The other gun also had disappeared. Gray had lost his hold upon it at the impact of Benton’s charge and it lay somewhere beneath the battered, tangled bush.
The knee came up again and plunged into his stomach with a vicious force. Retching, Benton slid forward, rolled free of the bush, crawled on hands and knees. The hill and moon were swinging in gigantic circles before his eyes and there was a giant hand inside of him, tearing at his vitals.
Off to one side a tattered form struggled up into the moonlight, took a slow step forward. Benton wabbled to his feet and stood waiting, watching Gray advance.
The man came on slow and stolid, like a killer sure of the kill but careful to make no mistakes.
Benton sucked in careful breaths of air, felt the pain evaporating from his body, sensed that he had legs again.
Six feet away Gray sprang swiftly, right fist flailing out, left fist cocked. Benton ducked, countered with his right, felt the fist sink into the banker’s belly. Gray grunted and let loose his left and it raked across Benton’s ribs with a searing impact.
Benton stepped back, trip-hammered Gray’s chin with a right and left, took a blow along the jaw that tilted his head with a vicious jolt.
Gray was coming in, coming fast, fists working like pistons. Benton took one quick backward step to gain some room to swing, brought his right fist sizzling from his boot tops. It smacked with a terrific impact full in the banker’s face, jarred Benton’s arm back to the elbow. In front of Benton, Gray was folding up, fists still pumping feebly, feet still moving forward, but folding at the knees.
Strength went out of the man and he slumped into a pile that moaned and clawed to regain its feet.
Benton stepped away, stood waiting.
Painfully, Gray made it to his feet, stood staring at Benton. His clothes were ripped and torn and a dark stream of blood bubbled from his nose and ran black across his mouth and chin.
“Well?” asked Benton.
Gray lifted a hand to wipe away the blood. “I’ve had enough,” he said.
“Talk then,” said Benton. “Talk straight and fast.”
Gray mumbled at him. “What you want to know?”
“About the ranches. It was a put-up game?”
Gray shook his head. “All legal,” he protested. “Everything was…”
Benton strode toward him and the man moaned in fright, putting up his hands to shield his face.
“All right, then,” said Benton. “Spit it out.”
“It was the Watsons that thought it up,” Gray told him. He stopped to spit the blood out of his mouth and then went on. “They knew about the market up north and they wanted land and cattle.”
“So you fixed it up to go broke,” said Benton.
Gray nodded. “The bank really didn’t go broke, you see. We just doctored up the books, so there’d be some excuse to foreclose on our loans.”
“Then what?”
“That’s all,” said Gray. “I foreclosed and the Anchor brand took over. Paid the bank the money and took the land.”
“And you’ll testify in court?”
Gray hesitated. Benton reached for him and he backed away. He wiped his mouth again. “I’ll testify,” he said.
Suddenly Gray straightened to attention, head cocked to one side, like a dog that has suddenly been snapped from sleep by an unfamiliar sound.
Then Benton heard it, too. The click and rattle of horses’ hoofs, somewhere across the ridge.
Gray whirled about, staggered up the slope.
“Help,” he yelled. “Help!”
Benton leaped after him, swift rage brimming in his brain.
“Help!” yelled Gray.
Benton reached him, grasped his shoulder, hauled him around. The man’s mouth was opening again, but Benton smashed it shut, smashed it with a blow that cracked like a pistol shot. Gray sagged so suddenly that his falling body ripped loose the hold Benton’s hand had upon his coat.
This time he did not moan or stir. He lay huddled on the ground, a limp pile of clothing that fluttered in the wind.
The hoofs across the ridge were speeding up and heading for the top. Frantically, Benton explored the ground for a gun. Three guns, he thought, and not a one in sight.
For a single instant he stood in indecision and that instant was too long.
Mounted men plunged over the ridge top, black silhouettes against the moon and were plunging down the slope. Dust smoked in silver puffs around the horses’ jolting hoofs and the men rode silently.
Benton ducked swiftly, started to run, but those on the ridge top saw him, wheeled their mounts, tore down upon him.
Faced about, he waited…and knew that final hope was gone. Gray had yelled when he heard the hoofs, but he could not have known that the riders were from the Anchor ranch. He had only taken a chance, gambling on the fact that they may have been.
And they were.
Four men, who wheeled their horses in a rank in front of Benton, reined them to a sliding stop, sat looking at him, like gaunt, black vultures perching on a tree.
Benton, standing motionless, ticked them off in his brain. Vest, the foreman of the Anchor spread, Indian Joe, Snake McAfee and old Dan Watson himself.
Watson chuckled in his beard, amused.
“No guns,” he said. “Can you imagine that. The great Ned Benton caught without no guns.”
“I shoot him now?” asked Indian Joe and lifted up his gun.
Watson grunted. “Might as well,” he said.
Indian Joe leveled the gun with a grossly exaggerated gesture of careful aiming.
“I nick him up a bit,” said Joe.
“None of that,” snapped Watson, peevishly. “When you fire, give it to him straight between the eyes.”
“No fun that way,” complained Indian Joe.
Watson spoke to Benton. “You got anything to say?”
Benton shook his head.
If he turned and ran, they’d stop him with a storm of lead before he’d gone a dozen feet.
On the hillside above a rock clicked and Vest stiffened in his saddle.
“What was that?” he asked.
Snake laughed at him. “Nothing, Vest. You’re just spooky. That’s all. Shooting at them shadows back there.”
Slowly, deliberately Indian Joe raised his gun. Benton stared straight into the ugly bore.
The gun flashed an angry puff of red into his eyes and the wind of the screaming bullet stirred the hair upon his head.
“Missed, by Lord!” yelped Indian Joe in mock chagrin.
Watson yelled angrily at him. “I told you none of that!”
Indian Joe was the picture of contriteness. “I do better next time.”
He leveled the gun again and Snake growled at him. “You take too damn long.”
“Got to hit him this time,” said Indian Joe, “or boss get awful mad. Right between the eyes, he said. Right between…”
Up the hill a rifle snarled and Indian Joe stiffened in his saddle, stiffened so that he was standing in the stirrups with his body tense and rigid.
Vest yelled in sudden fright and Indian Joe’s horse was pitching, hurling the rider from his back, a rider that was a tumbling empty sack instead of a rigid body.
With a curse, Snake swung his horse around, reaching for his gun. The hilltop rifle spoke again and Snake was huddled in his saddle, clawing at his throat and screaming, screaming with a whistling, gurgling sound. Blackness gushed from his throat onto his clawing hands and he slumped out of the saddle as the horse wheeled suddenly and plunged toward the canyon mouth.
Benton dived for the shining gun that fell from Snake’s hand, heard the hammer of the rifle talking on the hill. A horse screamed in agony and far off down the slope he heard the hurried drum of hoofs.
Scooping the weapon up, Benton
whirled around. A sixgun roared and he felt the slap of the bullet as it sang across his ribs.
In the moonlight Dan Watson was walking toward him, walking slowly and deliberately, gun leveled at his hip. Behind him lay the horse that he had been riding, downed by the rifle on the hill.
Watson’s hat had fallen off and the moon gleamed on his beard. He walked like an angry bear, with broad shoulders hunched and bowed legs waddling.
Benton snapped Snake’s gun up, half fumbled with the unfamiliar grip. A heavy gun, he thought, a heavier gun than I have ever used. Too heavy, with a drag that pulls the muzzle down.
Watson fired again and something tugged at Benton’s ear, a thing that hummed and made a breeze against his cheek.
By main strength, Benton forced Snake’s gun muzzle up, pulled the trigger. The big gun jolted in his hand…jolted again.
Out in front of him, Watson stopped walking, stood for a moment as if surprised.
Then his hand opened and the gun fell out and Watson pitched forward on his face.
From up the hill came a crash of bushes, a cascade of chattering rocks that almost drowned out the beat of plunging hoofs.
Benton swung around, gun half raised. Two riders were tearing down upon him.
One of them waved a rifle at him and screeched in a banshee voice.
“How many did we get?”
“Jingo!” yelled Benton. “Jingo, you old…”
Then he saw the second rider and his words dried up.
Stones rattled about his boots as Ellen Madox reined in her horse less than six feet from him.
Jingo stared at the three bodies on the hillside.
“I guess that finishes it,” he said.
“There were four of them,” said Benton. “Vest must have got away.”
“The hell he did,” snapped Jingo. “Who’s that jigger over there?”
He pointed and Benton laughed…a laugh of pure nervousness.
“That’s Gray,” he said. “I got him and he coughed up everything, He’ll testify in court.”
“Dead men,” said Jingo, sharply, “ain’t worth a damn in court.”
“He isn’t dead,” protested Benton. “Just colder than a herring.”
“Young Watson should be around somewhere,” said Jingo. “What say we hunt him up?”
Benton shook his head. “Bill Watson is riding and he won’t be coming back.”
Jingo squinted at him. “Gal riding with him?”
“I suppose she is,” said Benton.
“Did a downright handsome job on them cows,” said Jingo. “Take a good six weeks to get them all together.”
“You had good help,” said Benton, looking at Ellen Madox. She no longer wore the dress that she had in town, but Levis and a flat felt hat that must have been her brother’s, for it was too big for her.
Jingo snorted. “She wasn’t supposed to come. Sneaked out after the rest had gone and joined up with us.”
He spat disgustedly. “Her pa was madder than a hornet when he found out about her being with us. Told me off to take her home.”
He spat again. “Always something,” he said, “to spoil a man’s good time.”
Benton grinned. “I’ll take her off your hands, Jingo. You take care of Gray over there and I’ll be plumb proud to see Ellen home.”
Condition of Employment
Originally published in Galaxy Magazine in April 1960, “Condition of Employment” was actually sold to Horace Gold at the end of 1958. It echoes, in a way, the theme of “Huddling Place,” a noted story Cliff had written more than a decade earlier about the effect of psychological illness on a space traveler.
—dww
He had been dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight shut in a desperate effort not to lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the dream. He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as a lost and far-off thing and place, but it was not there as it had been in the dream.
But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew what they’d open on, and he shrank from the drabness and the coldness of the room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the cold, but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not look at it, he need not accept this harsh reality, although he felt himself on the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind.
At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin and fragile to ward off the moment of reality, and he let his eyes come open.
It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh, and there was the maddening alienness waiting for him, crouching in the corner. He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself to arise and face it for another day.
The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling and dark stains ran down it from the times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that had been caged in the room too long.
Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when he could have seen it through this or any ceiling. For the sky had belonged to him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he’d lost them. They were his no longer.
A few marks in a book, he thought, an entry in the record. That was all that was needed to smash a man’s career, to crush his hope forever and to keep him trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own.
He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, hunting for the trousers he’d left on the floor. He found and pulled them on and scuffed into his shoes and stood up in the room.
The room was small and mean—and cheap. There would come a day when he could not afford a room even as cheap as this. His cash was running out, and when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job. Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had shied away from it. For settling down to work would be an admission that he was defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again.
He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just get back to Mars and no one could ever get him off it. He’d go back to the ranch and stay there as his father had wanted him to do. He’d marry Ellen and settle down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System.
Glamor, he thought—it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were young and starry-eyed. The glamor of the far place, of the wilderness of space, of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness—the glamor of the engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the loneliness of the emptiness, and the few cubic feet of courage and defiance that thumbed its nose at that emptiness.
But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness and awful sickness, the terrible fear that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the ping against the metal hide, for any one of the thousand things that could happen out in space.
He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall and down the rickety stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside.
And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag at, to steel oneself against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was green and all the plants and every single tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a hidden life.
The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping beat—these were things of Earth that it was
hard to bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride along with—but the green was always there.
He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package and in it one crumpled cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at the gate, trying to make up his mind.
But it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was nothing else to do. He’d done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he’d do it again today and tomorrow and tomorrow, until his cash ran out.
And after that, he wondered, what?
Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could buy passage back to Mars—for they’d surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn’t let him run them. But, he told himself, he’d figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and he had no twenty years.
He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through the cigarette, he could smell the hated green.
Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a moment looking at it before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast.
There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren’t any, some days three or four. But there was a ship today and it might be the one.
One day, he told himself, he’d surely find the ship out there that would take him home—a ship with a captain so desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book.
But even as he thought it, he knew it for a lie—a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify his coming here each day to check at the hiring hall, to lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his courage up. A lie that made it even barely possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of Earth.
He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool.
The waitress came to take his order. “Cakes again?” she asked.
He nodded. Pancakes were cheap and filling and he had to make his money last.
“You’ll find a ship today,” said the waitress. “I have a feeling you will.”