The unspeakably wonderful perfume of smokeless powder hung heavy in the air, and Emerson was already feeling the skin-drying effect of its residue on his hands. He cleared his mind, ordered his nerves to settle—he’d be fine once he’d fired the first shot that counted—and centered his attention, as well as his scarlet front sight, on the leftmost of a row of five freestanding steel chickens, twenty-five yards away.
As always, it looked like twenty-five kilometers.
“Shooters, at your own pace, fire five rounds!”
Before he was aware of it, the first chicken had fallen to the Grizzly. “Two inches higher than it should have been,” a soft female voice to the rear informed him, “and a little to the left, maybe half an inch. Take your time with the next one. Remember you’ve got two whole minutes, forever, really.” With the voice had come that elusive but unmistakable scent of sagebrush and woodsmoke. Gretchen had finished her course of fire and come back to the line to spot for him. It never failed to surprise him how generous “competitors” could be with one another.
He raised the Grizzly, maneuvered the sights into position, and held on the target for what seemed like an eternity, trying hard to get the sight picture just right. Before he knew it, he’d held the weapon up too long and his hands were beginning to shake. Most people were unaware how painful and wearying it is to hold one’s empty hands out at arm’s length for as long as two minutes, let alone hands weighed down by three and a half pounds of steel, brass, and lead. Wisely, he decided not to take the shot just then. A more common psychological response was to “get rid” of it, to shoot the shot anyhow, and waste it. Instead he let the Grizzly down and took a couple of deep breaths.
Next time, he pulled the trigger. The second chicken slammed backward into the low mound of earth behind it and was immediately buried under half an inch of crumbly carbonaceous chondrite. The Grizzly was too powerful, really, for twenty-five-yard chickens.
“Dead center, which means you’re still shooting high if your sights are adjusted right.”
Emerson nodded thanks. With him, consistent high shooting simply meant that he was still nervous. He lowered the gun, took two very deep breaths, held the third, and raised the pistol to eye level again. It seemed to hang there in the air before his face without support, tracking the target almost as if by itself.
That meant he’d found it. The Grizzly roared and a third chicken went down, followed quickly—too quickly, really—by a fourth. He hurried the last shot and missed the fifth by an inch. Groaning inwardly, although he’d actually expected this, he heard the command to clear and holster his pistol, obeyed it, and trudged a few feet to the next position, for the second string of twenty-five-yard chickens. He missed the first, then bore down and forced himself to breathe correctly, take his time, focus on the front sight while holding so that the chickens appeared to be standing on it, and hit all four of those remaining. His shots were hitting now where they were supposed to, rather than too high.
The order came to shift to the next position. He collected his ammo box—Gretchen had taken the scorecard, which he’d planned to mark himself—and moved to the right, in front of the first string of steel pigs standing fifty yards away. “This time,” she told him, “remember to aim at the bottom edge of the bellies. And Emerson...”
For the first time, he turned to face her, a barbarian maiden with long hair streaming in a gentle breeze, bare arms, many-pocketed shooting vest, and gunbelt slanting across her hips. In both hands she held a huge pair of binoculars. “Yes?”
She grinned. “Remember to take your time. It isn’t a race.”
He nodded and turned back to the pigs. That was his problem with this game. If he could slow down, let his arms rest, he could double his usual score. The trouble always came within the soft, warm cloud of concentration, when his sense of time altered, and seconds seemed like minutes. But he’d try.
The first pig went down with a ferocious, satisfying clang and a cloud of dust. Patterned after a wild javelina of the West American desert, the pigs were heavier than the chickens, although they still vanished abruptly from their stands when hit. Gretchen told him he’d connected dead center, which at this range was acceptable. The second pig disappeared like the first, another center hit, but he missed the third because he’d hurried it. Now he took two breaths between shots, oxygenating blood, clearing vision and mind, letting his arms rest as the Grizzly hung in front of him. When he raised it again, it seemed to float, as it had before, and seek the target by itself. Wishing the trigger could pull itself, he used every scrap of self-discipline he had, took the pull up gradually, felt the hesitation, then the recoil of the weapon as it reared back and spat hot, copper-jacketed lead in one direction and hot, empty brass in the other.
The fourth pig clanged to the ground as he heard a startled yelp from Gretchen’s direction. He didn’t dare look, but apparently the hot case had found the open V-shape of her vest. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. She never seemed to learn to wear a shirt beneath it. Suppressing a grin which could get him killed—or at least threatened—he aimed at the last pig and knocked it down. With Gretchen’s coaching, he cleared all five pigs in the second string.
And now it got difficult. It wasn’t that the turkeys, at seventy-five yards, were further away. Rams stood at one hundred and were easier to hit. The turkeys weren’t small. Emerson, along with every other silhouette shooter he knew, believed the problem was their shape, a grotesque oval pitched at about forty-five degrees, which bore no relationship to the picture made by his rectangular sights. Like every other silhouette shooter he knew, he’d adjusted his sights so that the bullet would go exactly where he was aiming, at the apparent center of the turkey’s irregular mass.
He missed the first one. He missed the second and decided it wasn’t the turkeys or his gun. The damned things intimidated him and he’d been thinking about them all week, as he did every week before a match. He took his time—he’d hurried his first shots, probably with the idea of getting the turkeys over with—steadied down with help from Gretchen, took several deep breaths, and reviewed the fundamentals.
He caught the third turkey on the tail. It spun end for end, and for a moment he thought it wasn’t going to fall. When it did, he went through the same discipline as with the previous shot, hit the fourth turkey dead center, and dead-centered the fifth. It was the first time he’d hit three turkeys in a row.
In the second string, he hit four turkeys in a row.
At last ten rams confronted him. The mostly rectangular targets standing one hundred yards off seemed more difficult than ever before, perhaps because he was aware of how well he’d done on the turkeys and was now afraid of relaxing the discipline that had taken him this far. Although he wasn’t keeping count, he knew he’d shot better, so far, than ever before. Gretchen helped him, reminding him to breathe, focus on his front sight, squeeze the trigger, and follow through—to try, although it was impossible, to maintain the relationship between the sights and the target after the Grizzly had gone off. Over and over she told him, “Remember to take your time. It isn’t a race.”
Emerson wrapped his right hand around the grip, his index finger on the trigger guard until he was ready to fire. He wrapped his left hand around the right, his right thumb on the safety, his left on the slidestop to locate his hands correctly and against the small chance that either control might operate under the substantial recoil and spoil his shot. The hammer was cocked as a result of chambering his first round. He breathed, raised the Grizzly, and squeezed the trigger. The Grizzly bellowed. The lag between its discharge and the impact was perceptible. The ram seemed to hang in the air a moment before it toppled backward in a cloud of dust. Emerson calmed himself for the next shot.
And missed, and missed again. Even as he missed the third time, Gretchen didn’t alter the tone of her voice or anything she said. He understood the principles and it was up to him to follow them. Most weapons, sighted for center hits on the seventy-f
ive-yard turkeys, must be aimed at the uppermost edge of the rams. Emerson’s shots, according to his spotter, were high, missing the rams by less than an inch.
He missed the last ram in the string and noticed, as he drew the empty magazine, that his hands were shaking. Scolding himself—it was only a game, after all, and the reward for winning was kept small and symbolic to make sure it stayed a game—he moved to the next position, breathing deeply and trying to relax. He loaded five rounds into the empty magazine. “Concentrate, Emerson,” Gretchen whispered. “Don’t look at the front sight, be in it.”
The trouble was, the sight covered the target. He could see when he was shooting low. He couldn’t see when he was shooting high, which gave him an idea. This time, as he raised the gun, he let the thinnest possible edge of the ram’s back show above the bright red sight. That might make him shoot a trifle low, but it was better than missing altogether. He had to let the gun down without firing and try again, but when he reacquired the sight picture he squeezed the trigger and was rewarded by a clang and the sight of the first ram in the string toppling with a majestic slowness which lent Gretchen’s voice a worried tone.
“Okay for windage, Emerson, but that was pretty low in the belly.”
For the first time, he replied. “At least I hit it.”
Emerson’s second shot repeated his first, the concentration, the fine line above the front sight, the pull, the clang, the slow fall, the cloud of dust. What he didn’t notice was the small crowd of shooters behind him who’d finished their own courses of fire and were staying to watch. Somebody had been keeping count.
He nearly wasted his third shot keeping that fine black line consistent with previous shots. Before he put pressure on the trigger, he realized his front sight was blurry. He-released the trigger, lowered the gun, breathed before he raised it and fired, knocking over the third ram. He missed the fourth, and the low groan behind him made him aware he had an audience. That, and the fact that he’d never hit the last ram in a string, made him more nervous than ever. In a way, it helped, forced him to relax and follow every step in the discipline.
The fifth ram fell to the Grizzly. Gretchen squealed and her arms were around his neck—a serious breach of range discipline—before the command to cease fire had been given. She turned him around, put her soft, warm mouth on his, and kissed him hard and deeply—he was shocked to discover that you could do that with your tongue—before she finally let him go and stood back.
“Congratulations, Emerson,” she told him breathlessly. “You’ve just tied the range record!”
Something Wonderfully Absurd
If the American people ever discover the extent to which the broadcast media have lied to them about their own lives and the world around them, there won’t be a television studio or network building left standing above the ashes.
—Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class
Emerson didn’t know what to think.
More accurately, he didn’t know what to feel. Naturally, he was pleased with his shooting prowess this morning. The local club would write it down in their books as a “29x40”—as well, according to the match director, as anyone on Pallas had ever done. Emerson was only getting started as a marksman and perhaps he’d do even better someday. Of course it was equally possible that this was the best he’d ever shoot. But he’d never have another first kiss from Gretchen Singh—or from any other girl—and that’s what he’d remember about this day for the rest of his life.
Afterward, at an unhurried pace, he and the girl headed home through the little town lying on the western shore of Lake Selous. At one end of the single unpaved street stood the statue of William Wilde Curringer, larger than life exactly as the man himself had been by all accounts—before he’d screwed his ultralight aircraft into the ground close to this very spot. Otherwise, it was difficult to tell what Curringer had been like from this bronze simulacrum, cast from the same native Pallatian tin and copper Emerson worked with every day in the machine shop where he’d been employed for the last six months.
They waved at a passerby they both knew. Tyr May, Brody’s assistant, also worked at his family’s general store and taught Tae Kwon Do at the bank after hours in his spare time. May grinned knowingly at them and waved back. Except for occasional evenings when, for some unfathomable female reason, Gretchen insisted on going into town alone, she and Emerson had been together practically their every waking hour.
For a small town with only one street, Curringer was a noisy place, filled with people coming and going from here to there on foot, punctuated by an occasional rare motor vehicle. The town stood on a rounded spit of elevated land which didn’t quite qualify as a peninsula, although it was surrounded on three sides by Lake Selous. Seyfried Road, stretching past the shooting range northwest of town toward the southwest fringe where Mrs. Singh lived, curved around to follow the outline of the small cape everybody called Point Cooper. Apparently the city’s founders had planned for the statue of Curringer to stand in the center of things, but it hadn’t worked out that way. The southern half of the town had grown so much faster that the statue stood at one end, while the other was marked by the oil well pumping away in the middle of the street. From what he knew of the man, Emerson thought Curringer would have liked that.
Curringer had been an individual of substance in more ways than one—“portly,” Emerson’s mother would have called him. His heavily moustached face above a broad expanse of vest, tie, and coat cast its benign gaze directly through the etched-glass front doors of one of the town’s trio of what Brody referred to as “houses of swell repute.” Neither Emerson’s meager budget—he’d begun paying rent to Mrs. Singh almost immediately, along with payments he made each week for the Grizzly—nor his own view of the world afforded him opportunity to discover for himself whether the Nimrod’s proprietor was correct in that assessment.
Flanking Galena’s, the establishment Curringer was fated to admire in perpetuity, were Doc Sheahan’s office, which offered medical and dental services to both human and animal clients, and May’s Dry Goods, one of two general mercantiles. All were on the western, inshore side of the street. On the other side of the street stood Baldy’s, the town’s only barbershop (most men on Pallas appeared to prefer beards and those who had hair wore it rather long), and the White Rose Tattoo, one of Brody’s three competitors. A vacant lot lay between them, past which Emerson and Gretchen looked out over the lake, only half aware that they were doing so. Emerson was thinking for the first time in a long while about the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project and of the family he’d left behind there.
“You couldn’t see it, Emerson, even if it weren’t for the curvature of the asteroid,” Gretchen observed gently. “Lake Selous is nearly seventy miles across at this point.”
He turned to her and grinned. “Reading my mind again, are you? Well, my fine, feathered telepath, it’s ninety-four kilometers, almost another fifty miles, from the Rimfence to the Residential compound, in addition. And much, much further off than that in some ways. I was just wondering what my mother and father would think about this morning.” He gave the holstered weapon hanging at his thigh a fond, familiar slap and sighed. “Somehow I doubt that they’d be proud of me.”
“Oh.” Her feelings sounded a bit hurt. She thought he’d meant the kiss. Emerson glanced up and saw that she’d done it to him again—she was joking with him.
He laughed. “All right, have it your own way, then: that, too. My family—my people—can be extremely prudish in some ways, by your Outsider standards.” He hooked a thumb back toward Galena’s as they passed its garish false front. “In a million years, they’d never know what to make of a place like that, for instance.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “And do you?”
Inwardly, he cringed. She was getting ready to embarrass him again. He ought to know the signs by now. “I think I do. You people on the Outside are completely free—supposed to be, at least—to do whatever you want with your own lives, as
long as you don’t hurt the other people around you, isn’t that it?”
For some reason she looked genuinely hurt this time, although the expression quickly faded. “Well, whatever it lacks in philosophical rigor,” she replied blandly, “it makes up for in other ways.” Abruptly she asked, “Are you a virgin, Emerson?”
“Unh...” Straight to the solar plexus. He stopped walking. Damn it, she’d done it again, even though he’d been braced for it this time. A good deal later, it would occur to him that the proper reply would have been, “Are you?”
They glided on in self-conscious silence, Emerson unaware that Gretchen had embarrassed herself as well as her favorite victim. As they reached the actual middle of the town, following the curve of the street around its sharpest bend, they took in the familiar sight of Aloysius Brody’s Nimrod Saloon and Gambling Emporium. Parked directly in front of it, taking up a great deal of space in the narrow road, was one of the rollabouts from the Project, the very machine, in fact, that Emerson had stowed away on to get here. Consulting his mental calendar, he was mildly perplexed. This was Saturday, the wrong day for the vehicle to make its produce delivery to the Nimrod. Although the schedule wasn’t written in stone, it usually came around the middle of the week.
“So much for my plan,” Gretchen told him, visibly grateful for a reason to change the subject, “to show you off and shout your praises at the Nimrod. Aloysius will be busy, and I’ll bet you’re not terribly anxious to see anyone from back home.”
He shook his head. “One of your father’s books says that in the Middle Ages, if a serf ran off and stayed gone a year and a day, he was free. I’m about three weeks past that, but I’m not sure the Chief Administrator respects the custom.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t give a damn if he loses one troublemaking peasant—maybe nobody does. He’s got ten thousand more.”
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