Starliner(53)

Reed looked at Da Silva. They stepped through, into the gallery, themselves.

A party of K'Chitkans had taken the gallery ahead of Reed's party. They were still excited, bobbing their heads and chirping to one another in simultaneous cacophony as they waved their down-covered arms. When the humans appeared, the bird-folk bowed formally and exited through the hologram, still gabbling.

"Wouldn't think they could handle guns meant for men with those short arms," Da Silva said.

"Needs must when the Devil drives, friend," Wade said. "I recall firing a Zweilart cavalryman's gun once, with a curled stock and a bore I could stick my arm down. I was so keyed up under the circumstances that I didn't feel the recoil, even though it knocked me flat on my fundament. I jumped right up and let go with the other barrel."

"There's a story there, I shouldn't wonder," Reed said, glancing at the ceiling.

The interior of the shooting gallery was almost entirely a holographic construct. An autoserver by the door held a selection of rifles, shotguns, and energy weapons which it provided when a passenger presented his ticket for identification. The "weapons" weren't real, but they were full weight and the shooter could set them for any desired level of flash, bang and recoil.

"What's your choice, Wade?" Dewhurst said gleefully. "Don't believe they've got Zweilart hand-cannons here, but a black powder 8-bore ought to be pretty similar, don't you think?"

The gallery had scores of possible backgrounds. The scenery which the K'Chitkans had chosen was modeled on the veldt of southern Africa with a profusion of life unseen since the 19th-century. Elephants, zebras, and antelope of many varieties paced back and forth in the middle distance, but the score displayed in letters of light above the counter was entirely of lions: 117 of them.

Dewhurst handed the immense double rifle to Wade. "No, no—"Wade said with a gentle smile. A black-maned lion leaped from behind the thornbush an apparent hundred meters away and began bounding toward the men.

"I'm truly sorry," Wade said, his back to the target, "but I absolutely can't shoot under these—"

The holographic lion made a final spring and vanished in the air.

"—conditions."

"Jungle?" Reed offered. He touched the control panel on the counter. Lush foliage of green light replaced the holographic bush. A snake thirty meters long slithered through the air, gliding around treetrunks on its flattened ribcage.

"Or ice cap?" Jungle flashed into a wasteland in which snow-covered blocks alternated with wedges of blue ice, shattered and overturned as the glacier that spawned it broke up in a bay just deep enough not to freeze to the sea floor. A creature humped toward the viewers across the irregular surface. Occasionally it bared yellow tusks.

"'No' generally means 'no' when Dickie uses the word, fellows," Belgeddes said. There was enough of an edge in his voice that Reed cleared the display, leaving only a large, circular room with gray walls.

"That wasn't Earth, was it?" Dewhurst said, blinking toward where the last creature had been before the projectors shut off.

"Bifrost," Wade said. "A sea devil, though the real ones are usually shot from the air."

Belgeddes clucked his tongue against his palate. "You got yours on foot, Dickie," he said.

"I suppose this just isn't real enough for you, is that it, Wade?" said Da Silva.

"Oh, not that, friend," the tall old man protested. "Quite the contrary, in fact. It's far too real. A setting like this and a gun in my hands, well—too many memories, you see. I don't want to live them again."

"Kindly thought you fellows had, though," Belgeddes said.

"Doesn't bother you to talk about it though, I notice," Dewhurst said, looking up at a corner of the ceiling.

"Not the same thing, friend," Wade replied. He handed back the replica 8-bore. "Talk isn't the real thing, you know."

Reed snorted. "That the three of us know quite well."

Dewhurst offered the rifle to Belgeddes. "Here," he said. "Do you fancy a try?"

Belgeddes threw up both hands in mock horror and said, "Heavens, no! Palling around with Dickie, I've made an effort, but I was absolutely hopeless. Isn't that so, Dickie?"

Wade chuckled. "'Fraid it is, yes. When Tom's got a rifle in his hands, the safest place to be is in front of the target."

"Well, since we've got the gallery anyway . . ." Reed said. He touched a button on the control panel. The empty room became a reed-choked riverbank. A bipedal "lizard" the size of a cow darted past, glancing toward the humans.

"Hobilo," Reed said in satisfaction. He drew a modern rifle with a fat magazine of rocket-assisted projectiles from the counter's stores. "Unless this disturbs you, Wade?"