In the second place, even if somebody did possess the accuracy posited by those stories, protracted gunfights rendered those skills irrelevant. Every single shot produced a cloud of gunpowder smoke, larger and more opaque than contemporary imaginations can possibly believe, the effect of any determined fusillade a curtain of haze that burned the eyes and obscured the position of the people firing on you. Hollywood provided clarity so audiences could tell who fired, who missed, who got wounded and who got killed, the very issues that were not always immediately clear to the real people who had stood on those dusty streets, fighting for their lives and helping to construct the lies that would be told about them. So that mythical gunfighter who could drill a hole through an ace of spades at fifty paces might not have been able to see the playing card at all.
Finally, the gunfight that ultimately made Wyatt Earp a legend was a most unusual day for him. He didn't have daily shootouts. His usual M.O., dealing with armed loudmouths, was to sneak up from behind and club them unconscious. It was dangerous and it was brutal and it minimized the number of dead bodies littering the streets of Tombstone, primarily by rendering far less likely the possibility that Earp himself would ever become one of them. It was also less than perfectly heroic and not exactly the kind of thing that builds legends; few dramatizations of his exploits acknowledge it at all.
Similarly, most of the stories about Malcolm Bell's quick thinking during the First Gunfight on the Moon turn him into some kind of crack-shot killing machine, up against one of the deadliest killers in the solar system.
I'm sorry, but that's not true either.
Ken Destry was a man addled by brain damage and suffering the organic after-effects of serious neurological malfunction. He was demented in the medical sense, his reflexes and capacity for abstract thought reduced to the absolute minimum possible for a man still remaining dangerous and mobile. Imagine a rabid dog, attacking everything that moves; it's dangerous enough, but it's also uncoordinated, confused, and in great pain. Similarly, Destry might not have known who he was, where he was, or even that his own life was in danger; he certainly hadn't recognized the one most important thing about the day, the thing that in a perfect world would have made him the legend and put his name on a par with all the great explorers of history. You want to be fair? On that day, there was no Ken Destry at all.
Hurtling from the cab of his barge for the second time in less than five minutes, Malcolm Bell had been determined to hit the ground in a controlled roll, the better to come up shooting.
It has not worked out that way.
Truth to tell, he's never been called upon to perform acrobatics of this sort in his moonsuit, and has completely misjudged both his landing and his duck-and-roll.
He hits the ground hard, his arms and legs flailing, his body rebounding off the sun baked lunar rock at an angle that leaves him airborne for a period that is probably only a second or two, but which his stressed mind experiences as long unbroken minutes. It is a miracle that he doesn't crack his faceplate or tear his suit or do himself so much damage inside that thin cocoon of life that Destry's desire to kill him will be reduced to sheer redundancy. He screams, braces himself in precisely the wrong way, and hurts himself more with his second landing than with his first.
Were this Earth, his slide across the loose Earth might do him some tactical good, by raising a cloud of dirt that would obscure his exact position even as it gives any enemy in sight a rough approximation. But this is the Moon. There's no air to slow the grit's return to the ground that birthed it. Ironically enough, Bell's bumpy landing is as clear to his unseen enemy as it would be to any bad guy in any Hollywood movie.
Bell has almost stopped sliding when he happens to see a rock about the size of his ungloved fist explode into gravel, less than a meter from his face.
He cannot tell where the shooter stands, so he does the best he can and attempts to roll. But the angle is wrong and the gear on his back is too bulky; it digs into the dirt and traps him on his side, a position that will take him precious seconds to escape. He sees another pair of impact points, one where his chest had been a second or so before, one hitting the dirt between his splayed legs. He knows, with absolute certainty, that he's blown it. That he's dead. That the next shot will impact his chest, or his faceplate, or the backpack that keeps him alive in this place but is still so bulky and unnatural and goddamned inconvenient that it's about to kill him anyway.
He knows that even firing is a waste of time. He has no idea where Ken Destry is. He has no time to aim. And last time he fired a weapon he was a lousy shot anyway. But one chance in a million of survival is better than absolutely none, and so he scans the landscape, looking for the shape of a man.
Miracle of miracles, he sees something about twenty meters away: the shape of Ken Destry, trudging toward him. It is not the gait of a healthy man. Destry's dragging one leg and hesitating before every step, as if needing to debate it first with the parliament of voices that must be vying for supremacy within his compromised brain. Bell would not be surprised to see Destry stiffen up and fall face down before narrowing the distance between them; but he feels a special madness of his own now, one that supersedes any fears he might have about base survival.
For a heartbeat, dancing on the edge of that madness, knowing that he must have cracked his skull in the fall, Bell gibbers. It's total nonsense syllabification, nothing more. In less than a day he will listen to the playback and marvel over how close he came to losing his mind at this moment. Maybe he did. Maybe it's madness that will shape him, that will guide his decisions, for the rest of the life he is now destined to spend as icon.
But then Destry stops and raises his homemade rail gun into firing position.
Malcolm Bell is still, miraculously, holding his. He will never remember firing.
* * * *
Bell reappeared maybe forty minutes after leaving me alone to think. I was looking right at him this time, and was able to follow the evolution from point of light to vertical line to two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a man, though it all happened in less than an eye blink and I could not be sure whether I'd actually seen it or whether it was something my mind had concocted over a fleeting impression. Even expecting it, I came close to fainting. Even frightened, I held on to consciousness anyway. If he was testing me, I wanted to pass.
When he grinned at me, age formed crevasses in both cheeks. “I must have looked like that, that last second before Destry and I drew on each other. It wasn't the first shock I'd ever had, in the old days—learning that we'd already made First Contact was pretty big, all by itself—but it was the worst. It changed me. Want a drink?”
“Water?” I said.
“Hell no, water. This is like losing your virginity, and calls for a good stiff belt.”
I managed a nod. He fussed around in one of his cabinets and handed me a plastic tube filled with something that looked like orange soda. I popped the membrane and took a suck. It was not an orange soda. I blinked and decided that while I'd enjoyed the experience, it would be wisest to avoid the second sip until the habitat stopped spinning.
“That,” he said, “is fermented druhz, a flowering organism from a world about five hundred and twenty light years from here. I'm not the asshole who first came up with the idea of making alcohol from it, but I must confess a hand in the construction of the world's first still. I'm afraid I can't give you some to take home; the Lunar Authority enforces a law mandating life imprisonment for anybody who attempts to smuggle it off Farside.”
“That dangerous?” I croaked.
“No. That secret. We wouldn't want some talented biochemist to analyze it and come up with anomalies testifying to its origin outside the solar system. You can have as much you want inside these four walls, but I'd advise discretion. The stuff packs a real kick.”
I was just beginning to see how much; my head felt like it was inflating. “You can't fool me, Bell. You just like getting young girls drunk.”
He sn
orted, though not without pleasure. “Never needed to, really.” But he took the tube from me and restored it to its rightful place in the cabinet, before sitting on the edge of his bed and giving me the most appraising of all appraising eyes. “So have you decided, Jessie James? Do you want me to call you a ride out of here or do you want to hear the rest of it?”
The question struck me as a formality, taken by a man who could already see what I'd decided from the look on my face. “I'm listening.”
“Right. Bottom line, something discovered by a whole lot of people who've lived through great historical events: The dramatic parts aren't always the parts that prove most pivotal over time. The Great Wall of China was not an effective barrier to invaders, the Pony Express was a total financial failure, and the gunfight between myself and Ken Destry was a stupid, sordid human tragedy that wouldn't have made a damned bit of difference to anybody's life but my own ... except for the one part that we've kept secret, the part that only gets told to promising people who ask the most promising questions.
“The point is, even I don't remember the gunfight. Not in any real sense.
“And it's not because I found it so traumatic or because I've gotten too old to remember what I had for breakfast this morning. The point is, nobody remembers anything. None of us do. The way the human mind works, I'm not the same entity that experienced the events we're talking about. I'm the entity that developed from that entity. I have a different mind than the one I had then, and when I think about what happened that day, or any other day, I'm not so much calling up the actual experience as reconstituting the same neurological connections that called up that reconstituted experience last time. What I'm remembering, really, is how to construct the software that simulates the same memory I simulated the last time I bothered to think about it. Follow me?”
It may have been the alcohol, but he'd lost me in record time. “I'm not sure I do....”
He didn't get upset or angry, as I'd feared. “You know what it's like to sit here, with me, and listen to me go on. You have a firm grip on that experience, because it's happening now. But everything in long-term memory is an approximation, stored in a filing system that is not so much a collection of clear snapshots as a collection of instructions for reconstituting flawed approximations of those experiences. For instance, my brain knows that linking a certain number of neurons will call back the taste of my mother's cherry cobbler, and if I don't allow myself to question it, I will grin with nostalgia and reflect that the old broad sure knew how to bake. But what I'm actually remembering, when I think about Mom's cobbler, is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It may not even be close to what actually happened. In fact, it almost certainly isn't, because the signal has been degraded, over time, by factors that include my own desire to be charitable to that old woman's memory, and separate memories of other great cherry cobblers I have known. You follow?”
I couldn't fathom what this had to do with anything. “This sounds like just a long-winded way of saying that your memories have changed over time.”
“You still don't get it. To us, the past is nothing but the cat inside Schroedinger's Box, which we alter in a thousand different ways via our flawed attempts to observe it. It may be that on some level, every two people arguing at length over the precise sequence of events they both remember, are both arguing from positions of equal authority. Inside their heads, they're both right. Because it's what's inside their heads that, to some extent, defines the reality they're remembering. Or to put it another way, the precise taste of my mother's cherry cobbler no longer exists, because it only existed in my perceptions in the first place. My current perceptions, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, are the only way to measure it now, so they've changed the reality. They define what the taste always was.”
I shook my head. “I'm sorry, sir, but I don't see that as anything but semantic ... bullshit. There's got to be some room for objective truth.”
“And there is,” Bell said. “We can't all decide to believe in Santa Claus and call that bearded old gent into being just because we want the company of somebody like him. Our influence on everyday life is just not that powerful, and the consensus has a leveling effect that prevents any one of us from getting up to too much mischief. But what I discovered that day—what Ken Destry really discovered, if you want to be fully fair about it—is that past and even present objective reality turns out to be a hell of a lot more responsive to our perceptions than anybody ever guessed. Given sufficient encouragement, we can make any number of localized changes as long as we avoid an overwhelming consensus to the effect that we can't. Do you follow me yet?”
It sounded like total gobbledygook. I tried to say something encouraging, but couldn't make my mouth form it, and in the end only shrugged.
He sighed, not in any impatient or discouraged manner, but with the sympathy owed another about to follow the path he'd blazed so many years before. “Here it is. Ken Destry may have been the first person on the Moon to ever completely lose his mind. He lost it for reasons that were not his fault, and that don't reflect on him as a human being, but he lost it just the same. And he didn't lose it while he was sharing a warren with two hundred other trained workers, capable of imposing their sanity on his insanity. He lost it while he was a closed system, isolated inside a moonsuit, sharing nothing with his fellow humanity, not even the same air. He was, in short, his own Schroedinger's Box, and he was completely out of touch with reality, including the reality of where he was.”
He took a deep breath. “And that, young lady, brings us back to the most pressing question regarding his rampage, one that bothered all of us at the time, but which has been almost completely ignored in all the histories written since then. It's a question so obvious that you're going to feel stupid as hell when I point it out to you.
“You see, Destry was running amuck for close to three weeks by the time I met up with him. During that period, everybody knew he was out of control. Everybody knew he was a threat. Everybody knew he needed to be captured and treated, or at worst killed before he did some serious damage. Nobody, working for any of the six governments and four major corporations on the Moon at the time, was about to welcome him into their own facilities, give him a warm bed for the night, patch his suit, supply him, and then send him on his merry way the next morning, with his condition untreated and his violent madness still out of control. It would have been irresponsible to the point of sociopathy.
“So put together everything you know now and ask yourself the obvious question.
“How did he last that long?
"Where the hell was he getting all his air?"
* * * *
It has been seven minutes since Malcolm Bell fired his rail through Ken Destry's head. In that time, he has regarded the corpse from several angles. He has knelt beside it, weeping. He has stood and circled it, as if hoping that another orbit will alter the nature of the crumpled body at his feet. He has rejected the evidence of his eyes and walked away, turning his back on the body, even standing with his arms folded and his booted foot tapping, in a comic parody of the bus station commuter awaiting the belated arrival of the Number Nine. He has imagined the horrific specter of Destry somehow not still dead, and rising zombie-like to attack him from behind; and he has angrily told himself Don't be stupid, but the madness of the day makes all possibilities equally likely and so he's whirled, certain that he'll find the body either gone or lurching toward him, but circumstances are kind and spare him that insanity, at least. He will never admit to hearing the frantic voices shouting at him over his suit radio, the ones demanding his latest status and assuring him that they are almost there; he will later say that shock kept him from registering the voices, but the truth is that he does not want to speak, that he doesn't trust his own mind to come up with anything coherent or cogent or relevant or even sane. He wants to wait for the promised relief to arrive, so he can hand off the body, return to the barracks, and surrender to about a month and a half of sleep.
/>
He doesn't see a buggy appear over the nearest ridge and pull to a stop, two spacesuited figures jumping out and approaching him from behind. They have reason to take care. They do not know whether the figure standing before them is the one they've come to save or the one they've come to save him from. Nor does he know, when he surrenders to a violent shudder visible through the material of his moonsuit, that he almost dies in that moment, as his rescuers twitch too and almost put him down.
But eventually they come close enough to identify him from the markings on his suit, and by then they're close enough to see Destry too. At which point everything changes.
Destry, who's as naked as any man can be, which is naked enough for an environment under atmosphere, infinitely more naked in a vacuum that should have killed him even before he was put down by Malcolm Bell's lucky shot.
It had not been stress or the threat of imminent death, but the sight of Destry exposed to vacuum and still stumbling along the rocks, no worse than drunk, his beard and scraggly hair making him look like a terrestrial hermit disturbed from his cave, that had made Bell's sanity wobble at that last moment before the two men fired upon one another.
Under the circumstances, it's a wonder Bell fired at all. Maybe his finger twitched and he got lucky.
The inevitable autopsy on the unfortunate Destry will find no organic damage other than that traceable to the contaminants in the air supply of the suit he no longer wears, and the much bigger, much more catastrophic wound inflicted by Bell. Nothing about his corpse betrays any sign of even momentary exposure to vacuum: not so much as a single burst blood vessel. Nor has Destry missed any meals. Nobody can identify the contents of his stomach; it's cooked meat, but not of any species anybody can identify. Nor can they identify the soil beneath his fingernails, or the combination of oceanic salts dried on his skin, or the species of mite that has built itself a new home in his matted hair. The insects, if they can be called that, possess no terrestrial DNA.
Analog SFF, April 2009 Page 6