Pallas (13 page)

“Yes, and to their numbers you can add the innumerable bankrupts—”

“The countless automobile thieves—”

“The ex-convicts—”

“The draft dodgers—”

“The bill evaders—”

“Ah, Billy Vader, Darth’s younger brother an’ a good friend of mine. An’ don’t forget the tax strikers—”

“And the husbands and fathers ducking child support—”

“Not t’mention the curse of alimony.”

“In short,” observed Mrs. Singh, “the antisocial scum—”

“Or the individualistic cream—”

“Depending on who’s telling the story.”

“—of the Earth’s vast, teemin’ population.”

Mrs. Singh laughed. “Within a year, that old-time movie ditty ‘What Was Your Name in the States?’ had become this asteroid’s informal a
n
them. Why, I believe they still start their broadcasting day with it at the radio station in Curringer.”

Emerson nodded enthusiastically. He’d heard the song many times and wondered what was behind it.

“Pallas”—Brody was suddenly very serious—” was t’be a place for renewed hope under a system—”

“Mirelle Stein’s Hyperdemocratic Principle?”
Emerson suggested. That, too, from what he’d been told about it, seemed like a self-evidently good idea to him, although he was still waiting, perhaps a little cynically, to hear more before he said so.

Brody scrutinized the boy, then nodded, “—of mutual tolerance an’ free individual enterprise.”

“And so the very first place-name to appear on any ‘official’ map of the asteroid Pallas,” declared Emerson, still repeating what he’d learned in school, ‘was Curringer?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Singh told him, “but it wasn’t because he was the man who’d made everything possible.”

“It wasn’t?” That was disappointing and confusing. William Wilde Curringer was rapidly becoming a personal hero to Emerson, the first the boy had ever had.

Mrs. Singh sighed, thinking back again. “No, it wasn’t. It was because, in the year 2010, at age seventy-four—”

“Durin’ a routine aerial seedin’ operation in which the stubborn man insisted on participatin’—”

“—he died there in an ordinary plane crash.”

Brody shook his head, as if to clear it of the unpleasant memory. His hand strayed to the parcel he’d brought with him, and it seemed to remind
him of something. Not for the last time, Emerson noticed that his accent seemed to fade as he grew more serious.

“All that t’one side, young fellow, it’s time y’gave some thought t’ what ye’ll do now t’keep body an’ soul together. You’re your own man here on the Outside, just as you’d hoped to be, but the liberty to steer your own course necessarily encompasses the liberty to sit down and starve t’death, or it isn’t liberty at all, just the same old contradiction we left back on Earth: an illusion involuntarily subsidized by others—purchased, as it were, at the price of their liberty. There are some as might not mind that, but y’don’t look the type t’me.”

Emerson became serious, too. “I’m not, Mr. Brody.”

Brody smiled. “I’m that tempted t’believe ye, Mr.
Ngu
.”

Mrs. Singh explained the agreement she’d made with the boy, along with the fact that they’d already discussed the need to find him something more permanent and rewarding to do. Her voice and expression were kindly. “Is there anything you’re particularly interested in or feel you’re especially good at, Emerson?”

“Well,” Emerson gave it some thought, “my father said he was going to start me on soil preparation next season,” he replied. “That’s plowing and mulching and sowing. Everything’s organic. No chemicals. I was never very good at weeding or cultivating or insect control or harvesting, but they’re all I was ever taught.”

Brody frowned. “’Tis everything an’ all that I expected. But for any number of reasons that’ll be after makin’ themselves clear t’ye soon enough, y’couldn’t have picked a less desirable array of skills, me boy. I suppose that’s the point, though, in a way. Y’didn’t pick ’em, they were after bein’ picked for ye.”

“Isn’t there anything, anything at all?” Mrs. Singh was determinedly undeterred. “There must have been something, Emerson. Don’t boys have hobbies any more?”

“There was,” Emerson replied, “one other thing...” Haltingly at first—until he realized all over again that he was Outside, where an i
n
dividual was free to do whatever he liked as long as he didn’t hurt an
y
body else—he told them about the little crystal radio receiver he’d built in
secret from discarded trash.

Brody whistled and sat back. “Now I am well and truly impressed, given the handicaps y’had t’be operatin’ under. Emerson, me boy, I’ve a friend I’ll be after talkin’ to tonight—if I’m still talkin’ to him at all after the poker game—who runs the only garage in Curringer, meanin’ the only garage on the whole asteroid. If ye’re interested, he might try
ye
as an apprentice mechanic. What do y’say?”

“An apprentice mechanic?”
Emerson gulped, wondering if it was truly possible that someone would actually be willing to pay him to be turned loose with real tools and things to use them on. He was afraid to ask. “I’ll certainly try if he will.”

“Before we see to that, Aloysius”—Mrs. Singh astonished Emerson once again, this time by winking broadly at him—“we’ve got an even more serious problem on our hands. It seems that poor Emerson, here, comes to us socially naked and completely unable to provide for himself in the customary and proper manner. He doesn’t have a sidearm of his own, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had one.”

Brody laughed broadly. “Well, of course the boy doesn’t have a gun of his own, medear, comin’ from where he does. The only ones who have ’em out there are the uniformed thugs who run the place—an’ they’re probably all locked up in an arsenal t’which the distinguished former Senator has the only key. The thugs wouldn’t mind a bit—they greatly prefer torturin’ unarmed peasants with cattle prods.”

Brody lifted the package and placed it on the table with a thud that gave Emerson a good idea of how heavy it must be. “However, I anti
c
ipated the young man’s social embarrassment, and brought this out with me in case I liked the looks of him, which apparently I do. You’ll recall that Horatio left it t’me when he passed on, rest his gallant soul. For the life of me, I can’t think of a better use t’put it to.”

He painstakingly untied the age-stained string which held the plast
i
cized paper together and carefully
unwrapped
the contents. Inside the shallow nest formed by its protective wrapping of oily-looking brown paper lay an enormous, flat, L-shaped slab of greasy, dull-finished blue-black steel. At some points the monster was almost as thick as
Emerson’s slender wrist and no less than a quarter of a meter long.

It was the biggest pistol the suddenly terrified boy had ever imagined possible.

I have always assumed that before a boy leaves home his father makes sure that he has been taught the essential
skills of life, from proper personal hygiene to driving a
car. Marksmanship is certainly one of those skills...

—Jeff Cooper,
To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth

I
t weighed a kilogram and a half, unloaded. And the cartridges were the size of his thumb.

Like boys everywhere, and despite the self-consciously pacific u
p
bringing he’d received at the Project, Emerson had somehow picked up enough firearms lore that he knew which end of a gun was which, what part to hold onto, and in a general way, what the trigger, sights, and hammer did. Beyond that, he was lost.

He watched with fascination as Brody pushed a striated button located behind the trigger on the left side of the thing and a silver box slid from the handle, containing seven enormous cartridges stacked one on top of another. Emerson counted them under his breath as, having laid the heavy pistol in his
lap,
Brody casually thumbed them off the top of the magazine into his free hand.

The next thing the man did was more amazing. Taking the gun in his right hand as if he were about to shoot—Emerson noticed that he rested his index finger alongside the squared loop encircling the trigger rather than on the trigger itself—he seized the top rear where a series of parallel grooves had been cut, and pulled back, thrusting his other hand forward. To the boy it seemed that the whole top half of the firearm slid backward and an eighth cartridge which had been inside somewhere popped out of a big square hole and fell into Brody’s lap.

Emerson
peered
eagerly past Brody’s shoulder, noticing how contact
with something—probably Horatio Singh’s holster—had worn the blue-black off the edges and corners of the metal, creating highlights. On one side, on the moving part Brody told him was the “slide,” three i
n
terlocking hexagons containing the letters
L.A.R.
had been engraved, along with the inscription
“GRIZZLY WIN MAG.”
On the other side, a charging bear was depicted beside the words
“MARK I.”
Below, on what Brody called the frame, in smaller letters, Emerson read
“L.A.R. MFG. INC., WEST JORDAN, UT. 84084 U.S.A.”
and what he guessed was a serial number.

Brody picked up one of the shiny yellow cylinders and held it between his thumb and forefinger. At one end a groove had been cut to produce a sort of rim. At the other, a copper-colored spheroid was truncated to expose a tip of dull gray lead. The man tipped it over so that Emerson could see the gaping hole in the end.

“I’ve often thought it odd that in the midst of the twenty-first century we’re usin’ essentially the same weapons as our ancestors of two cent
u
ries ago. The last major invention in the field was the self-contained metallic cartridge, in the 1870s, as I recall.”

Mrs. Singh nodded.
“Earlier, counting rimfire.
Some military outfits use caseless cartridges.”

“T’be sure—as they did, for all practical purposes, in the Crimean War.
I suppose it’s because ye can defeat a laser with a chemical fog or reflective longjohns, an’ nobody’s ever developed a pocketable source powerful enough for particle beam weapons. Here, of course, firearms’re rugged enough not t’require repair too often, an’ simple enough that we can do it ourselves if need be.”

“This is a .45 magnum,” Brody turned to Emerson with a grin, “the world’s most powerful handgun cartridge—this world’s, anyway, unless me neighbor Nails Osborn, the bold an’ darin’ plumber, finally sent off for that .454 he always wanted. Lemme see now, y’probably think in the accursed Napoleonic system, so this’ll drive a fifteen-gram ho
l
low-pointed bullet, a bit better’n half an ounce, at somethin’ like four hundred twenty-seven meters per second—that’s some fifteen hundred kilometers an hour, about Mach one and a quarter—generatin’ almost
half a tonne of energy.”

He scooped the cartridges up and poured them into the pocket where he kept his cigars.

Mrs. Singh had been watching with an eye on Emerson. “Aloysius is right. The Grizzly belonged to
Horatio,
rest his soul, who left it to his best friend because it’s too much gat for me.” She lifted her apron, revealing a holster—and a smaller pistol—which she’d apparently been wearing all along. “My little 10 Millimeter Lite fills the larder with venison and smaller game well enough to suit me. Horatio wanted the extra power for elk and buffalo—and because he wanted the extra power. He was a man, after all. Men look at things pretty oddly.”

Brody laughed. “These are the gentlest loads that’ll operate the m
e
chanism. We wouldn’t be puttin’ a cannon like this in yer hands, me boy, except that it’s the spare sidearm available.
Each gun on this asteroid had t’be shipped up absent the knowledge, or over the mealy-mouthed o
b
jections, of many an Earthside government.
We’ve no firearms man
u
factory of our own.”

What stood out for Emerson were the words “in yer hands.” Were they actually going to let him touch it? Suddenly he knew what young Arthur must have felt having drawn the sword from the stone. He reached out and took the gun Brody offered.

Even emptied, and even in the kindly gravity of Pallas, it seemed impossibly heavy. Brody had let the slide travel forward again after drawing out the final cartridge. Somewhere during the process the hammer had been cocked, but he had gently lowered it before handing the Grizzly to the boy. Now Emerson grasped the big, rubber-sheathed ha
n
dle of the weapon with his right hand and the serrated portion at the rear of the slide with his left and tried to imitate what he’d seen. He wanted to know where that extra cartridge had come from.

“Take a look!” Brody exclaimed. “Nobody has to tell him t’check the chamber t’see whether it’s loaded! Cock the hammer, Emerson—keep yer finger off the trigger—it’ll make it easier t’get the slide back. Let me do this first, so ye’ll know y’did it right.”

He inserted the empty magazine in the grip.

Following instructions, Emerson strained at the massive pistol, pus
h
ing forward on the frame, as he’d seen Brody do, as he pulled back on the slide. His hands shook, but the slide retreated until he heard a metallic click as it locked back.

“Excellent, me boy!
That long lever on the side is to let the slide back down. But hold onto the barrel—” he pointed to the tube exposed at the front of the retracted slide “—an’ let it down gently. When there’s no cartridge in the top of the magazine t’slow it down, it’s kindlier to the sear an’ hammer.”

Emerson did as he was told, although his thumb had to stretch to reach the lever. The slide went forward smoothly against his fingers as they slid along the barrel. Imitating Brody again, he restrained the hammer with his right thumb and left index finger and pulled the trigger. Nothing ha
p
pened until Brody reached over, inserted a finger, and depressed what he called the “grip safety.” The hammer rolled forward, and Emerson handed the pistol over, grip first, to the man.

Mrs. Singh nodded approval. “What do you say we go out back for the rest of this? I don’t want to misjudge Emerson here, but I remember my first time real well and it’s likely to be easier on the walls and furniture in the long run.”

“As ye will, Henrietta,” Brody agreed.
“’Tis yer home an’ castle.
But it’s still rainin’.”

“We can stand on the porch. Horatio used to do that, especially just before he passed away. He had to give up hunting, but he kept his hand and eye sharp until the very end.”

“As well I remember.”

The two rose and led Emerson, as bewildered as he’d been so far, through the warm, colorful kitchen and out the back door onto the railed porch which ran all the way around the house. Rain obscured the hills in the distance and the eaves dripped noisily. It was a little chilly, he thought, but the air smelled wonderful.

Short steel pegs had been driven into one of the lathe-turned columns on either side of the back porch steps, and hanging on them were a number of objects that looked like the headphones worn by the driver of
the rollabout he’d stowed away on. Mrs. Singh took down three pairs, passed two to him and Brody, and put the third one over her ears. Both the older people already wore spectacles. They insisted that Emerson wear a pair of amber safety glasses.

She pointed to a bluff outcropping of soil and crumbling rock across the back of the yard, perhaps twenty meters away. “Take two or three of those plastic milk cartons I threw away this morning, Emerson, and stand them up on the side of that berm, will you? Their yellow color ought to stand out real nice.”

Emerson complied enthusiastically, although it was necessary for Mrs. Singh to explain to him that a berm was a long, raised mound of dirt. The rain had fallen off to a mere drizzle and he was hardly wet at all when he returned.

Brody gave him the most serious look his normally jolly face was capable of. “Now before we begin,
y’must have
Colonel Cooper’s Four Rules. Observe ’em and ye’ll live a long life an’ die in bed. Violate ’em an’ ye’ll either do
yerself
in or be done in by a flock of angry bystanders. D’ye
understand
what I’m sayin’?”

Emerson gulped. “I’m not sure.”

Brody shook his head. “He’s honest, at least. Very well, Rule One is
that y’must always assume
that all guns are always loaded.
Always.
Y’must never
assume
that one is not.
Never.”

“All right,” Emerson nodded. “That I understand—and I understand the reason, too. If you always assume that all guns are always loaded, then you’ll always treat them as if they were loaded, and nobody will ever get hurt.”

“Accidentally, anyway.”
Brody looked up at Mrs. Singh.
“A bright boy.
I believe we’ll let him live. Rule Two is that y’must never let the muzzle point at anything ye’re not willing t’destroy. Now, Rule Two-and-a-half—it almost oughta be a rule in itself—y’see this little lever here at the top of the left grip? That’s a thumb safety. An’ the little swinging widget I showed you earlier in the back of the handle is the grip safety. The good colonel, in his wisdom, entreats us t’place only guarded trust in safeties. They can fail.”

Emerson nodded again. “That’s a good rule.”

“In a universe operatin’ on Murphy’s Law, it is. Rule Three: keep yer finger off the trigger until yer sights are on the target. Obey that rule itself an’ ye’ll never
come
t’grief.”

“It’s hard to see how you could,” Emerson replied. “Why would a
n
yone ever want—
”

“Because they’re stupid, me boy.
An’ that sometimes even includes yours truly, who hasn’t led an entirely accident-free life.” He gave his prosthetic leg a thump. “The Law of Stupidity is the one phenomenon necessary to explain the small part of the universe Murphy doesn’t cover. Rule Four: y’must
be
sure of yer target, as well as what’s behind it. Never shoot at a sound, a shadow, or anything y’can’t identify positively—not even a presumably hostile gun flash.