Free Andromeda Gun by John Boyd

indebted to a law officer might become the tool of his own lieutenant. Yet it was a matter that wouldn’t concern him after Tuesday.
    “I reckon you’re right, Liza, but I ain’t intending to run for mayor, and if I’m going to load up that jail with lawbreakers, them criminals have got to be fed. As long as the Territorial Stage Lines agreed on a lunch box price, the town of Shoshone Flats will figure it’s getting a bargain, and I calculate I’ll be needing over a hundred a week. Of course, I ain’t much good at sums.”
    “Nonsense, Ian McCloud,” Liza ejaculated, “you’re a genius as well as a he-man.”
    “Oh, mother. Don’t be so obvious.”
    “One thing you have to say about me, daughter, is that I’m grateful. After we’ve had the chicken dinner I promised you, Ian, I’m inviting you to stay for supper. I’ll fix you some of the best chicken dumplings you ever et.”
    Already Ian was beginning to feel over-chickened, especially now that he knew more solid meat was available at the saloon.
    “No’m. I appreciate it, but I got to write some letters to El Paso, and I got to take this rig back to the livery stable, so I’ll have to turn down your kind invitation to supper.”
    All these people were going to a lot of trouble, he thought, just to help him steal a fast horse and rob their bank, but they were getting something back. False hope wasn’t much, but it was better than no hope at all.
    Despite its triumph at the church meeting, G-7 was disappointed.
    Aware that the patterns of man’s fate were seldom accidental, it was pleased to have elicited the correct responses from Ian at the services, and it knew that one step at a time was the most it could hope to accomplish in leading the man to legality, but fascinating educational bypaths were opening to it, right here on the buggy’s seat, and its host was ignoring them.
    Both females were competing for Ian’s amorous attention. Yet G-7 knew that the romance it had hoped to research was going to be postponed, partly because of the inhibitions aroused in Ian by the presence of the girl’s mother, a presence which actually more than doubled the area of experimentation, partly because of the rain, but mostly because Ian was preoccupied with a five-cent rebate on a twenty-five cent box lunch for nonexistent prisoners. Somehow the prospect of the former Johnny Loco tapping the public till appealed to McCloud’s ironic humor.
    Love of money was the root of this man’s evil. Seated between two women, both eager and the older one willing, he dreamed of theoretical profits and of real cash waiting in a bank to be robbed. Even after his psychic lust was appeased and his thoughts turned from profits, they did not turn to the women beside him.
    He thought of a stallion called Midnight. Any horse that liked to kill men was bound to be a spirited steed. Moreover, with his freshly activated neural cells G-7 had quickened for high moral purposes, McCloud had hit on a plan to break the stallion of its pinwheeling habits forever.

4
    Ian canceled his planned steak supper at Bain’s saloon. Shyness, politeness, and susceptibility to Liza’s persuasiveness had led him to eat three extra helpings of fried chicken, and, by the time the overburdened mare pulled him the muddy way into town, the torpor of digestion left him indifferent to food. From the livery stable he went directly to the hotel. Spreading his pallet beneath the gray light from the window, he took the Gideon’s Bible from the dresser and sprawled beneath the window to leaf through the pages.
    Not once did he speculate about his unusual desire to read the Bible, because the unnatural act fitted well into his extraordinary day. Consciously, he knew only that he wanted to read something, anything. This morning he had been embarrassed to admit in the presence of a schoolteacher that he had read so little, and what reading he had done never led him to the opinion that it was dangerous, as Liza