State of War nf-7 Read online

  And he took care of things from the ammo end, too. He used CCI Minimags exclusively, the solids, not the hollow points. He’d buy a brick, a full five hundred rounds. Then he’d sit in front of the TV with the sports channel on and his little Dillon scale and weigh each cartridge. It turned out that seven or eight out of ten rounds weighed fifty-one grains. All the fifty-ones went into one box, the other stuff into another — he used those for his little lever-action Winchester rifle. It didn’t really matter how much they weighed; it only mattered that the ones he carried all weighed the same.

  When that was done, he would use the little headspace gauge he had made. With that, he could check to make sure the bullets were all the same size and shape. Any that were deformed or a hair too long or short went into the rifle box.

  Every round he carried in his revolvers or speedloaders was as close to exactly the same size and weight as he could make them. It didn’t matter if they all shot a hair high or a hair low, as long as they all went to the same place. Consistency, that was the key. An old silhouette shooter had showed him that, and it worked.

  Finally, because rimfire ammo could sometimes go bad, oil or lube seeping into them, he changed the rounds in his guns and speedloaders once a week, and the old ones went into the rifle box.

  Of course, a snub-nose revolver wasn’t going to be a tack-driver at any kind of range, no matter how good a shooter you were. Still and all, it didn’t have to be. All he needed to be able to do was hit somebody in the head at seven yards, which was the longest range of most gunfights. The FBI used to say, “Three shots, three feet, three seconds,” was the average shoot-out.

  Out to seven yards, he could point-shoot heads all day long pretty damn quick, yeah. But just in case, when he was working on the action, he’d kept the spurs on the Rugers’ hammers. That way he could cock ’em for single-action if he had to. Given just a little time to aim, he could hit that same target at twenty-five yards single-action, holding one gun two-handed, nine times out of ten. At fifty yards, the head shot simply wasn’t going to happen except by luck, but he could put them all into a torso at that range. The.22s might not be a manstopper to the body, but six hits would give a man something real serious to think about. There weren’t too many gunfights at fifty yards anyhow.

  Back at the firing line, he reset himself. Taking a deep breath, he drew and cooked ’em off…

  Six for six.

  He smiled. Damn, he was good.

  At least, he was good when the targets weren’t shooting back. He was going to have to do something about that soon, yeah, or else stop looking at himself every time he passed a mirror. Pretty soon, yeah.

  4

  Washington, D.C.

  Howard and Tyrone were in the den. Howard was reading the paper. Ty was in the lounger, VR goggles on his head, surfing the web.

  In the kitchen, Nadine was fixing supper. She yelled something at him, but he didn’t catch it.

  “What?” he called out.

  She came into the den, a spatula in one hand, an oven mitt on the other. “I asked you if you wanted part of a beer,” she said.

  They did that sometimes, split a beer while she was cooking.

  He smiled at her and shook his head. “No, thanks, babe, you go ahead.” He knew she would drink half the bottle, then put the rest back in the fridge. If he didn’t drink it, it would go flat. Big party animals, the Howards. Whoowhoo.

  Nadine went back into the kitchen.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Tyrone said. He took off his goggles and laid them on his chest, but kept the chair almost fully reclined.

  Howard put the paper down. At Ty’s age, when he wanted to talk, it was clear the decks and stand by or lose the opportunity. “Always a good idea, thinking,” Howard said, grinning. “About anything in particular?”

  “That TANSTAAFL stuff.”

  Howard nodded. He wasn’t sure of the term’s origin. He’d first read it in a science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein when he’d been a boy: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It referred, if he recalled correctly, to the old “Free Lunch” signs that were common a long time ago in local pubs and bars. Usually something like boiled eggs in pickle juice, or other snack-y food, given away to patrons. Well, it was free to the extent that you didn’t have to pay for it as long as you were buying beers. It was actually a kind of loss-leader for the bars to get the drinkers to stop in.

  Not all that long ago, Las Vegas used to offer terrific meals at ridiculously low prices, too. They knew that if they got you into their casinos, and kept you there with free drinks, they would get your money, either at the tables or from the slot machines. At least that way, when you went home broke, you could tell everybody how good and cheap the food was. It was like cheap advertising: Yeah, I lost my butt at the tables, but I ate great, and it was only like five bucks for a salad, steak, potatoes, and dessert.

  He’d told Tyrone about the concept a while ago, trying to get the boy to see things from a different, more grown-up, perspective. “What about it?” he asked.

  “Well,” Tyrone said, “according to what I’ve read, it’s one of those capitalist things. Robber barons and industrialists didn’t want anybody putting hands into their pockets in any way, shape, or form, no regulations, nothing.”

  Howard nodded. “That’s probably true.”

  “Pure capitalism doesn’t work, Dad, ’cause it screws the workers,” Tyrone said. His voice was becoming louder, more passionate. “If some rich guy owns a big factory, he can hire ten-year-olds to work eighteen hours a day and pay them almost nothing.”

  Howard nodded again. He thought he could see where his son was headed. “Yes, that was how it used to be, a long time ago, back at the beginning of the Industrial Age or so.”

  Tyrone sat up, his goggles falling into his lap. “So all regulation isn’t bad, then, is it? Without them, we’d have no unions, no Social Security, no welfare.”

  “I never said all regulation was bad. I’m a Republican, not a Libertarian.”

  Tyrone grinned, as if he had just won a major point. He said, “Right. So sometimes private industry needs to be held accountable, for the greater good of society.”

  Howard was right. He definitely saw where this was going. He merely nodded, though. He had to give the boy points for getting his groundwork set up.

  Tyrone picked up the goggles and held them in one hand, using them to point at his father. “So if some guy, for instance, came up with a cure for cancer and he decided to sell it for a hundred thousand dollars a pop, it might be in the public interest to regulate that.”

  Howard folded his paper and set it aside. “To a point, I’ll agree with that.”

  “But, see, Dad, that’s the whole thing: If you could save ten thousand lives by giving the cure away for free, or only charging a buck or something, wouldn’t that be valid?”

  Howard shook his head. “Maybe — as long as you didn’t put the guy who came up with the cure out of business. We’ve gone over this before, Ty, but let me say it again. Suppose this guy borrowed and spent, oh, say, ten million dollars researching, developing, and producing this cure. Even if his production cost per dose is fairly low, he still has to repay those loans, and that will drive up the amount of money he needs to keep his doors open. Are you saying it’s right to take the cure away from him and have him go belly up? That the people who invested their money in this guy should lose what they put in, for the greater good of society?”

  Tyrone shrugged. “If they can afford to invest beaucoup bucks somewhere, why not?”

  “What if they can’t afford it? Let’s say Social Security goes into the toilet — which is very possible before I get old enough to draw it — and all I’ve got to live on is my military pension. Let’s also say I’ve invested my money cautiously, and this rock-solid pharmaceutical company that comes up with the cancer cure is where a big chunk of my money went. I’m golden, I can quit work at sixty and live nicely for the rest of my l
ife. But ten years after I retire, you take the cure away from them, they go bankrupt, and there I am all of a sudden, seventy years old, sitting in a cardboard box, eating dog food because my investments got co-opted. Is that fair?”

  Tyrone shook his head. “No, of course not, Dad,” he said. “But if the choice is you sitting in a box and eating dog food or someone you love dying of a disease because they couldn’t afford the cure, which would you go for?”

  Howard smiled. He really was getting a lot sharper, his son.

  “Ty, in communism, which is a really unworkable philosophy, the saying is, ‘From each according to his ability, to each, according to his need.’ You know what that means?”

  Tyrone nodded. “Of course. It means those who can do stuff help those who can’t.”

  “Technically. What it means in practice is that people with ability carry everybody else. And there are a lot more people without special abilities than there are with ’em. Communism says that a guy smart enough to come up with a cure for cancer is exactly the same as somebody who digs ditches. And in the eyes of the law, that’s how it should be, when it comes to getting away with murder, say. But the truth is, a guy who can invent a cure for cancer is a lot rarer than a guy who digs ditches. I personally have trouble with a baseball or basketball player making thirty or forty million dollars a year while a schoolteacher might make only a little more than minimum wage — that’s skewed in a way I truly can’t understand. But you have to recognize that talent and skill should be rewarded somehow, otherwise there’s no reason to invent that cure except altruism. If you take away the thing a man spends his energy making and give him nothing in return, you take away his desire to do it again. And that of anybody else who looks at all the work needed and says to himself, ‘Why bother? It won’t help me or mine any.’ ”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Look at South America, Ty. Every few years, they have a revolution in one of the banana republics. Everybody in power gets tossed out and a new crew comes in. If you invested a few million in a company down there, and all of a sudden it gets nationalized and taken over for ‘the good of the people,’ how much do you figure you’ll want to invest from that point on?”

  “But we’re talking about knowledge, Dad, not hardware.”

  “And I’m here to tell you that knowledge is more valuable than hardware, because without knowledge, hardware doesn’t exist. Without the minds that came up with the internal combustion engine, or the steamer, or the electric motor, there wouldn’t be any automobiles, or freighters, or airplanes. You have to have metal benders, yes, but without blueprints all you get is… bent metal.”

  Tyrone frowned, but Howard wasn’t finished.

  “In our society, Ty, if you do something valuable, you get recognized for it. Could be fame, could be power, could be money, sometimes it’s all three, but the bottom line is, if you do the work, you are supposed to get the credit, and all the perks that go along with it. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the inventor gets screwed. But that’s how we want it to work. Because it is right, and on some level, people know it.

  “When you download ‘free’ music, or somebody’s newest novel that’s been pirated, scanned, and posted on the web, or the formula for a drug that somebody worked years to develop, you might as well be walking into their house and stealing it at gunpoint. Theft is theft, no matter how you spin it. And it’s wrong: ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is recognized by every civilized society and most major religions, and for a good reason. If there are no rules to protect people, then it becomes anarchy.”

  “There are exceptions,” Tyrone said, his voice stubborn. “What about the aluminum companies in World War II?”

  Howard nodded. “Yes, there are exceptions. And, yes, during World War II one company was forced to give its process to the others. But a war for your country’s survival is not exactly the same as some college student swiping music for his personal collection, now is it?”

  Tyrone grinned. “Well, no.”

  “A great part of common law around the world is dedicated to protecting the property rights of its citizens. When you start skirting those laws, you start down the road to big trouble. If they can take that cancer cure, what’s to stop them from taking that software you wrote for a new game? TANSTAAFL means that outside of real estate, pretty much everything of value in our world was, somewhere, somehow, some when, thought up, created, developed, produced, and distributed by somebody. That somebody paid for it, in blood, sweat, or tears, in time or money, for love or whatever, and that anything you think of as ‘free,’ isn’t. You might get it free, but somebody paid for it.”

  Tyrone shook his head.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I hear you, Dad. But you make everything sound so… mercenary.”

  “There’s not a thing wrong with being a mercenary, son. That’s how I make my living. In fact, that’s how most people make their living. If you do a job, you get paid for it. What’s wrong is making somebody do a job and then not paying them for it. That’s your CyberNation’s basic premise. What you get from them isn’t free. They stole it.”

  Tyrone sat silent for a moment.

  “Something?”

  “No, what you say makes sense, but I get the feeling there’s something else here I’m missing, some argument for my side.”

  Howard chuckled. Tyrone really was getting better at this. But he wasn’t there yet. “You’re right, Ty. There is.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  Howard chuckled again. “Oh, no, that’s for you to figure out. I’m not going to just give it to you. After all, haven’t you heard? There’s no such thing as a free argument.”

  “Dad!” Tyrone groaned.

  “Think about it some and you’ll get to it. It’s a good exercise.”

  Tyrone went off, muttering to himself and shaking his head.

  Howard felt a sense of pride as he watched the boy leave. Was there a valid argument against TANSTAAFL? Maybe. He couldn’t think of one offhand, but let his son believe there was, and he would keep looking. And sooner or later, he’d find it, bring it back, and hit his old man with it. Which was a good thing. Part of raising your child was teaching him how to take care of himself once he got out on his own. If you could take care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually, you had a leg up on most of the world.

  November 1935 Port of Newark, New Jersey

  Jay Gridley, sworn nemesis of evil, crouched low on the roof of the warehouse overlooking the Kill Van Kull, the waterway connecting New York Harbor with Newark Bay. He looked down upon the south docks, hidden in the shadows.

  “Follow the money” was the classic investigative advice, but first, of course, you had to find the money.

  If Jay was right, he was about to do just that.

  It was a foggy night, cold, with the promise of yet colder days ahead. The chill brushed at him with icy fingers as the mist drifted up in slow gray billows, shrouding the farther lights into dim globes. Below, illuminated by fog-edged floods, floated the Corona, a rust-streaked tramp steamer just arrived from Spain. Faint trails of coal smoke still drifted from the stacks of the ship, tracing whorls that mixed with the natural mist in the night sky.

  In another twenty years they’d call that smog…

  He pulled his wide-brimmed slouch hat lower on his head. A carmine-hued scarf covered his mouth and chin. A dark cloak shrouded him. Thin, black leather gloves covered his hands. He blended into the night, nearly invisible, no more than a shadow.

  He’d put a high-level watchbot on CyberNation’s wire transfers over the last few days. His sniffer had strained thousands of transactions, looking for relatively small chunks of money coming to the United States. CyberNation made all sorts of payments, naturally, so he’d set the bot’s sensors to filter out those that went to known companies, leaving only those that seemed to have no immediately legitimate destination, regardless of their size.

  The rusted ship Corona docked
below him was, in the real world, a large squirt of information coming over the net. Within it was a particular electronic payment from CyberNation that Jay wanted to trace. But to do that, he would have to get closer.

  Noiselessly, he padded to the edge of the wall facing the river and climbed down the knotted black silk rope he’d placed there earlier. Earlier in the day, he had broken the single mercury-vapor lamp in the immediate area, so his movements now were in near-total darkness. The Port Authority, flush with more money than they’d ever had, despite the Depression, had been refitting the lights to the docks. They would, no doubt, be unhappy with his action.

  He shrugged it off. A minor thing, a broken lamp.

  However, should anyone look up, they’d see no more than a wraith, and that not for long. It would seem a trick of the light. Nothing more than their imagination…

  Moving quickly, he hand-over-handed his way down the rope until he was on the docks. The smell of creosote sharp and pungent in the damp air.

  A sailor stood guard at the gangway to the ship, waiting, no doubt, for Customs to come and clear their cargo.

  Gridley moved slowly toward the man, removing the glove on his right hand as he did so. A gold ring featuring a large girasol, an orange-yellow variety of precious opal, gleamed faintly in the light. Intricate whirls of fire played over the deeply hued stone.

  The sailor glanced at Jay and reacted immediately, reaching for the oversized pistol holstered at his belt.

  Jay moved his fingers, a subtle movement that caused the opal to glitter in the dim light.

  Carefully… slowly…

  The sailor froze, his hand stopping inches away from the black leather holster. His eyes moved from Jay to focus intently on the gem in front of him. Jay moved the ring slightly in a pattern known only to a few in the Far East, concentrating the man’s attention, hypnotizing him, placing him in a trance.