Writers of the Future, Volume 28 Read online

  I asked him about the Gulf and service there, but he was rather ungracious about it. A little miffed, I started to go.

  As a parting broadside, he said, “I always laugh when I read stories about the Coast Guard.”

  And I stamped down the gangway, vowing that this would be one story which wouldn’t make the so-and-so laugh, yea man!

  Another C.G. boat was in, a slim greyhound. I decided I ought to board her and see what I could discover there. No officers were aboard. The deck watch was headed by a chief petty officer, a grizzled soul with a salt tang to his speech.

  “You wanna see the old tub, do you?” said the C.P.O. “All right, Johnny here will take you around.”

  Johnny, another C.P.O., escorted me through the vessel. He explained about engines in terms which made me squirm. He showed me everything, including how to fire a one-pounder. He told me that dope runners were bad eggs. Why, once up in Maine he had . . .

  And so passed the afternoon.

  I skittered homeward, mentally afire. I blessed the C.P.O. and cursed the officer in the same breath.

  By God, those officers weren’t so hot. My hero was the chief petty officer, beleaguered by officers and dope runners, battered by hurricanes in the Gulf, patrolling the sea with a keen salt wind nipping at him.

  The new Phantom Patrol began:

  Crisp and brittle, the staccato torrent ripped out from the headphones, “S.O.S. . . . S.O.S.—Down in storm 20 miles south of Errol Island. Hull leaking. Starboard wing smashed . . . Cannot last two hours. . . . Transport plane New Orleans bound sinking 20 miles . . . !”

  Johnny Trescott’s opinion of the matter was amply summed in the single word, “Damn!”

  And there I had it. Johnny is trailing the dope runners, but because saving life comes before stopping crime, he must leave his course and rescue the transport plane.

  But the runner, Georges Coquelin, hears the S.O.S. too and, as there’s wealth aboard that plane, Johnny walks straight into Coquelin when he tries to rescue the transport.

  The atmosphere began to crackle in the yarn. I was still listening to that C.P.O. telling me about these trips, these escapes:

  Heinie Swartz eyed the dripping foredeck of the lunging 75-footer. Green seas topped with froth were breaking. The one-pound gun was alternately swallowed and disgorged by water. The two 200 h.p. Sterling Diesels throbbed under the deck, pounding out their hearts against the blow.

  I knew what made the boat tick and I could visualize it. I was suddenly so secure in my data that I felt able to tinker with the effect of situations.

  The wordage went up like a skyrocket. I had so much at my command that I was hard put to hold the stuff down.

  And then when Johnny came back to the base, he’s up against the officers. And are those officers a bunch of thick-witted, braid-polishing bums? I hope to tell you:

  Lieutenant Maitland, counsel for the defense, entered with stiff, uncompromising strides. He had been appointed to the task much against his will, and the fact was clearly etched in his sunburned face. He sparkled with gold braid and distaste.

  When he entered the cell, he eyed his two “clients” with disgust. Garbed as they were in prison dungarees, they were two uninteresting units which comprised a sordid case.

  Johnny and Heinie stood up, in deference to his rank, but Maitland either forgot or refused to give the order, “At ease!”

  In those first two stories, the patrol boat had merely been a method of conveyance. Now it began to live and snort and wallow in the trough.

  The plight of Johnny, meeting up with Georges Coquelin and losing his ship, was capped by the attitude of the officers. He was in trouble and no mistake. When I started thinking about what would actually happen in such a case, I began to feel very, very sorry for my hero. He was really on the spot.

  And then, I had a little personal interest in the case too. Somebody thought they’d laugh when they read the yarn, eh? Well, let them try to laugh now.

  With a very clear picture of Coast Guard armament in my mind, I was able to give the final scenes the reality, the zip they needed. And those final scenes, when you’re tired, need something outside to give them life.

  Johnny Trescott sighted the lighted hut they had first seen. A harsh streak of lightning showed that the clearing was empty. The door of the hut swung to and fro in the wind.

  Johnny pulled back the loading handle of the machine gun. The belt dangled over his shoulder, drooling water from its brace studded length.

  Collected data changed the plot, pepped up the writing, gave the story an undercurrent of vitality which made the yarn. The wild implausibility of the original was there because I had no actual vision of what the Coast Guard tried to do and how it did it.

  The first two drafts were laughable, worthless. But my writing hadn’t changed so terribly much. Nothing had changed but the subject.

  And the subject had changed because I could feel it.

  The Phantom Patrol was published in the January Five Novels. The illustrator made a slight error in making the pictures those of officers.

  But even then the Coast Guard did not laugh. They read the story and wrote me about it and I felt that I had succeeded.

  Adventure is as difficult as you want to make it. The way to make it difficult is to sail blithely along, listening to the words of wisdom dropped by the old-timers about how the knowledge of the subject is unnecessary. One should listen and then promptly forget.

  Oh well, maybe when I’ve been in the game twenty-five years, I’ll go around pooh-poohing everything, especially accuracy. But if I do, I hope some young feller will take me for a buggy ride. Maybe I’ll remember then how I used to sell.

  Fast Draw

  written by

  Roy Hardin

  illustrated by

  PAUL PEDERSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In the sixth grade, Roy entered a writing contest and won a copy of Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet. It opened a door that led to Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, an endless parade of new worlds and ideas.

  Later, as a psychology student at Colby College, he met his first computer (or rather its teleprinter acolytes). He can still hear the humming of those metal beasts as they gobbled up his tentative typing and spat back their master’s reply in a loud ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.

  He went on to work in five computer-related companies, co-founding three of them. He saw the machines grow ten times more powerful, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, with no end in sight.

  Today, his stories reflect on the rise of technology and how it may change the way we think about the universe and our place in it.

  Roy was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the top-secret atomic city, and grew up in Ohio, Vermont and Pennsylvania. While at Colby, in Maine, he met his wife and many of the lifelong friends who, together with his family, have encouraged his writing.

  In his spare time, he likes to travel and has visited all seven continents and spent three years exploring the US in an RV. His hobbies include archery, yoga and pickleball.

  Just minutes after learning of this story’s acceptance by the Writers of the Future, he stepped into his backyard and watched a Delta IV rocket blast into the night sky over Cape Canaveral as if in grand celebration!

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Paul Pederson is also the illustrator for “The Paradise Aperture” in this volume. For more about him, please see this page.

  Fast Draw

  READING LEVEL: G-1

  [0.00 second]

  Jake caught a flurry of movement in the mirror behind the bar. He whirled left off his stool and hit the floor in a crouch, scanning for trouble. Accustomed to the dim light pooling the bar, his eyes strained to penetrate the darker gloom along the back wall. At the fourth table from the left, customers were on their feet mopping up
a spill with napkins, otherwise he detected nothing sinister.

  He was turning back to his seat when he stopped short and did a double-take. Ten feet behind his chair, a woman’s figure stood so still in the shadows that he had nearly missed her. It was easy to see that Gloria was still steamed over the way he had dumped her—the position of her hands above the six-gun on her hip painted a very clear picture—she was going to shoot him!

  Of course the very idea was ridiculous. As a bio-logical human, Gloria had no access to the Riemann pathways Jake traversed so nimbly. To keep up with him, she would need to channel at least a terawatt. Even if she could source the energy, she would never survive the thousands of G-forces of acceleration or the million-degree temperatures of super-compressing the air around her. But that was Gloria for you—when her anger roared, reason took a holiday.

  There would be plenty of time to react to Gloria later. For now Jake had more pressing business with the blonde on the next barstool.

  [0.01 second]

  A message from the blonde was already waiting on Jake’s internal com link: “You’re kind of jumpy, aren’t you, Lover? Just some lush spilling his drink. Why don’t you ease yourself back onto your chair and tell Bunny where you learned to move like that?” She leaned over and, for the second time that night, patted Jake’s empty stool.

  As Jake slid into the seat, he reviewed his situation. A few minutes earlier he had been sitting alone, deciding between ordering another drink and calling it a night. Weighing on the drink’s side was the atmosphere of this place. He loved the feel of the wood bar, cool and moist under his fingertips. The dim light, sparse clientele and emotionally distant barkeep bathed him in a reassuring anonymity. Weighing on the side of calling it a night was simple common sense.

  As his decision teetered in the balance, the barkeep approached him to say that a woman wanted to buy him a bourbon for his birthday. Jake shot a glance down the bar to see the striking blonde in a va-va-voom red silk sheath blow him a kiss and pat the empty stool next to hers. He didn’t recognize her and couldn’t imagine how she knew his birthday or his drink. Still, she was easy on the eyes, and it was Jake’s birthday, so he thumped the bar and collected his drink.

  On the walk to his mysterious benefactress, Jake noted the litter of peanut shells underfoot and how the floor grabbed at his shoes. Fleetingly, he wondered if this was how a fly perceived flypaper before becoming ensnared. Seconds after settling into the offered seat, the commotion had broken out behind him.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I was drifting. What was your question again?”

  “Welcome back to the land of the living! I was just wondering if you’d had any special training to make you jump like that.”

  “Oh.” Jake considered whether there were reasons to withhold an answer but couldn’t think of any. “I spent a year in special forces when I was ten. That was a while ago.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell, really. I did the time. They let me out. The end.”

  Jake stole a glance back at Gloria. Her right index finger moved steadily toward the gun’s trigger guard while her left hand brushed along the top of the cylinder en route to the hammer spur. With admiration and pride, he noted the perfect fluidity of Gloria’s dump draw technique. By Jake’s clock, three minutes and thirteen seconds had elapsed since he first noticed her. He figured that to be roughly 1/100 second to Gloria. Still plenty of time.

  [0.02 second]

  My turn,” Jake said. “You’ve got me at a disadvantage. How exactly do you know my birthday? I’m sure I’d remember if we’d met.”

  An odd little smile. “I like to research the men in my life.”

  “Didn’t know I was in anyone’s life.”

  “Oh, much more than you realize. Tell me where you’re from; maybe we have friends in common.”

  Suddenly Jake was worried. Admitting he lived in a senior center could undermine whatever attraction Bunny felt for him—better to keep his answer vague. “I have a place up in the West End.”

  “Fabulous! Do you ever get to Stanley Park?”

  Not being able to read Bunny’s tag was starting to cramp Jake’s style. In the world outside these walls, good manners and quite a few ordinances dictated that all citizens carry transponders identifying their generation. With this information anyone could instantly gauge another person’s cognitive and physical capabilities.

  Such ready identification had been unimportant when all people relied on the same biochemical processes, and the gap between the brightest and the dullest people was small. But everything had changed a hundred years ago with the introduction of the Advanced Platform.

  The first-generation APs were equivalent to bio-logical humans, but the technology evolved rapidly, averaging forty percent gains each year. The result was a highly stratified society in which a G-30 AP like Jake had twenty thousand times the abilities of a G-1 biological human like Gloria.

  Every public place was required to post a generation spread. For example, a restaurant posted as G-7 to G-11 was open to any citizen with a transponder in that range. Sometimes the range was narrower, but rarely was it wider. A five-generation spread meant that the most advanced person in the room had no more than four times the abilities of any other person. At that gap everyone pretty much recognized everyone else as another human being. If the gap opened much beyond five generations, society started to come unhinged—a lesson that had been learned the hard way many times over.

  Under normal circumstances, it would have been easy for Jake to ping Bunny’s tag, read her G-level, and know whether she was toying with him or whether he had a real shot at impressing her.

  Unfortunately, this particular dive wasn’t picky about the niceties of polite society. Although it posted a spread, it never checked the tags of paying customers. In fact, lots of people like Jake came here precisely because they could deactivate their transponders for a few hours and sample a wider cross-section of life.

  If Bunny was a higher generation than Jake, she sure wasn’t showing it. All her nods and gestures looked natural and comfortably paced. Her voice was smooth, and she seemed to hang on his every word. If she noticed Gloria, she betrayed no concern.

  Oh, yeah, time to check on Gloria. Let’s see: index finger in trigger guard, remaining fingers closing on grip, slap hand accelerating smartly toward hammer spur, gun still stationary in holster. No reason to worry yet.

  [0.03 second]

  Hello! Hello! Earth calling Jake. You seem awfully far away, Cowboy. Don’t you like me?”

  With an invitation like that, Jake decided to up the stakes. He put his hand on Bunny’s thigh and gave it a little squeeze. “I like you just fine, Baby.”

  She did not slap his face or shy away. Jake said, “You asked me about Stanley Park. Matter of fact, I do get there from time to time.”

  “I love to attend the cricket matches. Maybe you could take me sometime?”

  Something about the conversation was setting off alarms in Jake’s head. He had picked up lots of women in bars, but it was never this easy. Whatever was in Bunny’s secret Jake dossier apparently painted him in a very positive light.

  It occurred to Jake that Bunny might be trying to win some sort of bet. People played all kinds of games to amuse themselves, often at a mark’s expense.

  Ever so casually, Jake glanced down the bar and then back at the tables over Bunny’s right shoulder. He didn’t catch anyone lavishing unusual attention in their direction. Reluctantly, feigning stiffness in his arm, he patted her thigh appreciatively and withdrew his hand. Then pushing off the bar with his right hand, he rode his stool in a lazy circle that allowed his eyes to pass over the entire room. When his seat came around to face the bar again, he neatly scooped up his drink, as if that had been the sole reason for the maneuver. Admittedly, it was a quick glimpse of a lot of tables, but he saw no sign of jokers.


  As his eyes passed over Gloria, he noted her index finger fully curled around the trigger, the heel of her slap hand smashing into the hammer spur and the cylinder fully visible as the revolver started its journey out of the holster.

  [0.04 second]

  Jake was starting to wish he had brought his pals from the center tonight. While each of them individually was no more impressive than he was, Jake had worked out a way to pool their cognitive resources through a close-proximity network.

  The result was that any member within a hundred meters could borrow unused cognitive resources from the pool and boost his or her effective G-level for short periods. The technique lost steam after nine or ten G-levels, because the number of crew members needed got unwieldy, but in the right situation it was a killer trick. Best of all, use of the pool had no effect on an individual member’s transponder. This ability to hide their effective G-rating had enabled them as seemingly decrepit seniors to win some very profitable bets and sidestep a lot of mayhem.

  A quick G-boost might be all it would take for Jake to sort things out, but tonight he would have to get by on his own wits.

  Then it hit him—he should have seen it a mile away! This whole setup had to be the work of his buddies. They had been peeved when he said he wanted to go out alone for a quiet evening of reflection on his seventieth birthday. They had wanted a big party, and it appeared they were going to have one with or without his permission. It was exactly the sort of prank that would provide guffaws in the dining room for weeks to come—Jake, why don’t you tell us again about your hot birthday date? It certainly explained how Bunny knew his birthday and his admiration for bourbon.

  Jake put down his drink and spun his seat back through the circle in the opposite direction. As his eyes passed over Gloria, he noted that her slap hand had finished snapping the hammer to full cock and the first half inch of barrel was visible as the weapon continued to clear the holster.

  As his chair completed its turn, bringing Bunny’s stool into view, he was startled to see that she was gone!