Chapter 2

I was named Henry Edson by my mother, but I was known outside our home as Hank King. Of course, not having any experience to compare this to, it made absolutely no difference to me. Even Dad called me Hank, but Mom invariably called me Henry.

Up until I was about 12 years old, I did nothing but fool around and do odd jobs that the overseers thought that a young boy could handle. However, one day, an overseer showed up at our house and ordered me to follow him. It seemed that I was headed for a special job assignment.

The Queen was partial to the ancient movies and TV programs that were stored in the library. Yes, the town had a library, but it was off limits to serfs. However, it was stocked with virtually all of the knowledge accumulated by the human race over thousands of years. You can be sure that the king did not plan for this, but it was just included in the standard package of tapes delivered with the standard duplicators being sent off-planet.

The point of this was that the queen often wanted a specific movie or TV program that she vaguely remembered, but could not give a name to. The serf who had been trained to be the librarian was not the smartest person in the world, but she was smart enough to cover her ass by asking for an assistant to service the requests from the queen.

Well, I was well known among the overseers as a boy who was quick to understand vague orders, so I was tapped to be the librarian's assistant. To be able to handle this job, I had to be able to read and write and to do simple arithmetic. That was no problem. I received a high school education in those subjects in one morning and was ready to assist the librarian by lunch time.

The librarian showed me how the movies and TV programs were indexed and had me find a couple of items that the queen had requested but had stumped the librarian. One, I found immediately, and the other took nearly half an hour, mostly because the queen had made a mistake in her request. That latter point had required a telephone call to the "palace," actually the spaceship where the lords and ladies were living.

As much as anything else, the librarian was impressed by the fact that I was not reluctant to place a call to the queen's office. To my surprise, after I had given the computer that answered my call the reason for it, I wound up talking directly to the queen. She was actually a nice lady and not the old bat that I had expected. Anyway, she told me in some detail what she was looking for, and I was able to find it in short order. I patched it into her display, and she was able to enjoy her situation comedy after all.

After that, the queen no longer sent notes to the librarian, but called for me directly to find the shows she wanted to see. The problem was that she was inclined to call at odd times during the day or night, and she always expected me to be there to take her call. Uh-oh, that meant that I had to move into a room at the library so that I would be available, even if I had gone to bed.

After three weeks of this, I was bored right out of my skull. I was stuck in that damned office and not able to leave except to empty my bladder or bowel. Even my food was delivered to me so that I would be available if the queen wanted me. The problem was that I worked at most 30 minutes in a day, and the rest of the time found me sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

Then it dawned on me! The teaching machine was also in the library purely for convenience in having a good place to put it. I figured "Why not?" and decided to learn about the things that interested me. Well, like any boy in that age group, I was all for adventure, especially since I had no chance of having one.

The first thing I did was learn all I could about guns. You wouldn't believe how much there was to learn about those things. I got interested in all kinds of guns and looked up every bit of reference material that the data bank had on that subject. Hell, that kept me busy for nearly four months before I had exhausted the data on guns.

The most interesting guns I could find were those that did not use gunpowder. I got caught up in a study of the guns that used compressed air as the propellent. I concluded that for the kind of gun that an adventurer could use, an air propelled shotgun configuration was the best. I then started thinking about how such a gun should be built. I spent almost two months working on that subject until I was sure that I had the perfect design. The newest frustration was that I had no way to test my ideas.

That was when I found out that I had access to the replicator by a roundabout route. Dammit, that was not going to do me any good because the replicator required a computer program written in a kind of script language called, naturally, replicator programming language (RPL).

Hey! There was a tape available for the learning machine that could teach me how to program in that language. There was no stopping me. I gave not a thought to what would happen to me if I were caught learning this information. I simply asked Margaret to mind the telephone for me while I used the learning machine. She mumbled some sort of answer and I set up the tape. Three hours later, the telephone had not rung, and I was an expert in the programming of replicators.

It occurred to me that I would be in safer territory if I had my own replicator to practice on. I did not need the tremendous capacity of the main replicator in the spaceship, but I could use that replicator to turn out a smaller version of itself for me to play with. At this point, that was what I was doing—just playing. I diddled around a little bit and found out that I could have a small replicator built and delivered to me here at the library under the guise of obtaining some heretofore ignored reference works. Nobody ever checked on this sort of thing, so I was sure to get away with it.

I ordered up my small replicator and had it delivered. When it showed up, Margaret asked, "Hank, what is this thing in the large carton that is being delivered to you?"

My answer was, "Heck, Margaret, it is a replicator. I am going to use it to make guns." I produced a big grin, as if my statement were a joke, and she accepted it as such. She dropped the subject and so did I. I wrote a series of basic programs working up toward the more complex ones as I learned to be a programmer. Yes, I had some mistakes and some downright blunders, but eventually, I had polished my skills to the point that I was ready to start my big project: building the perfect gun.

Oh, damn, I had a clutter of small items that I had built and did not dare let anyone else see, including Margaret. Now, what could I do? I thought about the problem for a while and decided to build the ultimate shredder that was powerful enough to reduce even hardened carbon steel to little more than powder. If somebody happened to take even a close look at the product of my shredder, he would not be able to tell what had been the starting point, so I felt safe on that point.

On the other hand, it was better if my shredder remained a secret. Well, sometimes it was a bit noisy, so I saved its operation for late at night when everyone else was asleep. That was also the time I used to dump the shredded product down the latrine. Nobody ever messed with the septic tank except serfs who were being punished, so I was not worried about them taking a close look at what they were handling. The stuff shoveled from the latrine was sent through a machine that converted it into plasma that was released into the atmosphere. Who could tell what happened to it after that?

Okay, now I was able to build my perfect gun at last. Oh, dammit, more frustration! I couldn't test the gun because the noise of it being fired would have signaled me as a subject for the gibbet. Back to the drawing board, as it were. I had to have a silencer, and the only way I could design that was to be an expert in that brand of physics. Therefore, I spent a whole day in learning everything I could find associated with sound and the generation of loud noises.