Usually I tell them the expected tale of determination, industry, dedication—and keep the real reason to myself. When it’s time to retire from the business I’ll write the whole thing up in my memoirs, but just at the moment it could make me seem pretty foolish if people learned that I got started on the road to the top because somebody took a shot at my grandfather’s mechanical duck.
The marksman who did it was pretty famous, in fact, probably the most famous Gun ever to stray into our strictly non-Duello sector of the galaxy, but the story could make me look ridiculous just the same.
It began one week when I was feeling bad about the way the job was going and decided to have a few days away from it all down at my family’s farm. Up until that time I had been running what amounted to a one-man show, gathering news for TV and sound transmissions covering half the continent. “Half the continent’ sounds good, but on a planet like Isher II—which has been described as a spherical paddy field—it meant that I was reaching about as many people as did any fair-sized parish magazine back on Earth. Still, I enjoyed the work, was collecting the full Galactic Union of Journalists rate, and had every expectation of landing an even better job in an area covering the more populous exporting centres.
Until Afton Reynolds showed up, that is.
Reynolds had been brought in from a mining world thirty parsecs away to take over when the editor for my area, Daddy Timmins, decided to retire while he still had strength to flick a fishing rod. Timmins had been letting me run the office single-handed for a couple of years and with a bit more seniority I might have been offered his job. Afton Reynolds, however, was a pusher on his way up, and the first thing he began to push on Isher II was me. Within a month of his arrival I had covered ten thousand miles on dead-end assignments, burned out my eyes on “Vital research projects’, and was—I suspect—twice reported to head office for passive resistance. To cap everything, thanks to Reynolds’ direction of my work and blue pencilling of the shaky stories I did collect, I clocked up precisely twelve seconds air time, and even that was on Friendly Night Owl’s Wee Small Hours news roundup—sound only.
As I said, I decided to go back home for a week or two.
By pushing my skimmer hard I made the three-hundred-mile trip from Wadhurst to the homestead in a round hundred minutes. I cut lift and let the skimmer nestle down into mud near the houses, then I realised something was wrong. My grandfather, my father, my two brothers and three of their children were grouped in the patio, and it wasn’t a welcoming party because nobody even noticed my arrival. They seemed to be arguing.
I got out of the skimmer, switched on my weather screen to keep off the fine drizzle we usually have on Isher II and sloshed towards the houses. Finally I was seen by the children, greeted hastily all round, then given what I thought for one wild second to be the news story of the century.
“There’s been a shooting,” grandfather Vogt said angrily. “A murder! Somebody’ll pay for this!”
He was so worked up that I nearly did believe for a moment that somebody had thought out a way to beat the electro-neuro safety catch—the built-in electronic conscience which prevents any weapon on our non-Duello world being turned on a human being, except in self-defence. Not that it made much difference to anybody—most people on Isher II hadn’t even seen a gun since the old days when the planet was being opened up.
“Just a moment, Grandad. Slow down. Who got shot? Has anybody called for a doctor?”
The three children laughed uproariously at my questions, and old Vogt gave me a withering look before splashing away into the house. It was only then I noticed he was carrying something under his arm.
“It’s his duck,” brother Jeff explained as we followed the others. “The new tenant of the old Ericsson farm put a bullet through it when it was out for a test flight.”
“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.