Wagers of Sin

by Robert Asprin

  Using that diary as a guide, they'd plotted out this madcap adventure and actually expected not only to find and rescue one or more of the smashed skeletons, but to get the bones back through the Wild West Gate and uptime to the museum affiliated with their university.

  Margo was glad they'd had enough sense to take her advice and get some good instruction on how to use whatever they'd brought along, but that did not mean she wanted to practice with them.

  Come on, Margo, bear up! Maybe if I take that farthest lane? If it's not reserved already, it ought to do. The lanes were sometimes reserved in advance for a scout who was planning to push an unexplored gate and wanted to learn to use a nice, little hide-out gun. It was a practice Kit disapproved of—and a habit he had very carefully made certain she never picked up, but scouts were independent agents, so to speak, so each made his own decisions on what to take downtime. Kit had warned her there were a few really marginal scouts who routinely broke what he considered to be the sacred rules of scouting.

  Carrying a gun downtime into an unknown time and place, where any gun might be an anachronism, wasn't stupid. It was suicidal.

  She didn't spot anyone else on the range, though, which bolstered her hopes. The paleontologists were talking excitedly while dumping gun cases onto Ann's benches. Lots of gun cases. Margo winced at the way they just casually bounced the stuff around, allowing them to slide to the floor, banging them together, using the muzzle end of a thin leather case to shove a larger, much heavier case farther down the bench to make room for the rifle with its now-possibly-ruined front sight. They'd be learning about sighting in and zeroing rifles, or Margo didn't know Ann Vinh Mulhaney.

  When Ann noticed that only one of her five students was opening the gun cases for inspection, while four of the group had their attention directed elsewhere, she glanced around. Then smiled so brightly Margo's eyes misted a little.

  "Oh, it's you," Ann laughed. "I thought maybe Marilyn Monroe's ghost had jiggled in or something."

  That statement caused several reddened faces and sudden diligence with as-yet-unloaded gear. Margo's face had gone terribly hot. Marilyn Monroe, the twentieth-century sex goddess? That, Margo would never be, but she enjoyed the compliment just the same. Ann nodded her over. Margo would have loved a long heart-to-heart with Ann—but now was not the time.

  Oh, well, she thought as she headed resolutely toward them, at least I'll finally get to see what firearms these "learned" idiots brought along. Making the best of it, Margo covered the intervening space with a cheery, "Hi, Ann! Hope things have been fantastic."

  Ann laughed and gave her a swift—hard—hug, then stepped back. She had to look up a fair ways to find Margo's eyes—and Margo was not even remotely tall. Ann was just tiny.

  "Yes, they have been. Utterly and completely fantastic. I'm going to have another kid in about seven months." She patted her belly gently. "So no wrestling," she chuckled. "Anyway, that's Sven's forte, not mine." Her eyes crinkled in a fond smile as she studied Margo. "Just look at you, girl. You're still growing! I thought so, earlier, but the way Malcolm was mauling you, it was hard to tell."

  Margo's cheeks flushed again, hotter than before. The ring on her finger tugged downward, it was so heavy. She knew Ann had noticed it the moment she'd walked into the range.

  "Good!" Ann decided, hands planted on hips in her usual stance. "You look better with some meat on those bones and some color in your cheeks, you scrawny little Irish alley cat. One thing's for sure, that baleful green glare hasn't changed. Not a bit."

  Margo grinned. "How're the wagers going?"

  Ann blinked. "Wagers?"

  "About how soon I'll be in your condition."

  "Oh, that wager." Ann's eyes crinkled again. "Hot and heavy betting, both for and against. Everyone knows how determined you are about your profession, but everyone also knows that Malcolm Moore is a very, um, how to put it—intense individual when it comes to getting what he wants."

  They grinned at one another. Then Margo noticed the paleontologists, who stood listening in silence, several of them round-eyed with shock. Aw, rats. Here I am doing just what I said I wouldn't do.

  Ann, perhaps guessing some of what was happening inside her head, just touched the back of Margo's hand with her fingertips, bringing her back to the reality outside Margo's thoughts. Margo blinked. Ann asked gently, "Have you come to brush up with a lesson? If you did, you'll have to wait a while. Or do you just want to brush up with a stack of targets and whatever you care to shoot?"

  Margo nodded. "Thought I'd try a Winchester model 73 first. Malcolm's taking us to Denver, so I thought I might as well tackle period rifles. I'll try a model 76 Centennial later."

  "Just those two?"

  Margo let go a genuine, healthy laugh. "And who taught me to carry only the right weapon for the job? This is just this morning's practice session. Tomorrow morning I have a date with handguns of every imaginable design and manufacture, just so long as they were invented before 1885; then Sven gets a crack at me before lunch."

  Anne's eyes brightened. "Oooh, can I come watch? I don't have a class scheduled . . ."

  Margo just rolled her eyes. "I can't stop you. Besides, I might need help crawling out of the gym."

  Ann laughed heartily. "Okay, imp. It's a deal." Ann's eyes sparkled with anticipation. "You're head's on straight, kid, even if you were stuck in an uptime college for six months. A college I'm certain does not have a shooting range."

  "Are you kidding?" It came out sour as early Minnesota apples, still green and hard as walnuts on the tree. "A shooting range? No way real." That new bit of uptime slang hadn't filtered down to La-La Land yet, given the startlement in Ann's eyes.

  "They just outlawed metallic emery boards, for God's sake."

  Ann shook her head, eyes dark with sorrow. "It's been lousy uptime for a long time. Why do you think we moved our family to Shangri-La Station?" She shivered at some memory she was unwilling to share, then sighed. "Well, you might as well get started. Use lane four, if you don't mind. I'm going to start the class on basic safety before we move to pistol and rifle types. You know where the keys are, right?"

  Five sets of jaws dropped—again.

  Margo grinned back. "Yep. I even"—she dropped a wicked wink—"know where you hide the pole guns and laser-guided dart guns, never mind the really cool stuff. Hey, is that Browning Automatic Rifle working again? I really liked shooting it before it malfunctioned." She considered pride versus humility in front of this bunch of geeks, and decided on humility—hoping it would be a lesson to them. "And I'm still utterly mortified that I, uh, caused it to malfunction last time I used it, then couldn't figure out how to machine a new part. Is it fixed yet? I did send the money to repair it." She batted pretty lashes and sounded wistful as a half-drowned kitten.

  Ann just laughed. "Oh, you're impossible as ever, imp. Weepy one second, hellbound-for-leather the next. Go on and get whatever you need and let me get back to paying customers." Her smile took any possible sting out of the words. But she had not answered Margo's question about the B.A.R. Rats!

  Before she left, Margo glanced at the rifles and pistols that had been quietly laid out on the benches while they spoke. Uh-oh. Thought so. Smart—but stupid. Typical academicians. You'd think they'd eventually change.

  Margo found the keys right off, then unlocked a largish room built inside the range itself. Made entirely of steel four inches thick in every dimension, with a heavy door whose hingepins were on the inside, it contained firearms of literally every time period from their invention in the 1300s onward. Door still open, she half heard Ann say lightly to her new students, "Why did I . . . Margo . . . keys? Oh, that's only because . . . time scout. Still in . . . already very good at her job. Her first scouting adventure . . . very dangerous . . . unstable gate. But she got everybody out but one . . . malaria."

  Margo squirmed—all 'eighty-sixers knew who'd pulled her bacon out of the fire (literally) on that trip; but she was still young and vain
enough to wish she could've seen the expressions on those stuffy academic faces as it registered: a woman time scout. She grinned—then suddenly sucked in air as a horrifying thought sent her belly plummeting groundward.

  Oh, damn! She figured she had about three months before those five idiots out there blabbed to every uptime newsie in the business that a woman time scout by the name of Margo Smith was working out of TT-86. She'd be swarmed over by reporters, particularly the tabloid kind. And they were nearly impossible to shake off once they got interested in you.

  Now she'd never get any studying done. She abruptly understood her grandfather's uncompromising, lifelong hatred of news reporters. Well, Margo, my girl, just make the best of it and maybe you'll build up a reputation big enough to satisfy even your ego.

  She grinned at herself, having learned quite a few things about Margo Smith this day she'd never even guessed existed, and plucked a beautiful Winchester Model 73 .44-40 from the rifle rack, automatically checking to be certain it wasn't loaded. She laid it carefully aside, muzzle pointed away from the open door. She found ammo for a Model 76 Centennial in .45-75 Winchester, remembering vaguely that Ann carried a couple of the rifles in stock. She discovered a beauty of a lever-action Winchester Model 76 Centennial—clearly original—which was very similar to the 73, but beefier and in a more powerful caliber. It, too, was safely unloaded. The Centennial was for serious shooting. She'd have to remember to ask Ann to reserve them for the Denver trip.

  The size of the 76 caused Margo to remember Koot van Beek's rifle and that great, horrid Cape Buffalo. That was a barely scabbed over memory, too. She hastily snagged the Centennial, along with a modern cleaning kit with brushes for both rifles. Never, ever again would Margo travel down a gate without the right weapons close at hand.

  Putting aside the memory, Margo carted all the items to an empty shooting bench on lane four. Ann glanced up and nodded approvingly, her goggles in one hand, her ear muffs slid down around her neck, in "lecture mode."

  "Let me know when you're ready to go 'hot,' Margo," she called down the line.

  Margo nodded and curiously studied the beginning of the lesson as she prepared to practice. It looked from here like the paleontologists were giving Ann a very difficult time.

  One of them—Margo's electronic earmuffs picked up conversations from an astonishing distance—demanded in a voice that would have frozen lava, "We are not renting and wearing this crap! Why would we possibly need eye and hearing protection? This is supposed"—the word dripped venom—"to be a trial run for our field work. We'll have none of this junk downtime! Will we?"

  Margo continued shamelessly eavesdropping—how else did one survive in a cruel world, particularly when one was studying to become a real scout whose job was to overhear and remember just such conversations? Ann was clearly working hard not to shout obscenities in Vietnamese and Gaelic at her recalcitrant pupils.

  As Margo's first, lamentable lessons had shown, while Ann could instruct willing students to a high degree of skill, she couldn't instill intelligence. Result? Some customers refused to listen, went downtime improperly armed and/or trained, and usually came back needing a hospital—or staying downtime in a long pine box.

  Time Tours, Inc., of course, liked to keep that kind of publicity to a strict minimum, but the company executives—looking for ever more gate profit—did nothing about requiring weapons or self-defense training before allowing a tourist to go downtime. Lessons with the terminal's pro's were strictly on a voluntary basis.

  Maybe she ought to suggest required classes to Bull Morgan. She snorted. He'd no doubt tell her it was a tourist's business to get training, not his, and if they were stupid enough to go downtime without it, they deserved whatever they got. Besides, Bull Morgan would never pass such a rule, because La-La Land was a place where folks fought, ignored, and thumbed noses at rules, rather than making new ones.

  At any rate, it looked like Ann could use some help corralling this bunch of jerks into listening instead of tossing their academic credentials around like spiked morning stars. She sighed and left everything on her chosen bench, muzzles pointed downrange, then plunged in.

  "Hi, guys!" Margo called, friendly-like, baiting her hook with a honeyed voice. Margo smiled sweetly, a dire warning to every person who knew her well—Ann actually winced—then she swept off shooting glasses and protective earmuffs and shook out vibrant hair.

  "See these?" She held out the earmuffs, determined to give this her best effort. "These are hearing protectors. On a firing range, you wear them. Period. You can lose most of your hearing mighty fast unless you put hearing protection on before somebody starts target practice."

  "How would you know?"

  One man she couldn't quite see shot the question in her general direction.

  She shrugged. "Because I lost part of my hearing in this ear on a deadly little street in Whitechapel one bitter cold morning in 1888."

  Silence reigned.

  She didn't add that Malcolm had done the shooting. But the hearing loss, slight as it was, was genuine. She added, "I lost more when an unstable gate opened up and I fell through it right into The Battle of Orleans. Joan of Arc and some really pissed off English knights and archers and some even angrier French nobles were taking a beating and hating it. Orleans was a really intense battle. Damn near got myself killed—twice—before I was back safe in the station's infirmary.

  "Then some more of my hearing went bye-bye in South Africa, running from sixteenth-century Portuguese traders. I got caught in the middle of a firefight. Some friends of mine who'd figured out I was in trouble had come to help and I got caught between them and a whole, unwashed mass of murderous traders who were really riled up. They'd already decided to burn my assistant and me at the stake."

  Margo managed to hold back the near-instinctive shudders such memories brought—and in suppressing them, Margo understood her grandfather more than she'd ever believed possible. It was little wonder he'd turned her down so rudely in the Down Time Bar & Grill that first day.

  "Believe me, black powder guns are loud. You do want to be able to hear when you get downtime?" Margo questioned sweetly.

  "As for these," she wiggled the clear, wrap-around shooting glasses between two fingers, "even a novice should be able to figure out what they're for. I do take it that nobody wants to go blind?"

  Nobody answered, despite an angry stirring near the back of the group. Margo shrugged. "They're your eyes and ears. You got replacements lined up for 'em, go right ahead without the safety equipment. But then," she smiled sweetly again, "I'm wagering you're just the teeniest bit brighter than that. By the time you've earned a master's, never mind a Ph.D, you've supposedly learned what's irrelevant and beneath notice from what's not only correct, but essential. Right?"

  Behind the paleontologists, Ann had covered her lips with both hands to hold in laughter. Tears appeared in her eyes when five heads nodded like marionettes in sync.

  "Thanks, Margo, for taking your time to help out. I'm sure these folks will save their ears from the noise you're about to generate!" Ann added pointedly. The group sheepishly picked up its safety equipment and began donning it.

  Margo retrieved her Winchester Model 73—the most popular rifle in the Old West—from her own shooting bench. She loaded the Model 73 and called out, "Ann, I'm going hot!" She then lined up her first shot.

  BOOM!

  To her right, all five paleontologists jumped, despite the dampening qualities of their hearing gear.

  BOOM! A little high and right, she muttered to herself, correcting her aiming point rather than adjusting the sights, using a method called "Kentucky windage," where you simply moved the sight picture to the other side of the target the same distance you missed or until you simply "felt right." The third BOOM! put the bullet exactly where she wanted it: inside the ten ring. She finished the magazine, pleased that the only shots outside the nine ring were those two initial placement shots. Didn't throw a single round! And that, despi
te months without even picking up a gun. She continued with her practice, nonetheless.

  After a while, Margo smiled at her latest target and put the rifle down. She was tempted to return to the group, if only to see what sort of firearms they had, but was reluctant to disturb Ann's class any more than she already had. As if divining her interest, Ann looked up and waved Margo over.

  Upon her arrival, Ann motioned almost imperceptibly for Margo to hold her own inspection. Margo realized this inspection—and everything that went with it—was, in fact, a lesson Ann was using to judge her improvements, her judgment. She took a good, long look at the neatly arranged firearms. She confirmed at a glance what she'd suspected earlier.

  "Mmmm . . . they do have some nice Winchester Model 94's here, don't they, Ann? It really is too bad." She glanced over toward the paleontologists. "You're gonna have to ditch 'em, every last one. Anachronistic as he-heck. For one thing, the whole feed system on a 94's different from the Model 73 and 76."

  A deep, angry voice behind the knot of grad students demanded, "What does that have to do with anything? Standing right here they look just alike!"

  Hooo, boy. Ivy League and pissed. Not good.

  She shook her head. "Sorry, but no, they don't look alike."

  "Not at all," Ann chimed in, startling Margo at first until she saw the tiniest bit of a dip from Ann's left eyelid. She felt better immediately.

  "Now," Ann was saying, "where you're going, some folks are going to see those Model 94's up-close enough to notice."

  "Can't be avoided," Margo added, enjoying the see-saw rhythm as they took turns. Maybe if I'm desperate for something to do on weekends, I could try my hand at teaching. I've got pretty good credentials, after all.