“If it’s crazy,” he said coldly, ‘why is the Isher II News Service paying fifty thousand monits just to have a camera there?”
I gaped at him. “Now I know you’re crazy! Why I wouldn’t offer you ten cents for the whole galactic rights!”
“Yeah,” Cordner sneered. “Well, Reynolds signed the contract an hour ago. Herb has the cheque in his pocket right now.”
“Don’t be so….” Suddenly I felt weak. “Who signed the contract?”
“Your boss, of course—Afton Reynolds. Say, he didn’t put you in the picture very well, did he?” Cordner looked at me, obviously with a dawning suspicion that I was some kind of incompetent office boy who had wandered in on big things by mistake.
“You mean Reynolds is here … on your farm … now?”
“Been down here since early this morning,” Cordner affirmed. “It was pretty smart of him to find out we were here. At first we didn’t want any publicity—what with things being a bit irregular and all—but fifty thousand monits! That’s as much as we’d get in the …”
I stopped listening to Cordner as it dawned on me what had gone wrong with my once-in-a-lifetime scoop. When I made my late night call to the office reference library I should have remembered that Sam Griggs owed twice as much money to Reynolds as he did to me. And the line about needing information to settle a bet had hardly been original—with my experience I should have done better than that.
I became aware of Cordner’s voice again. “Here they are now,” he was saying. “We’ll see who’s crazy, huh!”
Afton Reynolds and Herb Talmus looked alike. Two small, neat, flashily-dressed men who seemed completely out of place on Isher’s honest brown mud. Their smiles were alike too, like those of cats who had not only licked the cream but found a few drowned mice in it.
When the four of us came together beside a clump of cloud-truncated trees Reynolds nodded to Cordner and, still grinning affably, pulled me to one side. “Hello, Jackie boy,” he said.
“I’ll kill Griggs for this,” I replied conversationally, smiling and keeping my voice low.
Reynolds didn’t even try to cover up for his helper. “Sam has the makings of a good newshound, Jackie boy. Besides, you should be glad of an older and wiser head on a thing this size.”
“How would you like your older and wiser head beat into an older and wiser pulp?”
Reynolds stopped smiling. “I’m not going to argue with you now, Tilton. I suggest you get on back to your …’
“I suggest you try to get that cheque back before it’s too late, Reynolds. Otherwise, you’ll be out of a job. The agency can’t afford to lose that sort of money through your stupidity.”
“That does it,” Reynolds snapped, abandoning the attempt to convince the others we were having a friendly boss-to-employee chat, ‘you, my friend, are fired.”
“If I were your friend,” I said with as much dignity as I could raise, “I’d deserve to be fired.” I went back home as fast as the skimmer would carry me and sent a lengthy cable to the managing editor at the world office in Carrsville. After a light lunch I sat around for a while but early in the afternoon I was skimming back to Cordner’s farm—I just had to see the gunfight on which Reynolds had spent a whole year’s story-buying funds.
Luther Hardin didn’t look much like the popular image of a fast gun. He was small and pudgy, with a pale slab-cheeked face and tiny twitching mouth. Perhaps that was his trouble, I thought, trying to find a comfortable position behind the tree where I was hiding. If Hardin had been big, handsome and tough-looking he might have been content to fight under the auspices of a team of medics.
He was completely alone at one end of the marked-off arena, while Cordner, Talmus and Reynolds formed a little group at the other. Three cameras were set up and I noticed that Reynolds was operating them himself—there might not have been the time to get a proper camera team down, but I suspected that Reynolds intended to walk into head office having wrapped up the story of the century single-handed. Also, if Cordner was planning deliberately to slow his draw as a safeguard the cameras would need careful positioning to disguise the fact.
At last Talmus and Reynolds moved off to one side and I knew the show was about to start. A few seconds later Hardin and Clint Cordner began the ritual advance down the centre of the long narrow rectangle. It would have looked better in the dust under a scorching noonday sun, but squelching muck and a fine persistent drizzle were the best that Isher II was prepared to offer—I never liked our climate more than at that moment.
Both men moved very slowly, Hardin walking quite upright, turned sideways so that the toe of his right boot never passed the heel of his left; Cordner walking square-on, but crouched forward hungrily.
My eyes began to smart and I wanted desperately to knuckle them but was afraid to try it in case of missing everything. Suddenly—no, suddenly isn’t the word for Hardin’s draw—the gun was just there in his hand, as though he had been holding it all along and I hadn’t noticed. Cordner must have been slower, but as far as I was concerned he performed his feat of “B simultaneously with Hardin.
The guns went phut!
Showers of purple sparks burst from Hardin’s and Cordner’s right hands and the guns dropped hissing into the mud. Both men danced around clumsily, nursing their arms. Hardin made little whimpering sounds like a sick pup.
When I reached the group I saw that their burns were painful-looking but not too severe. “Are your medics back at the farmhouse?”
Cordner was too dazed to answer me, but Talmus nodded as he stared at the burns in horror.
“You’d better get back there fast, Clint,” I said gently. “And take Hardin with you. It looks to me as though you’re both out of the gunfighting business for some time.” Cordner nodded humbly and Hardin’s face went whiter than ever, but neither of them moved. I think they felt worse than if they’d been shot.
Afton Reynolds looked ill. “What happened? I … I don’t get it. Both those guns were all right half an hour ago. We tried them out.”
“That’s right,” Talmus chimed in angrily. “What made them burn up? Is this some kind of trick?”
“Your crazy plan made them burn,” I told Talmus. “There are two separate electronic elements in the electro-neuro safety catch—a sensing network which picks up and amplifies the currents in a man’s brain, and a computer which interprets the impulses and decides whether any particular situation justifies jamming the trigger action. I tried to explain this to my ex-boss but he fired me before he would listen.”
“I still don’t see it,” Talmus persisted. “Hardin had his gun out first and was aiming it at Clint. It was a clear case of self-defence as far as Clint was concerned.”
“No. Clint knew he had the slower draw and therefore Hardin’s gun wouldn’t fire at him.”
“But what happened then? If Clint had the only gun which worked Hardin would have been defending himself even though he was faster in getting his out.”
“Ah!” I said happily. ‘But we’ve just shown that Clint’s gun wouldn’t work, even though he was slower, so Hardin couldn’t have been acting in self-defence either.”
Talmus pressed his hands to his temples. “But that means …”
“It means you can think around in circles for ever and you won’t get any nearer a solution. That’s what happens to the computers. It burns them out.”
Talmus wasn’t very bright, but he made a quicker recovery than the others. He shrugged. “I guess that’s it then. When the story gets out both of these boys will probably be laughed out of The Game, but Clint and I have had a pretty good run. The fifty thousand we collected on this shambles will be a big help, of course.” He looked at Reynolds significantly.