“I wouldn’t do anything foolish!” said Old Keno flatly.
The man wore a weapon, low and strapped down. “We’re not bein’ took. I reckon if you’re a condemned enough fool to come after us all by yourself—”
The leader’s hand, silhouetted in the firelight, flashed too fast to be followed.
There was a blend of roars, four shots! And then it was done.
Moffat had seen something he was never likely to forget. All three men had been on their feet. Old Keno’s hands had been entirely free from his guns. The leader had drawn first and the other two had started to fire.
But Old Keno’s left hand had stabbed across his body and his right had gone straight down and his three shots were like one blow. The leader’s bullet went whining off on some lonesome errand amongst the rocks. Three men were dying there; three men had been shot before the leader had squeezed trigger.
And Constable Moffat’s frozen, cut and blistered finger had tried to close to back up the play and Constable Moffat had not been able to fire! He stayed where he was, semi-paralyzed with the shock of what he had seen—three men shot in something like an eighth of a second.
The leader went down. Another man dropped into the fire. The third stood where he was, propped against a rock, eyes wide open and the firelight shining in them—stone dead.
Moffat looked at his hand. He had not even been able to squeeze trigger. He, champion shot of the school, had not even been able to fire at his first live target when his companion was in danger!
On the verge of tears, Moffat came up from cover and walked toward the dying blaze. Old Keno was bending to retrieve their loot.
Moffat stepped into the ring of light. And then, of a sudden, a strange sensation came to him. It was like a yell inside his head. It was like an automatic switch being thrown. He knew he was in danger!
With the speed of a stabbed cat, young Moffat dropped to a knee, spinning on it toward the spacecan, drawing a rifle bead as he turned. He had not heard anything. But there stood a fat Asiatic in the passageway port, rifle leveled at Old Keno, about to shoot. He never got a chance.
Young Moffat fired from the hip and the bullet caught the fat one in the chest. His weapon exploded into the night. And then without looking at that target Moffat saw the second.
Under the shadow of the spacecan a man had come up, his arms full of firewood. This was falling now, halfway to the ground, and a gun was in his grip, aimed at Old Keno. The gun blazed. Moffat fired and the fifth man went down.
But he was not alone. Old Keno—the infallible, never-missing, always-beforehand Senior Constable of Ooglach—was flat on his face in the sand, motionless, victim of his own overconfidence.
Coming quickly to the spacecan port, young Moffat scanned the interior with his flash. There were five tumbled and evil-smelling bunks here. He glanced back to the fire, counting noses to make sure. Then he scouted wide, looking for strange tracks, and in a moment knew that they had the entire outfit. Not until then did he come back to Old Keno and there he knelt, turning the ancient patrolman over.
To see the wound and its extent it was necessary to remove Old Keno’s shirt, for the bullet had apparently lightly creased his back.
It was cooler here by the side of the stream which, a few feet further, plumed two thousand feet into a chasm and which chilled the air in this cup. Young Moffat felt himself relaxing, beat up as he was. Old Keno missing such an obvious thing!
He had off the patched blue shirt and then rolled Keno to his face, fumbling for the wound. It was light; it was on the surface—
Suddenly Moffat stared. He came halfway to his feet and still stared. He took out his pocket flash and knelt eagerly beside the fallen man. His brows knit and then began to ease. Sudden laughter sprang from his lips, rose up the scale toward hysteria and turned aside into an honest bellow. What he had endured for this! What he had endured!
Young Constable Moffat sat down in the sand and held his sides. He laughed until his shoulders shook, until his breathing pounded, until his sides caved from labored wheezing. He laughed until the very sand around him danced. And then he looked—growing calmer and settling to a mere chuckle—back at the fallen man.
Moffat jumped up and went into the ship. Presently he came back with a kit and began to patch. And in a very short while Old Keno was sitting groggily up, trying to piece together what had happened.
The young man watched him. Through Moffat’s mind was flashing all he had gone through—the cold, the heat, the sharp rocks, the wreck. He thought of the fight when Old Keno had drawn and killed and he thought of the faculty Old Keno did not have. He had lasted and come out here.
“How much do you know of yourself?” said Moffat.
Old Keno stared in amazement and then, eyes shifting to the blue shirt and becoming conscious of his nakedness, slowly averted his gaze.
“Everything you know, I guess,” he mumbled. “I didn’t know it at first. I came up here for some reason I can’t recall and the transport crashed near Meteorville. I thought I just had amnesia and I went to work in the bars as a guard.
“Then they made me marshal and finally the Frontier Patrol commissioned me a senior constable. Twenty years and I didn’t know. Then I went down to Center City, where they built the big new prison. And they’ve got a gadget there to keep weapons from going in. I couldn’t pass it. That’s how I found out.”
“Did anybody know?”
“I fell and when I came around I was okay. No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“I think you were out longer than you thought,” said Moffat. “By the way, did you ever read this sign on your back?”
“I tried with mirrors but I couldn’t.”
“Well, listen.” Moffat studied it again before reading it aloud.
POLICE SPY
Pat. No. 4,625,726,867,094
THE BIG-AS-LIFE ROBOT CO.
“And twice as natural”
Motors: Carbon
Instruction: Police
Attachments: Infrared eyes
Chassis Type: R
“Our Robots Never Die”
Caution: DO NOT OIL!
MADE IN DETROIT, MICH.
USA
There was silence for a moment. Old Keno looked scared and reached for his shirt. “You’ll turn me in.” He heaved a sigh. “I’m done.”
Young Moffat grinned. “Nope. Because that isn’t the only sign there. You were out a lot longer than you thought at Center City. They must have had time to send dispatches to the Frontier Patrol. Because there’s another sign.”
“Another?”
“Yep,” said young Moffat with a jubilant upsurge. “It reads very short and very sweet.”
To the recruit:
You’ll only locate this if you can last, if you can’t be fooled or if you’re a better shot. Know then that you now send a dispatch to headquarters for your transfer and raise in rate. Well done, Senior Constable!
Thorpe
Commanding Section C
“I’m a trainer,” said Old Keno.
“You showed up three,” said Moffat. “Three that couldn’t take it the hard way. And you almost killed me, Keno Martin. Froze me and broiled me and drained me of the last ounce. By golly, I never knew what I could stand until I came to Ooglach. And now . . . well, if they want to train a man the hard way it’s all right with me.”
“And I—” fumbled Old Keno.
“Martin, you’re better than men in a lot of ways—heat, cold and energy. But of course your sixth sense doesn’t exist. You’ll have to watch for that. But you’re still Senior Constable of Ooglach and I guess you’ll last forever if you don’t short-circuit from a slug.
“I replaced the fuse that bullet blew. You’d better keep some in your pockets. So t
hey won’t be retiring you, Keno, until you fall apart and according to your back, that won’t be until forever arrives. Okay, Senior Constable?”
Old Keno became suddenly radiant. He looked at the boy before him and his smile grew proud. He put out his hand for a shake. “Okay, Senior Constable Moffat,” he said.
They shook.
Battling Bolto
Battling Bolto
YOU hear some strange and amusing tales in the Intragalactic Survey, tales of the exiled and the damned. Men forgathered in some inhospitable system two jumps beyond forever from the nearest lighted window and far removed from the ordinary mediums of amusement, depend perforce upon themselves. There arises in every crew some champion teller of tales who, when company comes, is put forward by his fellows as a man of value and charm.
One would suppose such stories would be of high danger, sudden demise and new planets won, but this is never the case. The further the crew from its outflung base, the more intimately the yarns concern home.
Wandering around the stars, I have often been the target of “champion taletellers” and I wish that I had the memory to repeat one-hundredth of what we laughed and wept about at the Universe’s end. Many of them, I suppose, in less glamorous and vigorous settings, told to men less abused by fates and the outer dark, would prove dull.
But whatever the setting, whatever the audience, I do not think any such charge could ever be leveled at Battling Bolto.
He was a huge ox of a man with a fitting sense of his own gullibility and weaknesses. He came from some system I will not name because he is badly wanted there—a common thing in the Survey, or how else would it ever recruit? He was fully seven feet tall and he had all the marks of one who had been raised on a gravity and a half. Earlier in the day, when our crews had boisterously met, he had amused us by manually hammering the dents from our hull, for he was a smith by trade and a smith he remained. His companions, when the fire was burning down, urged him on to tell his tale for us and after much bashful twisting and applications to the jug, the majority prevailed and he began to talk in a mellow roar which I am certain he believed to be quiet and fitting in this lonely, strange-starred night.
I wasn’t cut out to be a rover (he began). It was a woman that did it. (He settled himself, took another drink and grinned into the fire.) I guess I never had much luck in keeping people from coming over me.
Down in Urgo Major, where I was born and raised, folks counted on me to become a pillar of the community and an example to the very young. And I would have if Aimee and the Professor had left my life alone.
Gentlemen, beware of professors. But they ain’t a patch on women. I had a shop and I shoed a six-footed beast we had for a living and I mended people’s pans and was all set to lead a comfortable and useful life when Aimee got to watching me in church. Pretty soon she was walking me home from church. And then she was expecting me to call Wednesday night. And the first thing I knew, I’d proposed to her. I can’t rightly say just how it happened and for two or three weeks afterwards I kept wondering how it was I’d got engaged, and to this day I don’t recall saying a word about it.
But we were posted up as likely bait for the parson and there I was. She’d come over me.
Wasn’t any hurry about the marriage, but then I guess there isn’t any hurry about anything down on our planet. Aimee was planning this and that and arranging the house Pop left me and everything seemed to be pretty smooth.
And then one day this spaceship landed.
Professor Crack McGowan he called himself. And the big banners he hung out said that he sold robots “for every purpose known to man.” I figured this was going a little far. But I went down with the boys and we stood around and watched while he put on a show. It wasn’t much. He had a robot that clanked around and gave a lecture and he had two men—humans—in the crew that shifted through the crowd handing out literature.
The robots was awful cheap but our planet is pretty poor and he didn’t make many sales. And then I found my watch was gone.
Pop had give me that watch and I wasn’t going to part with it amiable. I don’t get mad very often but I got mad then. We’d been free of crime ever since the carnival came through and I figured it was the little goose-faced character that’d come through with the literature.
So I grabbed him, held him upside down in the air with one hand around his ankle and searched him.
I had just found my watch when I felt something hit me that I figured must be part of the planet come loose. I got up and saw I was facing a man from some two-gravity world who had fists like elephants’ feet and a face like a handsome ape. So we tangled.
Folks cheered around there and this Professor danced on the outskirts and the town cop held his peace. Chunks of turf as big as your head was flying like confetti and the display stand took on the happy appearance of a junkyard. We had a good time and then this character laid down and quit.
Well, an hour or so later when the doc had brought him around, Mike, our cop, agreed to let me go and I went back to the shop to wash off some blood and pieces of skin and hair. And here was this Professor waiting for me.
“I got a job for you,” he says. “I’m partial to brawn and I got a good job. I am Professor Crack McGowan and I own a roaring good business that will let you see the Universe. Now how about it?”
Well, I explained I was happy and content but the more I explained, the higher his wages went and pretty soon I hear a cooing voice and there was Aimee. After that, all the dealing bypassed me cold and I found out a few days later, when we was sailing along at a couple light-years, that I’d been hired on as smith for six earth-years, a third of my pay going back to Aimee to compensate her for the wait. They’d come over me again.
But I didn’t know anything yet. The bruiser I’d whipped and the little guy were gone and a couple humanoids helped in their place. I spent all my time back in the workshop turning out robot skins.
I never even had the run of the ship, which was a big one. She was called the Opportunity, which name, I might add, didn’t include me. I knew she had some other workshops but they were always bolted down. She had a couple storerooms and they had things in them which looked like coffins and which I guessed must hold the robots he sold.
I made nothing but metal skins. The Professor would cart them off and that’s all I knew about them. And this kept up for about two months of travel until I was sick of looking at my distorted reflection in curved plysteel, my face not being anything too wonderful to begin with.
And then this Professor comes back and he tells me to start on a new, big skin of a certain design and size of a new metal. I didn’t ask any questions. He was sort of a hard man to talk to—little and scrawny and always in a hurry and a lot more glib than I care to meet in my fellow travelers. So I made the skin. Had a little trouble with materials. Kind of faceplate he wanted wasn’t aboard so I tore up the only spacesuit.
“Now,” he says when I’m done with it, “put it on.”
“Put it on?” I said. “Why?”
So I put it on. He’d come over me again. I sure felt silly. It had joints for all my joints and a visor in the “face” that you could look out of but not into and a goofy helmet on it, and when I saw myself in the glass I almost got scared. Gruesome.
“Now,” he says, “that’s fine. We land in about three hours so you might as well stay dressed.”
“Why dressed?” I said.
So I stayed dressed and we landed.
It was a pretty planet, mostly blue grass and orange trees and a sprinkling of humans in the crowd.
Before he opened the port, the Professor said, “Now I want you to go out there and move around and demonstrate things. It’s just a joke and we’ll take off your helmet at the end of the performance and they’ll all laugh. So go outside.”
Well,
I went outside in this tin suit, feeling like seven kinds of idiot, and clanked around. And the people all looked interested and polite because it was a religious holiday and they didn’t have anything else to do anyway and spaceships from strange places were unusual in these parts. Then the Professor puts up a stand and his two humanoids begin to spread this banner. It read:
BATTLING BOLTO
The Robot Boxing Champion
of the Universe and Sub-dimensions
$10,000
PRIZE TO ANYONE STAYING
WITH HIM TWO ROUNDS!
Well, robots were common enough, even if they were expensive as the dickens, and a boxing robot wasn’t too much for me to wonder about, and so I stood and stared at the space lock waiting for this wonder to appear. And then I felt the Professor’s hand on my arm and, by golly, I was Battling Bolto! He’d come over me again.
The hicks stood around and the crowd got bigger, and the Professor put on a spiel about his special farm robots and people were real interested.
“Now, gentlemen,” said the Professor in a braying voice, “I have planned a little exhibition just to show you how magnificent our product really is. You all know that most robots are delicate, that they have a poor sense of direction, timing and balance, but, gentlemen, this is not true of our product! Battling Bolto will prove to you how superior our products really are.”
The humanoids were lining up coffinlike boxes and taking the lids off and a whole line of inert robots were displayed beside the ship.
“Our robots sell for one thousand dollars. One thousand paltry dollars, full price. Ten measly little hundred-dollar bills! You can’t lose. Our nearest competitor sells this same type robot, of infinitely inferior skill, for twenty-one thousand dollars. Save that middleman profit. Save the manufacturer’s squeeze. Save the freight! Buy one of my fine, class A robots, guaranteed forever. . . . Step right up here, young man. What’s your name?”
A great big hulk of a kid had been hustled out from town and several of the leading citizens were pushing him ahead.