can’t even guess at. They were passing through and got in trouble; Gaddy pulled their nuts out of the fire; he got burned doing it, so they squared it by…that’s it! They made sure he came out of it better than when he went in!”
“Sure,” Fat Bill shrugged, having figured it out for himself. “Naturally. He has hi-tec fingers.”
“He cheated me!” Pavanaz was furious.
“Hell, no,” said Fat Bill. “You ever done target shooting? You can’t disqualify a man just because he’s better equipped!”
“The way I see it he cheated,” Pav insisted. “Where does he live?”
“Now wait!” Fat Bill was alarmed. “Twenty percent of murder I can do without!”
“I don’t want his life,” Pavanaz snorted (though he really wouldn’t mind, if he could do it smart), “I want his skill, his edge. Shit, the war’s over! He doesn’t need it—but I do!”
“Let it be, kid,” said Fat Bill. “He’s outgunned you once. Gaddy’s no fool.”
“Does he live with Aces?”
Fat Bill shook his head. “Like I told you, they parted company when Aces got himself a job here in the spaceport. The kid lives right here, but Gaddy lives way out. On his own. He was a one-woman guy.”
“Where?” Pavanaz demanded.
And sighing, Fat Bill told him. Hell, it was Pav’s neck.
After the Khuum wars, the Corps had taken care of its men. It could afford to; not too many had come through it. Also, Gaddy must have picked up a disability pension. (The thought of that almost made Pavanaz scream!)
Property hadn’t been so expensive then; not on a swamp like Shankov’s, which made Gizzich IV seem positively dry! Gaddy had bought himself a house surrounded by waterways. Not for security (after the Khuum, what was there to feel insecure about?), just for peace of mind. He hadn’t wanted hassle, and the only people he’d needed were his people. After his wife died he’d lived with Aces, and now he was on his own.
Following Fat Bill’s directions, Pav had covered the eight hundred miles to Gaddy’s locality by jet-boat and steam-paddle, taking two days and a night to get there. Arriving in the local town on the evening of the second day, he’d hired a fan-driven swamp-skimmer (he was an off-worlder, here for the fishing). As darkness came down, he’d located Gaddy’s address. Then, putting out a dummy fishing line, he’d slept on board the skimmer for a few hours, coming awake at 2:00 a.m. in the morning. It was eerily quiet and all Gaddy’s lights were out.
There was a wooden bridge over the canal to the house, but Pav didn’t want to take the chance someone would see him crossing. So he wrapped the skimmer’s breakdown oars and paddled silently across, then moored his boat in the mangroves on the rim of Gaddy’s property. Pav was equipped for a break-in but it wasn’t necessary—the place was wide open.
In the entrance porch he took off his shoes, put on clean cloth shufflers, then crept into the main building. There were only a few internal doors, none locked; inside was as eerie and as quiet as out; security was literally nonexistent. The place was mainly a solarium (synthetic sunlight, which switched itself off nights), and a greenhouse where Gaddy gardened. Exotic plants crept all over the place, not just adding to but mainly being the décor. It was a big house and, Pav supposed, lonely.
He carried a life-seek whose winking red indicator led him to Gaddy’s bedroom, a huge, high-ceilinged, opaque glass-walled room with a big double bed in the middle; and Gaddy was in it, just his hair showing, asleep, dreaming…and moaning. Whatever he was dreaming, it wasn’t good stuff.
Gaddy’s clothes were all over a curving bamboo couch, and his gloves were lying on top of the other things. It was easy as that. Pavanaz took the gloves and tucked them in his shirt.