One of his old mentors had said more than once that his intuition was a plus for programming: that it could short-circuit hours of scut work with one sudden realization. This time, though, it just wasn’t coming.
Ahead was the pond. He looked at the water. The breeze pushed ripples across it. A pair of white ducks swam sedately along. He noted the details for future VR work, and looked for a likely place to park the pram.
“Wahhhhhhhhh!”
At Mark’s sudden wail, Jay went tense.
“What is it, pumpkin? What’s the matter?”
He leaned down and sniffed. It didn’t smell like a full diaper.
He quickly ran through the list. Hungry? Didn’t sound like a hungry cry. He reached in the little incubator bag anyway and produced the bottle, warmed to just the right temperature.
Nope. He didn’t want that.
The crying went on. Jay began to feel an edge of panic.
Binky, binky, fallback plan.
He lowered the gemlike plastic pacifier to his son’s mouth, which popped open and latched right on.
The crying stopped immediately.
Whew.
He pictured what he might have done if the binky hadn’t worked: running full-tilt across the park, heading home to get Saji.
Glad it didn’t come to that.
He looked down and saw that Mark had spit out the binky. His little arms flailed around for it in frustration. Jay could see that it had fallen just to the right of the boy’s head, and reached down to get it. Mark’s hands twitched, trying to find his lost comforter. The boy had such a look of irritation that Jay found himself thinking about his own problems.
Yeah, he thought, all I need is a little help from someone else, get them to reach down and hand me the solution.
And then the realization clicked, the situation spun around, and he saw how he might beat the locked-room mystery.
Yes!
Jay smiled at his son again, and stroked his head. Not bad — take the baby to the park, and cut the Gordian knot at the same time.
Mark’s eyes started to close. Get a binky, go to sleep. Must be nice…
Jay grinned.
Smokin’ Jay Gridley was about to ride again.
He turned the pram around and headed home. Saji would be done teaching her lesson by now, the boy would nap for at least an hour, and Jay could get on-line and run with his new idea.
10
Instinct was like inspiration. Neither were things they taught in computer school, though a few of Jay’s teachers had spoken about one or the other. Nor were they things you should depend upon with any regularity; then again, they weren’t things you should ignore when they tweaked you, either.
Jay felt that tweak again now — a sixth sense of somehow knowing he was close. It was different from wishful thinking — he’d experienced that often enough to recognize the feeling.
The scenario wasn’t a complicated one. It was an old standby he’d built years ago, a town in the Old West, with cowboys and shopkeepers and schoolmarms, and that atmospheric High Noon twang underlying it. He had changed names and places and upgraded the sensoria, and it was one of his favorites.
Jay strode along the boardwalk, tipping his hat to the ladies he passed, inhaling the odors of dust and horse dung. Tumbleweeds had gathered in the alleyways, and the sun-bleached storefronts and graying wood buildings baked in dryness.
Ahead, at the entrance to the town saloon, the Hickory Branch, a figure suddenly moved from the boardwalk and into the place.
Jay wasn’t sure who he was hunting, but he knew, he knew that this was his quarry. His realization at the park with his baby son had pointed him in this direction, and it felt right.
He hurried toward the saloon. There were two ways into the Hickory Branch — the front door, which, unlike so many movies, wasn’t a pair of useless swinging doors that did nothing to keep out the heat, dust, and flies, but a wooden-framed etched-glass panel that closed just like any other door. There was also a back door, plain old wood, and generally kept locked save for when trash — of one sort or another — needed to be hauled out.
Jay left the walk at the gun shop, went down the alley to the back, and moved two buildings down to the Branch.
He tested the saloon’s back door. It was locked. Good.
Jay circled back to the street, passed the hitching post, which was empty — smart men didn’t leave their horses tied up there during the heat of the day, even, though there was a trough with water where the animals could reach it. If you lived in town, you walked to the saloon; if you came from elsewhere, you paid the livery stable boy a nickel to put your horse in the shade, and make sure he had food and water.
Jay opened the door and stepped inside.
It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, smoky, and not much cooler than outside. The beer was warm, too, but if you drank enough of it, you didn’t mind the heat, and these frontier towns were full of what would later be called “alcoholics”—men and women both.
The piano player didn’t pause, but kept on tinkling away at the off-key instrument, playing some kind of New York show tune from the late 1870s.
Jay didn’t look particularly threatening. He wore a shopkeeper’s duds — boiled shirt and starched collar over a pair of gray pinstriped trousers and low-heeled English-style riding books. His coat — even in the heat, men often wore coats when they went out — was a cutaway frocklike thing of gray wool. His hat was closer to a derby style than a cowboy ten-gallon.
He didn’t want to look threatening, not like some pistolero with low-slung strapped-down Peacemakers. More like a mild-mannered shopkeeper.
He had his gun, of course. The coat’s right-hand low pocket was heavy canvas stiffened with leather, and in it was a chrome-plated 1877 Colt.38 “Lightning,” with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. The revolver looked like the Peacemaker, sort of, though the butt was rounded. It was a somewhat delicate machine compared to some weapons, but it had the advantage of being double-action, which meant that you didn’t have to manually cock the hammer for each shot. You could just point it and pull the trigger repeatedly until you ran out of ammunition. The hammer spur had been removed, so as not to catch on the pocket during the draw.
Billy the Kid had owned a similar gun. Pat Garrett had carried a larger model, the “Thunderer,” in.41 caliber. And John Wesley Hardin, one of the meanest of the gunslingers, had gotten one just like Jay’s as a gift from his brother-in-law, Jim Miller.
Definitely not a gun for shooting at targets twenty-five meters away. It was for taking out a bad guy ten or fifteen feet away. The short barrel made it easier to get out and working.
Jay moved to the bar, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t feel, while searching the faces for his quarry. The person he’d glimpsed out front had been a man, he was pretty sure — or a woman dressed like a man. That meant he could discount the three trulls in low-cut dresses who worked the crowd, and the woman playing cards in the side room with four men. He could probably eliminate those men, too, since the one he was after wouldn’t have had time to break into an ongoing game — there was usually a waiting list for poker on a Saturday.
Jay grinned. His scenarios were a mix of fantasy and genuine history, but when he put real stuff in, he usually had it from two or three sources.
“What’ll you have, friend?” the bartender said.