Four-Day Planet

by H. Beam Piper

  8

  PRACTICE, 50-MM GUN

  It seemed as though I had barely fallen asleep before I was wakened bythe ship changing direction and losing altitude. I knew there wereclouds coming in from the east, now, on the lower air currents, and Isupposed that Joe was taking the _Javelin_ below them to have a lookat the surface of the sea. So I ran up to the conning tower, and whenI got there I found that the lower clouds were solid over us, it wasgrowing dark, and another hunter-ship was approaching with her lightson.

  "Who is she?" I asked.

  "_Bulldog_, Nip Spazoni," Joe told me. "Nip's bringing my saloonfighter aboard, and he wants to meet Mr. Murell."

  I remembered that the man who had roughed up the Ravick goon inMartian Joe's had made his getaway from town in the _Bulldog_. As Iwatched, the other ship's boat dropped out from her stern, wentend-over-end for an instant, and then straightened out and camecircling around astern of us, matching our speed and ejecting amagnetic grapple.

  Nip Spazoni and another man climbed out with life lines fast to theirbelts and crawled along our upper deck, catching life lines that werethrown out to them and snapping onto them before casting loose theones from their boat. Somebody at the lock under the conning towerhauled them in.

  Nip Spazoni's name was Old Terran Italian, but he had slantedMongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for hisnickname. The amount of intermarriage that's gone on since the FirstCentury, any resemblance between people's names and their appearancesis purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, who looks as though his nameought to be Lief Ericsson, for example.

  "Here's your prodigal, Joe," he was saying, peeling out of his parkaas he came up the ladder. "I owe him a second gunner's share on amonster, fifteen tons of wax."

  "Hey, that was a good one. You heading home, now?" Then he turned tothe other man, who had followed Nip up the ladder. "You didn't do avery good job, Bill," he said. "The so-and-so's out of the hospital bynow."

  "Well, you know who takes care of his own," the crewman said. "Give mesomething for effort; I tried hard enough."

  "No, I'm not going home yet," Nip was answering. "I have hold-room forthe wax of another one, if he isn't bigger than ordinary. I'm going togo down on the bottom when the winds start and sit it out, and thentry to get a second one." Then he saw me. "Well, hey, Walt; when didyou turn into a monster-hunter?"

  Then he was introduced to Murell, and he and Joe and the man fromArgentine Exotic Organics sat down at the chart table and Joe yelledfor a pot of coffee, and they started talking prices and quantities ofwax. I sat in, listening. This was part of what was going to be thebig story of the year. Finally they got that talked out, and Joe askedNip how the monsters were running.

  "Why, good; you oughtn't to have any trouble finding one," Nip said."There must have been a Nifflheim of a big storm off to the east,beyond the Lava Islands. I got mine north of Cape Terror. There's hugepatches of sea-spaghetti drifting west, all along the coast of HermannReuch's Land. Here." He pulled out a map. "You'll find it all alonghere."

  Murell asked me if sea-spaghetti was something the monsters ate. Hisreading-up still had a few gaps, here and there.

  "No, it's seaweed; the name describes it. Screwfish eat it; bigschools of them follow it. Gulpers and funnelmouths and bag-bellieseat screwfish, and monsters eat them. So wherever you find spaghetti,you can count on finding a monster or two."

  "How's the weather?" Joe was asking.

  "Good enough, now. It was almost full dark when we finished thecutting-up. It was raining; in fifty or sixty hours it ought to begetting pretty bad." Spazoni pointed on the map. "Here's about where Ithink you ought to try, Joe."

  * * * * *

  I screened the Times, after Nip went back to his own ship. Dad saidthat Bish Ware had called in, with nothing to report but a vaguesuspicion that something nasty was cooking. Steve Ravick and LeoBelsher were taking things, even the announcement of the ArgentineExotic Organics price, too calmly.

  "I think so, myself," he added. "That gang has some kind of a knife uptheir sleeve. Bish is trying to find out just what it is."

  "Is he drinking much?" I asked.

  "Well, he isn't on the wagon, I can tell you that," Dad said. "I'mbeginning to think that he isn't really sober till he's halfplastered."

  There might be something to that, I thought. There are all kinds ofweird individualities about human metabolism; for all I knew, alcoholmight actually be a food for Bish. Or he might have built up some kindof immunity, with antibodies that were themselves harmful if he didn'thave alcohol to neutralize them.

  The fugitive from what I couldn't bring myself to call justice provedto know just a little, but not much, more about engines than I did.That meant that Tom would still have to take Al Devis's place, and I'dhave to take his with the after 50-mm. So the ship went down to almostsea surface, and Tom and I went to the stern turret.

  The gun I was to handle was an old-model Terran Federation Armyinfantry-platoon accompanying gun. The mount, however, waspower-driven, like the mount for a 90-mm contragravity tank gun.Reconciling the firing mechanism of the former with the elevating andtraversing gear of the latter had produced one of the craziest piecesof machinery that ever gave an ordnance engineer nightmares. It was alocal job, of course. An ordnance engineer in Port Sandor doesn'treally have to be a raving maniac, but it's a help.

  Externally, the firing mechanism consisted of a pistol grip andtrigger, which looked all right to me. The sight was a standardbinocular light-gun sight, with a spongeplastic mask to save thegunner from a pair of black eyes every time he fired it. The elevatingand traversing gear was combined in one lever on a ball-and-socketjoint. You could move the gun diagonally in any direction in onemotion, but you had to push or pull the opposite way. Something wouldgo plonk when the trigger was pulled on an empty chamber, so I didsome dry practice at the crests of waves.

  "Now, mind," Tom was telling me, "this is a lot different from apistol."

  "So I notice," I replied. I had also noticed that every time I got thecross hairs on anything and squeezed the trigger, they were onsomething else when the trigger went plonk. "All this gun needs isanother lever, to control the motion of the ship."

  "Oh, that only makes it more fun," Tom told me.

  Then he loaded in a clip of five rounds, big expensive-lookingcartridges a foot long, with bottle-neck cases and pointed shells.

  The targets were regular tallow-wax skins, blown up and weighted atone end so that they would float upright. He yelled into the intercom,and one was chucked overboard ahead. A moment later, I saw it bobbingaway astern of us. I put my face into the sight-mask, caught it,centered the cross hairs, and squeezed. The gun gave a thunderclapand recoiled past me, and when I pulled my face out of the mask, I sawa column of water and spray about fifty feet left and a hundred yardsover.

  "You won't put any wax in the hold with that kind of shooting," Tomtold me.

  I fired again. This time, there was no effect at all that I could see.The shell must have gone away over and hit the water a couple of milesastern. Before Tom could make any comment on that shot, I let offanother, and this time I hit the water directly in front of thebobbing wax skin. Good line shot, but away short.

  "Well, you scared him, anyhow," Tom said, in mock commendation.

  I remembered some of the comments I'd made when I'd been trying toteach him to hit something smaller than the target frame with apistol, and humbled myself. The next two shots were reasonably close,but neither would have done any damage if the rapidly vanishing skinhad really been a monster. Tom clucked sadly and slapped in anotherclip.

  "Heave over another one," he called. "That monster got away."

  The trouble was, there were a lot of tricky air currents along thesurface of the water. The engines were running on lift to matchexactly the weight of the ship, which meant that she had no weight atall, and a lot of wind resistance. The drive was supposed to match thewind speed, and the ship was suppo
sed to be kept nosed into the wind.A lot of that is automatic, but it can't be made fully so, which meansthat the pilot has to do considerable manual correcting, and no humanalive can do that perfectly. Joe Kivelson or Ramon Llewellyn orwhoever was at the controls was doing a masterly job, but that fellaway short of giving me a stable gun platform.

  I caught the second target as soon as it bobbed into sight and slammeda shell at it. The explosion was half a mile away, but the shellhadn't missed the target by more than a few yards. Heartened, I firedagain, and that shot was simply dreadful.

  "I know what you're doing wrong," Tom said. "You're squeezing thetrigger."

  "_Huh_?"

  I pulled my face out of the sight-mask and looked at him to see if hewere exhibiting any other signs of idiocy. That was like criticizingsomebody for using a fork instead of eating with his fingers.

  "You're not shooting a pistol," he continued. "You don't have to holdthe gun on the target with the hand you shoot with. The mount control,in your other hand, does that. As soon as the cross hairs touch thetarget, just grab the trigger as though it was a million sols gettingaway from you. Well, sixteen thousand; that's what a monster's worthnow, Murell prices. Jerking won't have the least effect on your holdwhatever."

  So that was why I'd had so much trouble making a pistol shot out ofTom, and why it would take a special act of God to make one out of hisfather. And that was why monster-hunters caused so few casualties inbarroom shootings around Port Sandor, outside of bystanders andback-bar mirrors. I felt like Newton after he'd figured out why theapple bopped him on the head.

  "You mean like this?" I asked innocently, as soon as I had the hairson the target again, violating everything I held most sacredly trueabout shooting.

  The shell must have passed within inches of the target; it bobbed overflat and the weight pulled it up again into the backwave from theshell and it bobbed like crazy.

  "That would have been a dead monster," Tom said. "Let's see you do itagain."

  I didn't; the next shot was terrible. Overconfidence. I had one moreshot, and I didn't want to use up another clip of the _Javelin_'sammo. They cost like crazy, even if they were Army rejects. The seacurrent was taking the target farther away every second, but I took mytime on the next one, bringing the horizontal hair level with thebottom of the inflated target and traversing quickly, grabbing thetrigger as soon as the vertical hair touched it. There was awater-spout, and the target shot straight up for fifty feet; the shellmust have exploded directly under it. There was a sound of cheeringfrom the intercom. Tom asked if I wanted to fire another clip. I toldhim I thought I had the hang of it now, and screwed a swab onto theramrod and opened the breech to clean the gun.

  Joe Kivelson grinned at me when I went up to the conning tower.

  "That wasn't bad, Walt," he said. "You never manned a 50-mm before,did you?"

  "No, and it's all backward from anything I ever learned aboutshooting," I said. "Now, suppose I get a shot at a monster; where do Itry to hit him?"

  "Here, I'll show you." He got a block of lucite, a foot square on theend by two and a half feet long, out of a closet under the charttable. In it was a little figure of a Jarvis's sea-monster; long bodytapering to a three-fluked tail, wide horizontal flippers like thewings of an old pre-contragravity aircraft, and a long neck with alittle head and a wide tusked mouth.

  "Always get him from in front," he said. "Aim right here, where hischest makes a kind of V at the base of the neck. A 50-mm will go sixor eight feet into him before it explodes, and it'll explode among hisheart and lungs and things. If it goes straight along his body, it'llopen him up and make the cutting-up easier, and it won't spoil muchwax. That's where I always shoot."

  "Suppose I get a broadside shot?"

  "Why, then put your shell right under the flukes at the end of thetail. That'll turn him and position him for a second shot from infront. But mostly, you'll get a shot from in front, if the ship's downnear the surface. Monsters will usually try to attack the ship. Theyattack anything around their own size that they see," he told me. "Butdon't ever make a body shot broadside-to. You'll kill the monster, butyou'll blow about five thousand sols' worth of wax to Nifflheim doingit."

  It had been getting dusky while I had been shooting; it was almostfull dark now, and the _Javelin's_ lights were on. We were makingclose to Mach 3, headed east now, and running away from the remainingdaylight.

  We began running into squalls of rain, and then rain mixed with wetsnow. The underside lights came on, and the lookout below beganreporting patches of sea-spaghetti. Finally, the boat was dropped outand went circling away ahead, swinging its light back and forth overthe water, and radioing back reports. Spaghetti. Spaghetti with a bigschool of screwfish working on it. Funnel-mouths working on thescrewfish. Finally the speaker gave a shrill whistle.

  "_Monster ho!_" the voice yelled. "About ten points off your port bow.We're circling over it now."

  "Monster ho!" Kivelson yelled into the intercom, in case anybodyhadn't heard. "All hands to killing stations." Then he saw me standingthere, wondering what was going to happen next. "Well, mister, didn'tyou hear me?" he bellowed. "Get to your gun!"

  Gee! I thought. I'm one of the crew, now.

  "Yes sir!" I grabbed the handrail of the ladder and slid down, thenraced aft to the gun turret.