Duelmaster R. Smith adjusted his black tam. "Do not touch your shooting
hand to your weapon until the buzzer sounds," he instructed. "Otherwise,
the weapon may be carried as you wish. At the slightest infringement of
the rules, a robot gun will kill you. If you have any elaborate last
words, say them now; because the pen is soundproof." He laughed an
obviously much rehearsed laugh.
L. Dan wore orange tights today, but no armor, since the rules required
deulists to present naked torsos for probable bullets. Stonecypher faced
the duelmaster. "I reckon this room is the only place a man really has
free speech," he said. "You're deaf, and can't see good enough to read
lips, and me or him will soon be dead.
"I don't believe in this duelin'. It gives a man who's wrong a chance to
kill one who's right. A man shouldn't oughta have to die because he's
right. Just like ever'thing else in this Manly Age. It's painful. That
oughta be our motto, More Pain, just like in the Machine Age it was More
Gadgets At Any Cost."
"Why don't you go on tevee?" Dan jeered. "She'll soon forget you,
farmer."
Stonecypher's words rolled over the hobbyist. "I reckon the Manly Age
came because a man started thinkin' he wasn't much of a man any more. He
was just as fast as his car, and just as strong as his electric lawn
mower. And a loud minority of the women was claimin' they could do
anything a man could, and maybe better. So the men started playin'
football in shorts and huntin' each other on game preserves, and the
women went back to the kitchen and bedroom. Lots of things that went on
undercover come out in the open. Cockfights, dogfights, coon-on-a-log,
duels, stallion fights, bullfights.
"And people like you, L. Dan, went on livin'. You got no right to live.
You don't do any useful work. The Earth is slowly starvin', and you take
the grub out of some feller's mouth who might could help a little.
That's why--"
"Time!" announced the duelmaster with his face close to a large clock on
the wall. He opened the door. Two men carrying a body on a stretcher
passed. The body had four bullet wounds in it.
Dan said, "That drivel gives me a real reason to kill you, farmer. I'll
be good to her for a few days."
As prearranged, Dan took the right branch of the corridor and
Stonecypher, the left. A hooded man gave Stonecypher the Magnum revolver
and shut him into a space resembling a windowed closet with a door on
either side. Stonecypher secured the revolver in the clip holster. His
bony hands formed knotted fists.
The pen door slid back. Stonecypher stepped into a room thirty by ninety
feet with three bullet-marred concrete walls and a fourth wall of
bulletproof glass, behind which sat the ghoulish audience. Dan, crouched
and with his pistol in the crook of his left elbow, advanced. His right
hand fluttered an inch from the pistol butt.
Stonecypher, grotesque with thin chest exposed and overall bib wrapped
around belt, waited. Two photoelectric robot machine guns followed each
movement of the duelists. A buzzer sounded. Dan's index finger failed to
reach the trigger, for a guardian machine gun removed the hobbyist's
head in a short efficient burst. The noise of a louder buzzer punctuated
the execution.
When the soundproof inner door of the closet opened, the hooded man, who
had a pair of crossed pistols tattooed on the back of his right hand,
said, "He was too anxious."
"Yeah," Stonecypher grunted.
The man watched Stonecypher pass out to the street. Stonecypher snapped
up the bib of his overalls. An extremely rare bird, a robin, hopped from
his path and continued a fruitless search for insects. Stonecypher
walked down Watauga Street until the pavement vanished under the
brownish-green water of Kings Lake.
Catriona squealed when she saw him. Ignoring all Correct Procedures, she
almost knocked him down and attempted to smother him. "Ah told you it
just took practice!" she blubbered. "You did it, Stony!"
With muffled mumbles, Stonecypher managed to put her in the Tenite
canoe. The few people along the quay, who had witnessed the illegal
manner of their meeting, watched with shock, or with incredulity, or
with guarded admiration. When they saw that Stonecypher's hand rested on
a holstered revolver, they lost their curiosity.
Wading, Stonecypher shoved the canoe off and hopped aboard. As he took
up the paddle, his hand trailed in the water and released the small
buzzer that had made possible Catriona's best carnival act.
* * * * *
For July, the afternoon was cool. Blue-gray clouds drifted before larger
dirty white masses. To the southwest opened the mile-wide mouth of Horse
Creek; and, far beyond, the great blue pyramid of Chimney Top Mountain
stood defiantly above Sevier Lake. The world seemed water broken only by
partly submerged hills and mountains.
Stonecypher gazed across the Lake at Bays Mountain and at the five
Cement Islands apparently floating against that backdrop. Softly, he
said, "Some folks call the big one Martyrs Island. There's a marble
pillar right in the middle. Nobody knows who put it there, and the
Government never bothered to knock it down. I reckon the poison ivy's
covered it by now, but I went and read the inscription, once, when I was
a boy. It says:
"They moved me off the Powell River.
They covered my farm with water.
I bought me another near Beans Station.
The water covered it.
I was getting old, but I built at Galloway Mill.
When they flooded that, I gave up and lived in Kingsport.
I will not move again."
The canoe bounded over the choppy water, one hundred feet above the
silted streets of the flooded city of Kingsport. Stonecypher said, "The
time I was there, you could still find a few copter-trooper helmets and
old cankered shells. Couple of years back, a diver brought up two skulls
off shore."
Catriona's eyes remained moist, but she smiled. Her teeth were
beautiful. "It'll be all rahght, Stony. You can't change the wo'ld in
one day. You did fine, and Moe will too."
"I told you to stay at the bullring," Stonecypher said.
"Ah couldn't watch that! And those puny, little, mousy women stare and
talk about me, because theah's a little meat on mah cahcass. Oswell said
Moe would be last, anyhow. Ah was so wo'ied about you, ah couldn't sit
still."
Only a few boats, mainly those of piscatorial maniacs, were on the lake.
Stonecypher glared at them and muttered, "I hope I did right by Moe. He
wanted to fight. Maybe, Catriona, if I'd had you when I found out he
could talk--not just mimic--I'd of raised him different. Maybe I
shouldn't have shown him that bullfight movie, but I wondered what the
only bull to see a bullfight from outside the ring thought about it.
"That led him to wantin' to know all about the Man-Animal War. I told
him the best I could, how one of a man's basic drives is to exterminate,
ever' since prehistoric times when he did in the wooly mammoth and
rhinoceros. The dodo, quagga, passenger pigeon, great auk, aurochs, Key
deer, bison, African elephant, gorilla, tiger--there's an awful list.
Why, five hundred species of mammals, alone, have become extinct since 1
A.D., 'bout four hundred of them since 1850. A man'll even kill off
other men, like the Neanderthals and the Tasmanians!" Stonecypher rested
the paddle and grinned, faintly, at Catriona reclining in the bow. "I
guess you've heard this before."
"Go rahght ahead, Stony," Catriona sighed. "Ah like to heah yoah speech.
It's the only time you really get angry, and you look so fine and
noble."
"Yeah. Well. I told Moe how a man exterminates useful or harmless
species, and then he lets dangerous ones, like rats, eat him out of
house and home. Course, I explained this was just kinship. Folks used to
argue man come from a monkey, or from spontaneous combustion, or
something. Now we got fossil proof he's not like anything anybody ever
saw. He's a case of straight line development all the way back to the
first mammal, a sort of rat."
The canoe glided past Highland Pier. Every type of small watercraft,
from a punt, through an electric motorboat, to a sloop, had docked. More
boats lined the shore on either side of the pier. The flying field
contained so many butterfliers and copters that there seemed no
possibility of any of them taking off. Human voices welled in a mob roar
from the great open cylinder of the bullring. A huge banner draped on
the curving white wall proclaimed, in ten-foot letters:
DEPENDENCE DAY
BULLFIGHT
HONOR THE GREAT
GOVERNMENT ON WHICH
WE DEPEND
SIX BULLS--THREE KILLERS
Stonecypher ran the canoe aground in a patch of dead weeds, exposed by a
slight lowering of the lake level, and helped Catriona over the rocks
that lined the bank. He said, "I told Moe other things men do to
animals. All the laboratory butchery, done because it would be cruel to
treat a man like that, but it's all right with a animal, like takin' out
a dog's brains and lettin' 'im live. I told him about huntin', how the
kudu become extinct 'cause a bunch of fools wanted to see who could kill
the one with the biggest horns.
"I told him the things done to domestic animals. Dehornin',
emasculatin', brandin', slaughterin' with sledge hammers and butcher
knives, keepin' 'em in filthy barns. A man tells hisself he's superior
to other animals. If he does somethin' bad, he uses words like inhuman,
brutal, animal instincts, instead of admittin' it's just typical
behavior. And the psychologists take some animal, say a dog, and put him
in a maze, something the dog never saw before. If the dog don't run the
maze in two seconds flat, they say he's a pretty stupid animal. He just
operates on instinct, but they can't say how instinct operates. They'll
have a time explainin' Moe's instincts.
"I reckon the American bison made Moe madder than anything. They killed
the bison off, 'cept for protected herds, in the Nineteenth Century. A
hundred years later, the herds had got pretty big, so they declared open
season on bison. No more bison."
A recorded voice growled, "No guns permitted in ring. Deposit gun in
slot. No guns permitted in ring."
Stonecypher moved his permit in ineffectual passes before the electric
eye. He shrugged, dropped the revolver into the slot, and left his thumb
print. Catriona displayed the passes Ringmaster Oswell had given them.
The teveer blinked, and the gate granted admission. They rode the
escalator to the sixth tier and squirmed through pandemonium to their
seats.
The male portion of the crowd wore every possible style and color of
dress, in complete emancipation from the old business suit uniform, but
the women wore sober false-bosomed sundresses and expressed excitement
in polite chirps. Stonecypher pressed his mouth against Catriona's ear
and whispered through the din, "You got to understand, Cat, whatever
happens, Moe wanted it. He says he can scare some killers into givin' up
bullfights and maybe help stop it."
"He'll do fine, Stony."
Several spectators stopped venting their wrath on the unfortunate man in
the ring to gawk at the couple. Catriona's unorthodox physique aroused
sufficient amazement; but, in addition, Stonecypher gave her the front
seat and took the rear one, the correct place for a woman, himself.
Below, through a rain of plastibottles and rotten eggs, a tired man
walked to the barrier which Oswell advertised as the only wooden fence
in seven states. Behind the killer, a small electric tractor dragged out
the bloody carcass of a bull.
A gasping, gibbering little man grabbed Stonecypher's arm and yelped,
"Illard is the clumsiest killer, he ran the sword in three times, and
the kid with the dagger had to stick twice before they finished, Big
Dependence Day Bullfight my jet! This is the worst in years, Fergus made
the only clean kill all afternoon, and I flew every one of eighteen
hundred miles myself to see it, this last bull better be good!" The
little man waved his bag of rotten eggs.
Although the bullfight followed the basic procedures established by
Francisco Romero in the Spain of 1700, changes had occurred, including
the elimination of all Spanish words from the vocabulary of the
spectacle since the unpleasant dispute with the Spanish Empire twenty
years before. The gaudy costumes worn by participants had been replaced
by trunks and sneakers.
A purring grader smoothed the sand. The crowd quieted, except for those
near the box of Ringmaster Oswell. They suggested in obscene terms that
their money be refunded. A trumpet recording blared. A scarlet door,
inscribed, "Moe of Bays Mountain Farm," opened. The crowd awaited the
first wild rush of the bull. It failed to materialize.