Andromeda Gun by John Boyd Read Free Book Online

listened to “Oh! Susanna,” with a dead sound in the middle D, tinkle up from a player piano in Bain’s Saloon across the street. Down there, where lamps were being lit, free whiskey awaited him, and he could hear the laughter of women, but he was avoiding company. In fact, he was standing well back from the window—no lamp would be lit in his room tonight—and the back of a chair was propped under the knob of the locked and bolted door to his room.
    Yielding to a whim, he stood for a while watching the stars come out and tried to remember the names of the individual stars. He could remember the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and the Milky Way, but the only single star he knew by sight was the North Star, which he used to guide on when traveling after dark. He turned away from the window in disgust, not at his faulty memory but at himself for idling away his time trying to remember things that didn’t really matter.
    He spread a pallet on the floor at the foot of the bed, facing the door. If any of Billy Peyton’s friends who were familiar with the layout of the room fired through the door at a point where the sleeper should be, they would have had two chances to become bushwhackers, their first and their last.
    From where he lay, finally, spread-eagled on the pallet, his pistol near his hand, he could see the stars through the window. In the reveries of beginning sleep, the Milky Way reminded him of the swash of freckles beneath the eyes of Gabriella, and the image arrested his glide into somnolence. Impatiently he brushed the vision from his mind, vaguely disturbed by the turns his thoughts were taking. Here he lay, moping over stars and a girl, when he should have been thinking about a fast horse, a bank, and about getting out of Shoshone Flats before a passel of angry Mormons came swarming out of the lower valley.
    Ian slept.
    G-7 never slept. Now it took a long-delayed opportunity to evaluate the data which had been pouring into its host all day to reflect on its growing knowledge of man. There was very much planning to be done.
    The scout was aware of strange, bug-eyed monsters slithering in the depth of space. It remembered the snails on the eighteenth planet of Vega spewing venom before them to grease their paths with carrion. G-7 had individually converted the hookfangs of Vulpecula 8 who used torture as a religious ritual, but it had met no species comparable to the humans of sun 3 who had learned to walk upright in order to use their forelegs for maiming and destroying their own and other species.
    Yet the scout was not completely overcome with revulsion. Objectivity was a gift of its ethereality, and experience had taught it versatility. It had to admit that this organism was superbly conditioned to its environment, and G-7 was accustomed to working with whatever material was at hand. Nothing in its code condoned the willful destruction or impairment of energy systems, but, on the other hand, it knew that sometimes good could be the final goal of ill.
    This superb engine of destruction, Ian McCloud, could never be driven to light, never directly led—G-7 had fissioned an ion to prevent the murder of Billy Peyton—only nudged toward goodness at an oblique angle. G-7 faced the problem head-on; man was simply not a light-seeking animal and its chosen specimen was even less so. As it nudged Ian toward righteousness, it would have to keep the man’s eyes averted. Metaphysically speaking, the light from a single candle might prove a blinding glare to Ian McCloud.
    To train the man to lead the human race, it would first be necessary to persuade McCloud to join the human race while making full use of his genius for violence which elevated him above a species which evinced merely a general talent for mayhem.
    By now, G-7 had spotted areas in the social order of human beings where a man of McCloud’s inclinations might function, if not with virtue at least with legality, particularly if that man, as in the case