The Outpost (44 page)

She was dressed all in white in an outfit that fit like a second skin—not that there was anything wrong with her first skin, mind you.

“I haven’t seen you in white before,” noted Max as she undulated over to an empty table and sat down. “Are we being virginal?”

“We’re being a nurse,” she replied. “Or at least we were until recently.”

“I didn’t know there were any hospitals in the Henrys,” I said.

“There was an alien hospital on Elizabeth of York,” said the Earth Mother. She turned to Silicon Carny. “But I didn’t see you there.”

Which meant she hadn’t been there. Seeing Silicon Carny wasn’t a sight people tended to forget, even female people.

“When we all left the Outpost,” said Silicon Carny, “I figured that most of you were heroes and warriors, but that my particular talents lay elsewhere.”

“I’ll vouch for that!” said the Reverend Billy Karma devoutly.

“So I made my way to Trajan III,” she continued, ignoring the Reverend’s obvious enthusiasm, “which was the nearest planet with a military hospital, and volunteered my services as a nurse.”

“How did you make out?” asked the Earth Mother.

“Okay, at least at the beginning,” answered Silicon Carny. “My supervisor said I gave dying men the will to live again, just by walking past their beds.”

Even Max, who jumped on almost anything anyone said, didn’t seem to have a problem accepting that. He just nodded his head as if to say:
Of course they’d want to stay alive now that they could see what they were fighting for.

“So how come you’re not still there?” asked O’Grady.

“I was asked to leave.”

“By who?” asked Mix disbelievingly.

“By my supervisor.”

“Why?”

“Evidently eight other nurses saw me and began showing signs of terminal depression.”

“I can believe it,” said Max.

“Well, I, for one, am thrilled to welcome you back,” said O’Grady.

“I’ll second that!” shouted the Reverend Billy Karma.
 

Pretty soon just about every man in the place was echoing that sentiment, and then the Reverend offered to buy a round of drinks for the house, and Catastrophe Baker matched him, and then even Max bought drinks for everyone, and it occurred to me that I could make a healthy profit just by paying her to hang around while all the men tried to impress her.

Once all the drinks had been passed out and things had settled down again, the Reverend Billy Karma walked over and seated himself next to Silicon Carny.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to cut the cards?” he said. “First one to turn over a picture card loses.”

“What are the stakes?” she asked.

“We’ll think of something when the time comes,” he promised her.

“Whatever odds he’s offering, I’ll triple ’em for the same bet,” said Big Red.

“I’ll quintuple them,” said Max.

“Why do I think the result is a foregone conclusion?” asked Silicon Carny.

Billy Karma smiled at her. “Is this a face that would cheat an innocent semi-virgin like you?”

“That’s it!” she declared, getting up and moving to another table. “No bet.”

“By the way,” said the Bard, “did anyone run into Faraway Jones during the fighting?”

“Why?” asked Baker.

“I’m just trying to keep tabs on everyone so I know what to put in the book.”

“I never saw him.”

“Me neither,” said Hurricane Smith.

“Nor me,” said Big Red.

“Come to think of it,” added Nicodemus Mayflower, “has anyone seen Argyle, or Hellfire Van Winkle?”

“I spoke to Argyle via subspace radio just before he was due to land on Henry V,” offered the Gravedigger. “I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Who else is missing?” asked the Earth Mother.

I looked around the room. “Sahara del Rio,” I said.

“And Little Mike Picasso,” said Max.

“I haven’t heard from Achmed of Alphard since just before he set his ship down on Henry VIII,” said the Cyborg de Milo.

“I was on Henry VIII, and I didn’t see him there,” said the Gravedigger. He shrugged. “Still, it’s a big planet.”

“I tried to warn him off,” said the Cyborg. “He wasn’t the survivor type.”

“We can’t all be heroes,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” replied Big Red. “That’s a mighty impressive alien ship parked out there where your front lawn would be if you could grow grass on this dirtball. Somebody must have done something heroic or there’d be an alien tending bar right now.”

“Yeah,” chimed in Catastrophe Baker. “You’re a writer, a saloonkeeper, a robot bartender, and a blind man. How did the four of you manage to hold them off?”

I turned to the Bard. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”

“You tell them,” he answered. “I’ll be too busy writing it down.”

“But you already know what happened,” I said. “You were here. Why wait until now to record it?”

“Nothing happens until someone says it does,” he replied. “You’re elected.”

“That’s silly.”

“That’s objectivity,” he shot back.

“Are you guys gonna argue all night, or is someone gonna tell us what happened?” demanded Baker.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Keep your shirt on.”

How Einstein Saved the Outpost

I don’t know exactly when the ship touched down (I said). I just know that one minute the four of us were alone in the Outpost, and the next minute we had company.

There were maybe thirty or forty of them, and our side was only a bartender, an historian, a blind-deaf-mute genius, and me—so I figured it was pretty much up to me to save the day.

I didn’t think matching laser blasts or energy pulses with the aliens was the most sensible way to defend the Outpost, so I picked up the molecular imploder that I keep hidden behind the bar. I’d never had occasion to use it before, but I keep it in good working order. Besides, it was the only formidable weapon I owned. It’s the kind of thing that can turn a thousand aliens and their ship into jelly in a nanosecond.

Anyway, I aimed it at the approaching soldiers, flipped off the safety, and fired—and nothing happened. All the readouts told me it was charged and working, but it sure as hell wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

I tried again, and again there was no hum of power, no destruction of the aliens, no nothing. So I asked Einstein what was wrong, and after giving the matter some thought he figured out that the aliens had some kind of atomic neutralizer, some device that could stop any atomic-powered weapon from working.

The problem is, he told me that when they were maybe a hundred yards away. They’d seen me try to fire the imploder and knew their neutralizer was working, so they didn’t spread out in any kind of attack formation. They just laughed at me and kept right on walking toward the front door.

I told Einstein that if he was going to save the day, he had less than a minute to do it, and he promised to get working on it right away.

Well, they got to within eighty yards, then sixty, then forty. I kept trying to fire the imploder, and I kept getting no result.

“Einstein!” I yelled. “Either think of a solution in ten seconds, or your thinking days are through!”

Eight seconds later he tapped out his instructions on his computer, and the Bard relayed them to me.

“‘Move twenty feet to your left and fire again,’” read the Bard.

It sounded like the stupidest idea I’d ever heard, but I didn’t have time to argue, so I ran twenty feet away and fired again—through the window right behind Sinderella’s head—and this time, the imploder worked and the whole alien squadron melted right into the ground.

I took the computer back from the Bard and told Einstein that his idea had worked. “How the hell did you figure it out?” I asked. “And more to the point,
what
did you figure out?”

“Your weapon uses atomic energy, does it not?” replied Einstein.

“Yes,” I answered.

“And the basic principle of atomic energy is E=MC2, correct?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

“Now, the aliens had an atomic neutralizer which prevented your weapon from functioning.”

“That’s what you told me.”

“Well, as you can plainly see, that was the answer.”

“
What
was the answer?” I asked. “How did you know the imploder would work if I moved twenty feet to my left?”

“You could have moved twenty feet to your right, I suppose,” answered Einstein. “But there’s one more letter in ‘right’ than in ‘left’, and I was given to understand that time was of the essence when I wrote my instructions to you.”

“You’re not answering me,” I said. “How did you know the weapon would work if I moved in
either
direction?”

“As my great-great-great-et-cetera Uncle Albert pointed out, relativity may merely be a local phenomenon. You circumvented the neutralizer by becoming twenty feet less local.”

“In a long lifetime of listening to stupid stories, that’s the stupidest I’ve ever heard!” said Max.

“You think so?” asked Nicodemus Mayflower thoughtfully. “I’ve heard lots that were dumber. Some of ’em right here in the Outpost.”

“Uh … I don’t want to be the one to criticize,” said Willie the Bard, “but that’s not quite the way it happened.”

“It is now,” I replied.

“But—”

“Einstein didn’t see what happened and Reggie’s not a talker,” I said. “I figure that makes me the only eyewitness to history.”

“Just a minute,” said the Bard. “I was here, too!”

“You’re just the historian,” I said. “Without me telling the story, nothing happened.”

“The man’s got a point,” said Catastrophe Baker. “After all, they’re
your
rules.”

“You’d rather have me write
his
version than the real one?” demanded the Bard.

“His version
is
the real one,” said Baker. “Or at least it will be once you write it down.”

Einstein tapped out a message on the computer, which Big Red promptly read aloud to us. “He says he finds Tomahawk’s version rather charming, and he hopes no nuclear physicist ever reads it.”

The Bard stood up and walked over to the bar. “I appeal to you, Reggie—tell them Tomahawk’s lying.”

Reggie didn’t say a word. He just kept washing dirty glasses, and when he was done with that, he began wiping the bar.

“I guess you don’t appeal to him after all,” said Max, and everyone guffawed.

“All right, you win,” said the Bard, returning to his table and his notebook. “That’s how Einstein saved the Outpost.”

“By God, if I’d known history was this much fun, I might have stayed in school!” boomed Catastrophe Baker.

“When did you quit?” asked Big Red.

“When I was about eight or nine,” answered Baker.

“They didn’t try to stop you?”

“Of course they tried,” said Baker. He shook his head sadly. “Poor bastards. Still, I suppose most of ’em are out of the hospital by now.”

“You knew even then that you were going to be a hero?” asked the Earth Mother.

“I don’t know about that,” he admitted. “But I sure as hell knew I wasn’t going to be a scholar.”

“He had his whole future mapped before he was ten,” said Big Red ruefully. “And here it took me almost half my life to decide to be a professional rassler.”

“What’s the difference between being a wrestler and a rassler?” asked Silicon Carny.

“Wrestlers get hurt. Rasslers get rich. Or at least that’s the way I’ve got it doped out.”

“I can teach you all about rasslin’,” said the Reverend Billy Karma to Silicon Carny. “Just step out back with me and I’ll show you some nifty holds.”

“And I’ll show you some kicks, scratches, and knife thrusts,” said Silicon Carny.

“I admire your sense of humor,” said Billy Karma.

“Do you see me smiling?” she asked grimly.

“Leave her alone, Reverend,” said Baker. “Or ain’t you had enough body parts cut off lately?”

“You mean these?” said Billy Karma, holding up his gold and silver hands. “It was a minor inconvenience, all done for the greater glory of God.”

“Yeah?”

“Right.” He turned to the Bard. “Get your pen out, Willie. This story’ll uplift the hell out of you. You wouldn’t want to miss writing it down.”

An Undefeated Spiritual Tag-Team

Now, I got nothing against war (said the Reverend Billy Karma). It’s one of the best ways of getting rid of godless heathen and working off a little excess sexual energy, and certainly God is in favor of war, since He’s been battling with old Satan for the better part of a zillion years, give or take a century.

But on the other hand, I’m no warrior. I don’t expect Catastrophe Baker to be able to quote the Good Book and I don’t figure Three-Gun Max can please the ladies half as well as I can, but I can’t do some of the things they can do, neither. And butchering an alien army single-handed happens to be one of them.

But just as there’s more than one way to skin a cat (which is probably why we don’t have a hell of a lot of cats left at this late date), there’s more than one way to win a war. So I flew off to Henry VI, which is one of the worlds where God, in His haste, forgot to install running water, electricity, or breathable air, and decided to confront the aliens that were holed up there.